"Une police de la pensee"

hm. well, from what i have read the muslims were interested in "practical" material. so a lot of the science and what not got integrated, but the more ethical ideas of the hellenistic schools, not so much. the big diff. between europe and the muslim world is that in the former the pro-philosophers won, and in the latter, they lost.

Interesting question. I know nothing about it, but razib says up there that they were interested in practical knowledge. Didn't they do a lot of mathematics and astronomy? But they already had their own philosophical system of Islam, right? Perhaps they simply felt that the philosophical ideas of ancient pagans weren't correct and didn't fit into their scripturally-based system that was based on God's will. (From their POV, I mean; I'm not Muslim.)

From my perspective, neo-Platonist Greek philosophy did a lot to warp Christian theology. Maybe Europeans shouldn't have absorbed quite so much Greek philosophy in the first place...not that Greek philosophy is bad, but perhaps Westerners shouldn't have treated Artistotle as reverently as they did.

But they already had their own philosophical system of Islam, right?

ok, muslims are pretty diverse, but what i would say is that sunni muslims (90%) pretty much *officially* rejected philosophy around the 11th century. the philosophical ideas of men like ahmad ibn rushd were actually off the main stem of islamic intellectual tradition and had more influence on neo-aristotelian high medieval catholic thinkers. philosophical ideas (e.g., mut'azili) are still around in an above-ground fashion in shi'ism because that sect is by its nature much more dispersed and decentralized.

so here's "razib's sketch": in the first few centuries of islam there was a lot of debate about what should, and shouldn't, be integrated into islamic thought. the hellenists lost, and most philosophy as an ends was marginalized in islamic thought. the philosphical bent was only kept up in non-mainstream groups of shia (like the ismailis) who have little influence on the sunni majority. about one century after the muslim majority decided to turn its back on philosophy the aristotelian renaissance kicked into high gear in europe, and eventually after some debate the philosophs won out here....

(even during the period debate about philosophy, i'm to understand that muslims were not particularly interested in things such as literature or ethical hellenistic philosophy; we have the byzantines to thank for their preservation)

First, here's a English version of the Figaro article, from the Herald Tribune:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/28/europe/politicus.php

I'd like to make a couple points here: the influence of Muslim scholasticism (10th & 11th Century thinkers such as Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Sina (Avincenna), Al-Ghazali and Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides on Christian scholasticism is profound.

Profound, and indisputable. Anyone who has read Thomas Aquinas (the seminal Christian scholastic) and other medieval Christian scholastics knows how often they cite them. He nicknamed Aristotle "the Philosopher" and Ibn Rushd's commentary on every aspect of the Aristotelean corpus gained him the nickname “The Commentator.” In addition, many ancient Greek texts were translated to Latin from Arabic, not directly from Greek.

Ibn Sina and most especially Ibn Rusd were extreme rationalists. They both emphasized the primacy of reason over revelation. Ibn Rusd most especially. He had a contempt for scripture, saying it was suitable for transmitting philosophical truths in a blunt fashion to the unschooled masses.

Rod, this is important stuff from an Orthodox perspective. Because this rationalism, according to many Orthodox, is at the root of the Schism.

Many argue that we owe nominalism (which led to the Reformation & Scientific Revolution) to this strain of rationalism. Barlaam of Calabria (opponent of S. Gregory of Palamas) was nominalist to the core.

So Sylvain Gouguenheim is really just being a provocateur. The Muslims influenced Western thought in many important ways. The only question is how deeply, really.

So then, Why did Greek thought die in the East?

The Mongols under Hulagu Khan took Baghdad in 1258, butchered evryone in the city, and overthrew the Caliphate. And Arab civilization never recovered. The Crusade against Cordoba in the West performed a similar function.

This defeat destroyed the intellectual opposition to Ahmad ibn Hanbal's partisans, who were able to slam shut the gates to ijtihad, which is to say Quaranic inquiry and interpretation.

The Arab world was later subsumed into the Turkish empire. The Turks tended to be pragmatic warriors, or else Sufi mystics, and not great
philosophers or theologians.

By the Way: An interesting point is that the Persian Shiites never abandoned scholasticism, or Aristotle. It is a living tradition yet today. Places like Qom have very interesting work being done, even now.

One of the many reasons that Iran deserves our respect and curiosity, instead of our contempt and bombs.

Just a thought.

===

I've now broken my rule on five threads here in as many days. I've pledged myself to keep my trap shut online. But that MZ Meyers guy really got my goat..

