Concept tag
#transmission
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Did Hume ever read al-Ghazali?
Last month I read al-Ghazālī's account of his crisis of doubt, and then went looking for more. I found the part of The Incoherence of the Philosophers about fire and cotton: we see the cotton burn when it touches the fire, but…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies188 views -
Did the Latin scholastics really receive Aristotle through Arabic?
I guide visitors around Córdoba, where Ibn Rushd and Maimonides were both born. Almost every group wants the same simple story: the Arabs preserved Greek learning during Europe's dark ages and then handed it back, and that is how Europe got Aristotle.…
Started by Rafael Moreno Gálvez4 replies230 views -
Gundissalinus didn’t read Arabic: philosophy translated through spoken Castilian
I translate between Hebrew and Arabic for a living, mostly contracts, sometimes poetry, so the mechanics of translation are my daily bread. I've just learned a detail about the twelfth-century Toledo translations that I can't stop thinking about. Dominicus Gundissalinus, the archdeacon…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies284 views -
Can students learn something from a teacher who doesn’t believe it herself?
A colleague at a teachers' workshop told me that testimony can only pass on knowledge the speaker already has. It is a tidy principle, and it is how most of us picture teaching: I know something, I tell my students, now they…
Started by Rowena Abellana6 replies222 views -
Not a warehouse: what the Baghdad translators actually did
The usual story says Arabic scholars kept Greek philosophy safe until Europe was ready for it; the translators themselves were doing something far more interesting.
Started by Layla Haddad0 replies138 views -
Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina
I teach metaphysics at a seminary in Enugu, and my students arrive believing that Aquinas is a Catholic synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible. That leaves out the man in the middle. My thesis is strong: Aquinas's metaphysics cannot be understood without…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies127 views