A French reader -- yes, I have them -- sends along this amazing story from Le Figaro about a medieval historian who is being blackballed in French academic circles writing a book that poses the question: Why is it that the medieval Arabs had access to Greek philosophy, but made no use of it (unlike the Europeans did later in the High Middle Ages)?
The article is in French, so good luck. It makes the point that the book was published by a major, respected French publishing house, so it's hardly a fringe work. But many in the academic establishment have set out to ruin its author, Sylvain Gouguenheim, by tarring his as a racist and a tool of the right wing. Some medievalists have come to his aid, saying that it's a perfectly legitimate question and area of inquiry. But the politically correct academic police de la pensee are out for his head.
Astonishing. But not surprising, alas.
UPDATE: Just to clarify, it's beside the point whether or not the historian Gouguenheim is correct in his theory. The point is, he should be able to raise the question, and to be able to be wrong in his theory, without being professionally ruined by the academic thought police.
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This is the product description from amazonfr. He is not denying what cirdan affirms - that Thomas cites Avicenna, for instance. He is arguing
1) that Greek thought reached the West in monkish translations not Arabic ones
2) that Christian thought has been more hellenized than Muslim thought. I think that's true. Christian theology owes more to Plato and Aristotle than Islamic theology owes to Plato and Aristotle.
On considère généralement que l'Occident a découvert le savoir grec au Moyen Âge, grâce aux traductions arabes. Sylvain Gouguenheim bat en brèche une telle idée en montrant que l'Europe a toujours maintenu ses contacts avec le monde grec. Le Mont-Saint-Michel, notamment, constitue le centre d'un actif travail de traduction des textes d'Aristote en particulier, dès le XIIe siècle. On découvre dans le même temps que, de l'autre côté de la Méditerranée, l'hellénisation du monde islamique, plus limitée que ce que l'on croit, fut surtout le fait des Arabes chrétiens. Même le domaine de la philosophie islamique (Avicenne, Averroès) resta en partie étranger à l'esprit grec. Ainsi, il apparaît que l'hellénisation de l'Europe chrétienne fut avant tout le fruit de la volonté des Européens eux-mêmes. Si le terme de "racines" a un sens pour les civilisations, les racines du monde européen sont donc grecques, celles du monde islamique ne le sont pas.
Your question is do we support freedom of speech for everyone, including people who are deluded or lying, or do we require people to submit their ideas to some committee (thought police) before allowing them public expression?
In science, we do the second. It's called 'peer review'.
Scientist who choose to publish nonsense (Especially for political and other reasons, instead of just being dumb.) will be ignored by the scientific community and removed from said community by the community itself. This includes them putting pressure on the scientist's institute to let them go. They are then free, outside the scientific community, to publish whatever gibberish they want.
Scientists objecting to another scientist's conclusion, and criticizing him for it, is not censorship, is not 'thought police'. It is 'science police' and it is how science works.
Rod seems to believe this is an attack for 'political correctness' purposes, but really has no evidence of this. This article seems to think it's due to 'intellectual terrorism', whatever that's supposed to mean.
Whenever a lone voice in science says something, and the scientific community condemns it, and a group of non-scientists rush to his defense...he's almost always wrong. In other words, any scientific theory with popular support among a group of non-scientists, but disparaged by almost the entire scientific community, is a theory that someone has invented for some non-science reason.
DavidTC: In science, we do the second. It's called 'peer review'.
This prevents tromperies like cold fusion from creating a furor in the public square. Very effective.
But history is not science. It is opinion, speculation, tendentiousness. If an academic argues that no one is buried in Grant's tomb because Grant never existed, it is trivially easy to prick the conceit of the empty tomb, but harder to discredit the second proposition.
Peer review in science at least has a pretense to being anchored in empiricism; in the humanities it usually means adherence to the prevailing orthodoxy. Whether a Christoph Luxenberg uses a pseudonym to elude the beheaders in the ulema or the university, only he knows.
But history is not science. It is opinion, speculation, tendentiousness. If an academic argues that no one is buried in Grant's tomb because Grant never existed, it is trivially easy to prick the conceit of the empty tomb, but harder to discredit the second proposition.
But history is not science. It is opinion, speculation, tendentiousness. If an academic argues that no one is buried in Grant's tomb because Grant never existed, it is trivially easy to prick the conceit of the empty tomb, but harder to discredit the second proposition.
History is science. It is a somewhat fuzzy science, but it is science.
There are plenty of theories that are wrong (For example, Troy was regarded as mostly fiction until they found it.), although it's worth pointing out the difference between things that historians believe are unlikely, like Troy actually existing, and things they think are very very stupid, like the pyramids being built 15,000 years ago...and that reminds me that Stargate Atlantis is back.
But while some of that is just guess work and logical deduction, there's a difference between history that's been deduced by sifting through rubble, and this discussion, which is about Islam's influence by Greek during the European middle ages, when it kept Greek documents from being destroyed, which is extremely well documented with plenty of Muslim writers talking about exactly what this person decided to say they weren't talking about. It was so influenced by Greek philosophers that Muslims wrote books talking about how it shouldn't be so influenced by that!
It's the difference between claiming that one of the ratifiers of the Constitution was an impostor, which is a rather silly but possible claim, and claiming that the Constitution does not talk about a court system, which just demonstrations that someone has no idea what they're talking about.
Islam wasn't influenced in the same way by Greek philosophers as Christianity was during the Enlightenment, and their influence faded, unlike in Christianity, but pretending it wasn't influenced is just stupid.
Of course, I don't read French very well, and haven't read this person's original thesis, so have no idea if that's what is actually going on.
When I say that history is not science, I am not trying to be dogmatic. I simply mean that it is not the sort of phenomenon one can formulate a hypothesis about and devise experiments to prove or disprove, make predictions and construct theories.
Grand theories in physics, such as general relativity, can be proved by observations based on those theories, such as the predicted bending of light by a gravitational field.
I don't find history to be the same sort of experimentally verifiable phenomenon. Whether the Dark Ages were dark or the Enlightenment enlightened is a matter of opinion not fact.
I am not qualified to discuss the details of Gougenheim's findings. I do know that at the time the Saracens sacked the Imperial City the only work of classical Greek literature said to have been lost to the West was a complete copy of the « Bibliotheke istorike » of Diodorus Siculus, of which many sections were already known to Renaissance classicists. This is of course much later than the period of the Mont St. Michel copyists and translators discussed by Gougenheim. But, though I do not doubt that the Latin translations made from the Arabic were of prime importance to the Schoolmen (though later translations made directly from the Greek were more accurate), I am intrigued by Gougenheim's thesis. Surely a parallel filière for the transmission of Hellenism cannot threaten the received orthodoxy. I would not be surpised to discover that classical learning shone brightly in many Western schools from Clonmacnoise to Bobbio during the so-called Dark Ages.
As to who influenced whom and by how much, I don't think this is subject to a scientifically quantifiable metric.
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