Time to shut up again. Cheers.

Well, I think it has been established that the Muslims did make use of Greek philosophy, just such use as they saw fit (and the same can be said for the west). But perhaps what interested Rod was not a reflection on medieval Islam, but rather on present-day France.

"Charles, I'm not all that interested in whether or not Sylvain Gouguenheim is correct about medieval Islam. I'm interested in his right to raise the question, and to be wrong about it without being professionally ruined by the thought police."

An interesting point, Rod. Do you also support the right of "scholars" to raise doubts about the Holocaust?

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.

Yes, of course he should. Just at James Watson should be able to examine the question of genetic variation between races and others should be able to examine the question of eugenics without economic threats.

ds0490, questions about the Holocaust should not be off limits either

I agree on James Watson. Re: Holocaust denial, I am troubled by the imprisonment of David Irving, and I believe as a general matter that even something as loathsome as Holocaust denial ought to be protected speech, though strongly protested. Still, there is a much, much stronger case for Europeans outlawing Holocaust denial than something like this (or just about anything else you can think of).

Allen, why do you assume that Gouguenheim is "blatant[ly] lying"?

Good grief, you can buy the Marquis de Sade's perversions in print in France, and nobody cares. You can buy Stalinist tracts, produced by academics, and heaux-hum. But this Gouguenheim fellow writes a scholarly book raising questions about Islamic intellectual history, and suddenly he's got to be not just criticized, but professionally destroyed? Please.

If a scholar produced a dubious book claiming that aliens from the planet Zork colonized the earth, would you support petitions designed to destroy him professionally? How about if a scholar produced a dubious book claiming that Western civilization derived from Islamic revelation? It should be possible to discuss these things, and refute them, without resorting to p.c. hysterics.

Back in the old days, the Catholic Church taught that "error has no rights." It's interesting to see that while the Church has changed it's position (error has no rights, but people do), the politically correct Left has adopted it.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but all I see here is a scholar encountering criticism for expounding a thesis. I don't (yet) see the guy being dragged into court like Bernard Lewis was (*), a few years back. Or having to publish under a pseudonym for fear of death threats, as Luxenberg does. If the latter were occurring, I'd be a bit more annoyed (though not much, since this is France and not America).

As for Guggenheim's thesis: I don't know enough to comment about its validity. Perhaps this is the beginning of a paradigm shift, in which case, harsh criticism is to be expected, but not professional ruin ought not to be.

If, on the other hand, this is the medieval history equivalent of the Bellesiles affair, then he _should_ suffer professional ruin for (at the very least) gross incompetence in his area of expertise.

(*) See, e.g., princeton.edu/~paw/archive_old/PAW95-96/16_9596/0605let.html#story3

Thinking a bit more on this, I want to add that we disregard the influence of Islam here in the States, and fatally distorts our view of the past.

The "Black Legend" and Protestant tendency (from Gibbon on) to skip the late classical and medieval eras as being unimportant.

Even Catholics do it a certain degree. I went to school at Providence College, under the tutelage of the Dominicans, where I had to take 5 hours of Western Civ for two years. It was awesome. But we more or less glossed over the four hundred years between Justinian and Boethius and the beginning of the Carolingian Renaissance.

It's only because of my study of Islam and Byzantium/Orthodoxy that I've grown to appreciate how important the Rise of Islam was, and in light of our current global politics, is.

My thesis (and this you ought to appreciate, given your Orthodoxy, Rod) is that the rise of Islam in the 8th & 9th Centuries is the seminal event that fractured the Mediterranean World, and laid the political ground for the Schism, and the Fracturing of Christendom.

We in the West pay little attention to this history (pace the likes of Gibbon, who in his Enlightenment snobbery despised Byzantine history)
but the Rise of the Papacy and even the German Imperium under the Carolingians was only possible with the waning of the Greeks in Anatolia.

If Belisarius' armies had not been forced to withdraw, and Rome had remained under the thrall of Constantinople, then the papcy would never have been allowed to assert the radical claims to authority that it did.

Read the (very short- maybe 5 pages of) documents of Constantinople III (the 6th Ecumenical Council) which took place as the Arabs were awakening in the East.

Your typical Roman, papal, apologist will be loathe to admit this, but 1. the Council is called and presided over by the Emperor, not the pope, and 2. the Council anathematizes a pope (Honorious) as a heretic, and very forcefully. This for teaching the Monothelite heresy in an encyclical letter to Eastern bishops. All of the first seven councils were called buy the Emperor, who was always at pains to mollify the pope who was outside his territorial reach.

