I must have bought The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy
while visiting the CUP book-shop in the tail of 2007: all I know for sure is
that I was reading it, early in 2008, when I and some friends visited the
Middle East. It has been an eye-opening book to read, for all that I have yet
(in Spring 2011) to finish reading it.
European philosophy tends to trace its roots back to the Hellenic culture – principally Socrates, Aristotle, Plato and Archimedes. That is not inaccurate: but the tracing tends to skip over the interval between the late-Hellenic culture, over which the Roman empires (Western and, more relevantly, Eastern) ruled, and the late-Mediæval and Renaissance philosophers on whose work European traditions pretend the origins of Science were built. This book covers the interval that conventional history ignores.
(This paragraph is my opinion: the book discussed does not speak on the
topic.) Europe's proto-feudal era was characterized by war-lords who gained
power with the aid of warriors – whose priorities purported to revolve
around honour
but, in practice, revolved around their share of the
loot, their liberty to rape during victory and the bards' willingness to sing
their praises (which, in turn, depended on the bards' gladness in receiving
gold) – until enough power was consolidated in the hands of few enough
such lords that these could see their best interests were parallel to those of
the actual creators (not the warrior-appropriators) of wealth: the farmers,
crafters and artisans. Rulers who understood that the source of their wealth
was those who actually did work, that created valuable goods, began to see
that the thugs who extracted this wealth from its creators were both
an impediment to the creators' enthusiasm for doing the work that would create
wealth and an expensive way of collecting a slice of that
wealth. Wise lords saw that they could end up with a larger slice of the
wealth created if they employed fewer thugs to collect it and imposed rules on
those thugs that would assure the actual creators of wealth a larger share of
the wealth they created. One problem remained: they'd gained their power by
having more thugs than the lord from whom they took power; now they needed to
be rid of their surplus thugs. Circumstances provided an excuse: Jerusalem
fell to adherents of Islam and some in The Church called for aid to bring it
under the control of Christian powers. Rulers eager to rid themselves of
thugs could, with the public appearance of piety, send their surplus thugs
(especially the ones less able to understand how to adapt to tax-collection on
a basis of from each according to his ability
) away to a far off land
and a losable war (the relevant Islamic culture was, frankly, civilized and
technologically sophisticated – where Europe was not – and far
enough away that losing really didn't matter). The dumber rulers could be
persuaded by their kin (such as Prince John of England) to go with the thugs
and share their fate. Europe benefited greatly, in the short term –
although, sadly, the whole cynical mess of Crusades managed to pollute Islam
with the concept of holy war
(intifada),
with consequences the wise in both cultures can only lament. Many decent
folk, on both sides, got caught up in the resulting holy wars
and,
thankfully, some of them talked to each other and shared ideas. Europeans
were the main beneficiaries of this: and took sophisticated culture back with
them to their barbaric homes. One side-effect of this was to introduce Europe
to the culture of the ancients – in parallel with the Christian conquest
of Spain (also considered, by its participants, a crusade), which was also
home to some of the richest Islamic cultural traditions. In the aftermath,
christian Europe re-established cultural contact with valuable Hellenic
sources – but did so via Islamic cultures with which christian Europe
was, at the time, at war: so chose not to credit for its contributions.
The cultural baggage of the ancient Greeks was kept alive by the Eastern
Roman Empire long after Rome itself fell; while Europe descended into
barbarism and feudalism, Constantinople (and Ireland) kept the flame of
civilization alive. When Islam swept through the Middle East, it actually
preserved, learned from and expanded upon the sophisticated philosophy of the
ancients, that it acquired from the last remnants of The Eastern Empire. It
developed its own interpretations of (particularly, but not exclusively) the
Socratic/Aristotelean/Platonic philosophy. In particular, it developed ways
of accommodating Hellenistic philosophy (with its inherent polytheism) to a
monotheistic theology: these were, later, to serve as the foundation on which
Christian theologian/philosophers were able to build an academic system that
would ultimately present a theologically-acceptable form of late-Hellenistic
philosophy. This (at the expense of pretending to ignore the Islamic
intermediaries via whom Europe had received it) made it possible for European
culture to set aside Christianity's essentially
anti-intellectual grundnorms for long enough to
allow what we now know as science
to get the tips of its digits into
the rock-face of reality.
This book tells the story of what happened, in the Islamic world, that
transmuted the Hellenistic raw material into the subtle matter that Europe
transformed into its sophisticated post-Renaissance theology, alchemy and
– eventually – the foundations of natural philosophy
(which
we now call science
).
My favourite chapter is 14: Natural Philosophy
. Among other
crucial topics, it deals with the clash between continualism
and atomism
. The former sees the continuity of the world about us,
especially evident in motion; the latter addresses the discreteness of matter,
which is particularly hard to comprehend if space (and hence, presumably,
matter) is the same everywhere
. Each deals with the challenge of the
phenomenon of motion
in a world (which each accepts as properly
described by an idea) of particular positions and moments (when a thing is
there). The conflict between atomism and continualism has existed for roughly
as long as mathematics and philosophy (and, thus, for longer than the
distinction between the two – let alone the late-comer, physics); and is
essentially at the heart of the philosophical complications of
quantum-mechanics (where the old contrast is transformed into wave-particle and
position-momentum dualities). The Arab philosophers of a millennium before my
birth were as astute, interesting and illuminating as (but also as wrong as)
anyone from the intervening history, that I have read (including the
Copenhagen School and their contemporaries).
Classical (i.e. post-Gauss) mathematics resolved
the conflict
between atomist
points and a continuum in an impressively effective
manner (that, none the less, relegates continuity
to a derivative
property whose very articulation depends on mathematical tools –
principally reductio – which we are now obliged
to treat with some suspicion). The modern theories of quantum mechanics have
given a new twist to this story: the fusion of wave
and particle
– of position
and (dual) momentum
– necessarily
requires a conception of the continuum
in which a function and its
Fourier transform are granted equal status.