Concept tag
#transmission
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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 replies -
Gundissalinus didn’t read Arabic: philosophy translated through spoken Castilian
The mechanics of translation are my daily bread, so I can't stop thinking about a detail I've just learned about the twelfth-century Toledo translations. Dominicus Gundissalinus, the archdeacon who put Ibn Sina's work on the soul and parts of his Healing into…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina
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 Ibn Sina. The centre of Thomist metaphysics is the…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
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 replies -
Did the Latin scholastics really receive Aristotle through Arabic?
Almost every group I walk around Córdoba 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. I tell it with less and less confidence. I…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto4 replies -
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 SfeirReply first (no replies yet)