Again, I say we can thank the Arabs for this division.

Just an aside.

"Re: Holocaust denial, I am troubled by the imprisonment of David Irving, and I believe as a general matter that even something as loathsome as Holocaust denial ought to be protected speech, though strongly protested.
Posted by: Rod Dreher | July 17, 2008 8:45 AM"

Wouldn't it be better for such speech to be strongly refuted?

I still fail to see where this "thought police" nonsense comes from --my French isn't the greatest, so I wasn't able to understand the whole thing, so maybe someone can explain to me what horrible injustice Guggenheim has suffered that any other equally bad academic wouldn't also be subject to?

Rod is right to tag his post "dhimmitude".

A combox is an awkward venue for an academic debate on the merits of Gougenheim's thesis (though Charles Curtis very nicely gives the lie to that assertion, I concede.)

Suffice it to say that the medievalist professorat have not only not condemned Gougenheim, but in one case defended him. My translation from the article:

Incensed over these attacks, Jacques Le Goff, medievalist of world fame, supports the accused. « His book is interesting though debatable, » he says, noting in closing that the greatest medievalists abstained from signing the calls for prosecution. Others more boldly take up his defense. Invited by Alain Finkielkraut to debate on France Culture, Rémi Brague explained that the merit of this book is « to have turn the public spotlight on questions reserved to specialists. » ..... For their part the students of Sylvain Gougenheim signed a petition of support for their professor. But the evil is done. The author is branded with suspicion. Wasn't that the petitioners' original intent?

At one level, this seems to be an academic tempête dans un verre d'eau.

On another, had Islam evolved a permanent rationalist school as evinced briefly by the Mutazilites, then Papa Ratzinger would have had a less tempestuous and more reasoned response to his Regensburg thesis.

Les dhimmis, ce sont les académiciens!

Your post is meaningless because you don't distinguish between the criticism this guy has recieived for perputating a blatantly false thesis, on the one hand, and whatever it is that you're calling "politically correct". Of course, one reason that you don't make the distinction is probably that you're incapable of making it, i.e., you're simply much more ignorant of medevial Islamic scholarship than medevial Muslim scholars were of Greek philosophy, and so you're completely unaware of the massive extent to which Greek philosophy was involved in medevial Muslim scholarship, and therefore are incapable of realizing that Guggenheim is far more 'backward' than the Muslims ever were. In fact, some Muslism scholars in the middle ages were passionately opposed to Greek philosophy, and wrote whole books condeming it - but the reason they had to do so is because OTHER Muslims scholars (who, as has been pointed out, went on to influence the reception of Greek philosophy in the west) were promoting Greek thought with equal dedication. The only outrage here is that such a nonsensical, baseless historical claim as Guggenheim's was ever was published in the first place - which suggests that the prevailing French views are more likely to sanction anti-Muslism lies than what you're calling "dhimmitude". For you to try and say that the truth or falsity of Guggenheim's thesis is not at issue is a wonderfully post-modern, hyper-relativist claim, Dreher: you're saying that anyone should be able to get away with publishing anything without any criticism, simply because...because....because??? Face it: your attempt at being provocative only works if you're capable of distinguishing between legitimate scholarly debate, on the one hand, and absolute b.s., on the other. You're incapable of making such a distinction because you obviously know nothing about medevial Muslims thought. If you had studied, say, Avicenna's appropriation of Greek philosophy, then read Ghazali's attack on Avicenna and the Greeks, and then considered the defense of the Greeks by Averroes - and then researched its influence on Jewish and Christian scholarship - you'd be in a position to talk. So let's be clear: your inflammatory rhetoric about "dhimmitude" is really quasi-postmodern, uber-relativist claptrap, designed to defend any anti-Muslism garbage published anywhere, regardless of its basis in fact.

I'll just summarize the most important point here: Dreher's defense of his "dhimmitude" rhetoric is pure post-modern, hyper-relativist blather: he writes as if there's no way to distinguish between reasonable debate and absolutly baseless nonsense, so 'truth' and 'falsity' have no application here, or anywhere else then. You don't have to know anything about the history of Muslism scholarship to have an opinion; you just have to have an opinion, and then no "facts" should be allowed to get in the way of you broadcasting it. Let me repeat: Dreher has shown himself to be a pure a post-modern relativist, at least when it comes to bashing Muslims.

Wear da lub? Wear did da lub go?

Here's the International Herald Tribune article on it.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/28/europe/politicus.php

I guess the question really boils down to the validity of the proposal in question, which I doubt any of us is in a position to evaluate completely.

Frankly, I've regarded Said as an intellectual thug, when you come right down to brass tacks. Yes, he was countering a problematic condescension in Islamic/Arabic studies, but his solution was a new orthodoxy which promoted the opposite error. Which is why you see legions of Middle East Studies drones squawking in unison about "Orientalism" every time someone posits a mild criticism of the Islamic/Arabic world. Something that kicks the pendulum back to the center would be welcome. But only if the proposal has colorable merit.

Let me give you an example: Mark Whittow is a British historian who argues that the "official history" of Byzantium is to be approached with extreme skepticism, and that the Dark Age chronicles are especially suspect. Instead, we should look to archaelogy and non-Byzantine sources and prefer these to the chronicles where possible. He proposes this thesis in his book, "The Making of Byzantium: 600-1025." Thus, he argues against the current opinion as to the development of the theme system and Byzantine government as described by those chronicles and even denies that Basil the Bulgar-Slayer had 15,000 Bulgarian prisoners blinded after the Battle of the Kleidon Pass. All in all, it's a clearly revisionist work meant to be a shot across the bow of Byzantine Studies. Not fully convincing, especially since Byzantine archaelogy lags far behind Roman and even classical Greek archaelogy in its development, but still thought-provoking. To my knowledge, the Byzantine Studies world has not called for Whittow's metaphorical head or claimed he's a political tool. Nor should they--discoveries could change things greatly. It's also more understandable given the obscurity of the subject: Byzantine history is the focus of obsessives, geeks and academics profoundly hostile to the concepts of money and fame.

But obviously Islamic/Arabic studies is a whole different animal, much more political and with the potential of having an insane amount of money and even more controversy sloshed one's way. There are more sacred cows in danger of being gored. Thus, I think that should be kept in mind before cheap comparisons to the scum promoting holocaust revisionism are made.

I'm generally of the opinion that academic freedom should be broad, definitely so at public universities. And even more leeway should be given in developing fields, which this area is, especially when politics can--and will--work its way in.

Byzantine history is the focus of obsessives, geeks and academics profoundly hostile to the concepts of money and fame.

Ooooooowwwwwwwwwcccccccccccchhhhhhhhhhh.............!

Whittow's thesis is unorthodox, but quite defensible. Many other scholars have proposed similar theses, in fact. That is completely different from the claim that "medieval Arabs had access to Greek philosophy, but made no use of it". That is simply false. There are NUMEROUS books of mediveal Arab scholarship which are about Greek philosophy. There are numerous book-long commentaries on single works of Greek philosophy written by mediveal Muslim scholars. The claim that "medieval Arabs had access to Greek philosophy, but made no use of it" is completely and utterly false. One could argue about the use they made of it, how deep or long-lasting the influence was, etc. But the claim at issue is simply FALSE. I didn't say that it was in the MORAL universe as Holocaust denial. There's Dreher's post-modern relativism for you: everything is a "moral" question, because intellectual "facts" don't exist.

Let me put the issue another way: claiming that Greek philosophy had no influence on Arab scholarship in the middle ages is at the same level of ignorance as claiming that Aristotle had no influence on Thomas Aquinas. Both claims are so factually wrong that it should disqualify someone from scholarly discussion on the subject even before any moral questions are raised (as they would be with Holocaust denial).

People who are making analogies to Holocaust denial, Ward Churchill or racists are missing the point: those are MORAL questions, as Dreher and others have pointed out. But the issue here is simply a FACTUAL question. The desire to focus on the moral question, as if no factual matters are at issue, is consistent with exactly the kind of post-modern relativism that is typical of left-wing academics: "facts" are just "social constructs", "moral commitmments" count for more than "objective scholarship", which doesn't even exist, etc.

Dreher and his defenders need to explain if they think it would ok for a purported expert to claim that Aquinas "made no use" of Aristotle, because after all, the idea that Aquinas did use Aristotle is just a "theory", and claiming that no relationship exists between Aquinas and Aristotle shouldn't be an obstacle to anyone's career advancement if they claim to be specalists in the subject. In fact, the "theory" that Aquinas "made no use" of Aristotle should be welcomed by other scholars in the field, because its just a "theory", since "facts" don't exist.

Here's my contribution to the discussion of the "theory" that
"medieval Arabs had access to Greek philosophy, but made no use of it":

http://www.amazon.com/Averroes-Platos-Republic/dp/080148975X

http://www.amazon.com/Averroes-Platos-Republic/dp/080148975X

What's this? Links to book-length commentaries on Greek philosophy by medival Arabs? Never mind, let's keep discussing the "theory" that Arabs "made no use" of Greek philosophy, because, you know, "facts" should never stand in the way of anyone's career if they want to bash Muslims.

It appears that Charles Curtis, Rod Flanders, and Allen have caricatured Gouguenheim's argument. It is clear from the article that Gouguenheim acknowledges the importance of Avicenna, Averroes, and other Islamic thinkers, and it seems reasonably apparent that he merely seeks to correct for what he sees as the exessive attention given to the West's debt to Islam. Whether his argument is right, or even plausible, is impossible to judge from the articles, but from the brief sketch they give it is not on its face outrageous.

Rod Flanders says "The claim that 'medieval Arabs had access to Greek philosophy, but made no use of it' is completely and utterly false." He is correct, but it is not what Gouguenheim said. According to the French article, he says only that the Arabs did not use it to the same extent as the Europeans, which is undeniably true. Charles Curtis instructs us that "It's called nuance, and complexity." If he expects to find either in a news article about a scholarly work, he knows less about both scholarship and nuance than he thinks. But Allen outdoes them both: evidently judging solely by the brief summary in the articles, he tells us confidently that Gouguenheim is lying, a conclusion that tells us nothing about Gouguenheim but a great deal about Allen.

Touche, Jim. Shooting my mouth off a little here, haven't read the book.

But I have read quite a lot on the topic, and I have my own pet theories (couple of which I've already partially touched on here) about the importance of Islam in feeding the rise of nominalism and rationalism.

Say for example, how in Apostolic (sacramental) Christianity the Logos is Christ himself? But in Islam it's the Quran?

Then note how the Reformation occurs in the wake of Scholasticism's collapse. The Reformation being a movement that makes a fetish of the sacred text, and claims that it is inerrant and that it can be rationally understood by every believer? The Word is a book?

The sacramental depends on mystical unity and supra rational encounter. The Reform rejects this, stressing rationalistic understanding of God through scripture.

I mean, dude. Irony of ironies. Don't tell Reverend Haggee, or that Parsley fellow, but their approach to the Faith smacks an awful lot of Islam to me. I think Islam essentially influenced the Reform.. I mean don't get me started on the similarities between the Arians, the Muslims and those champions of textual fetishism, the Jehovah's Witnesses! Or the Muslims, and that apotheosis of Protestantism, the Church of Latter Day Saints! Protestantism culminates into theologies bearing weird resemblance to heresies that informed early Islam.

So I don't have to read his book, sir! I only need to see he is attacking my theories. Like any runtling academic, I trundle forth to defend my position!

@ Dale Price:

Byzantine history is both interesting and important. I've spent far too much time in Anatolia, in the ruins of Greek and Armenian churches.

Catholics and westerners in general ignore it. Unless they are dismissing it with comments make snide comments like "Byzantine history is the focus of obsessives, geeks and academics profoundly hostile to the concepts of money and fame."

Which I understand was tongue in cheek? Funny.

But at face value strikes me as crass and ethnocentric.

Rod Flanders, you've put up 10 posts on this thread in the past three hours. That's enough. Stand down for now, or I'll consider you a spammer.

Charles Curtis: Thanks for your good-humored response, and best of luck with your theories.

Rod Flanders: Fair enough on responding to Dreher rather than Gouguenheim -- but in your 11:27 post you say, "you don't distinguish between the criticism this guy has received for perpetuating a blatantly false thesis." My point is that it's not easy to determine what his thesis actually is from a news article, and to the extent that the articles allow scope for a tentative judgment, it's not at all clear that his thesis is "blatantly false."

Just as an example: Gouguenheim seems to think that the transmission of Greek texts was due more to Christian Syrians than to Arabs. That may be true, false, or insane, but I doubt there are ten people in the world whose off-the-cuff opinion on that subject is worth anything, and even they would probably want to check Gouguenheim's footnotes before pronouncing judgment. But on this thread several people who seem to have read some medieval history decided instantly that Gouguenheim is an obvious fraud and deserves the abuse he's received. That seems not just unproven but unlikely, given that utter cranks tend not to be published by respectable academic presses.

Snap judgments from a general acquaintance with the field are no better than snap judgements from political correctness. It's disheartening when Dreher says something as innocuous as "Hey, this professor's work is being judge too hastily," and the response is: no, it's not, we can tell from a news article that he's a crackpot.

How in the world can a guy posting literate, educated points and rebuttals in the conversation be considered a spammer, simply because he posts actively in a thread?

Defending whitewashes of the historical record is precisely was Stalinist show trials was about False. If this is an example of your historical scholarship, then it is you, not Guggenheim, who should get the bum's rush.

I'm not saying Guggenheim ought to be arrested, or face any sort of legal consequence...
Now that is sinister. Read that again. Folks, this is more than some learned hissy-fit.

Rod: "People who think an attempt to write critically about the intellectual history of the Middle Ages is in the same moral universe as an attempt to deny the Holocaust are beyond my ability to reason with, or take seriously."

Rod, if you will bother to go back and read your piece from '98 you will find that the person you are complaining about in it did precisely that which you seem to be defending. Leuchter made a "study" of a piece of concrete allegedly taken from one of the ovens in a concentration camp. According to his report, he had it tested for the presence of cyanide and other poisons. He says none were found, therefore none could have been used, otherwise they would have left residue.

Rod castigates him for publishing pseudo-science, and complains that the fellow who was doing the movie about him was casting Leuchter in too favorable a light.

You seem quite willing to question Leuchter's willingness to believe in this nonsense, and seemed quite supportive of him being prosecuted for holocaust denial. Why then do you, some ten years later, castigate folks for doing EXACTLY the same thing to another "scholar" that you supported doing to Leuchter.

It's not the moral question. It's the right to publish incorrect conclusions from faulty research. Why does this obviously erroneous scholar get your support? The circumstances seem fairly similar. Is it the subject matter that is different in this case?

Sorry about that...the 7/17/08 8:26 PM article above is mine.

"His ideas, so far as they can be discerned from the articles, are not obviously in oonflict with a great deal of solid evidence."

But Rod has set the parameters for this discussion thusly, Jim.

"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."

It's not the accuracy of the theory that Rod is wanting to discuss here. It's Gougenheim's right to raise the question and be wrong "without being professionally ruined".

I'm merely asking if Leuchter should have that same right. Clearly you do not believe he should.

Why?

ds0490 --

It's a fair question. And I should confess here that I have no independent knowledge of Leuchter's case and am relying on your summary. So let me distinguish the two cases in this way.

In Gouguenheim's case, a man who appears to be a serious scholar addressed a serious scholarly question within his field of expertise. There's no indication that there is anything wrong with his methods. He seems to have been subjected to unusually bitter criticism, even threats to his professional standing, merely because his answer is objectionable on political grounds to people who show no evidence of having examined his research. It seems to me obvious that his critics have seriously overreached, and Dreher is right to defend him.

In Leuchter's case, as you describe it, a man addressing one of the most sensitive issues of our age has drawn a sweeping conclusion in conflict with a huge amount of evidence on the basis of a single test that might have gone wrong in fifty ways. It seems to me as a matter of common sense that his conclusion cannot possibly follow from the slender evidence he has presented. In such a case, he still has a right to say what he thinks, but it seems to me that he deserves all the verbal abuse he gets, and that Dreher is right to attack him. It may be that his conclusions were more limited than you describe them, or his method somehow more reliable, in which there might be some defense to be made of him, but on the facts we have I can't see that Dreher is wrong in attackin him, or that he is inconsistent in defending Gouguenheim.

In short, I think Dreher is defending, not the right of anyone to say anything without fear of criticism, but the right of a serious scholar to speak on his field of expertise without assaults on his integrity from those ill-positioned to judge his work.

Academic books tend to be on rather narrow themes. I read the Figaro article this morning, and all Sylvain Gouguenheim seems to be saying is that the translators of Aristotle into Latin were French monks, not Muslims, as has hitherto been commonly believed. A standard opinion, which I have often relayed to my students, would be that the texts of Aristotle Aquinas was using came to him from Muslim translators. Sylvain Gouguenheim is challenging that.

Mr Flanders and Mr Curtis seem to have got the wrong end of the stick, in their reading of the Figaro piece. Sylvain Gouguenheim's book isn't about Averroes etc. It isn't denying the use of Avicenna etc by Aquinas. It's about a very narrow thread of mediaeval French intellectual history.

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.

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.

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.