Eurocentrism

[Phrossack]

I am an ardent chauvinist of the western heritage, from Greece to England. This is the tradition I was grounded it; from its stories I draw my metaphors, my allusions. Its history delivers my heroes, its philosophy my hopes. If I had been born in Arabia or China, my home tradition would be different. But I was born in America, tied to England, tied to Europe, tied to Greece and Rome. I will not let go, or even loosen my hold on this tradition, in the name of dreary, wretched, contemptible academic desiccation of culture that reduce all to the same status. There are many great civilizations, but the west is mine.

See, it's precisely because I was raised in the West that I find it kinda boring. Been there, done that. Learned about it in school and life for years. It's old. That's one of the reasons I find places like the Caucasus, Persia, Central Asia, and occasionally modern Africa so interesting.

 

[Traitorfish]

I am an ardent chauvinist of the western heritage, from Greece to England. This is the tradition I was grounded it; from its stories I draw my metaphors, my allusions. Its history delivers my heroes, its philosophy my hopes. If I had been born in Arabia or China, my home tradition would be different. But I was born in America, tied to England, tied to Europe, tied to Greece and Rome. I will not let go, or even loosen my hold on this tradition, in the name of dreary, wretched, contemptible academic desiccation of culture that reduce all to the same status. There are many great civilizations, but the west is mine.

What special claim does Europe have to the Greek inheritance that cannot equally be claimed by Arabia ("Arabia")?

 

[Kyriakos]

^Well, the Islamic world seems to crucially have moved away from the initial great interest in Greek math and philosophy, particularly after the treatise with the nice name "The Incomprehensibility of the Philosophers" in the 11th century AD. Which soon was answered in the other edge of the Islamic civ, in Al-Andalus, by Averroes, with his better-titled work "The Incomprehensibility of the Incomprehensibility"

Which reminds me that i just have to read Averroes

 

[Masada]

I've never seen the title for Al-Ghazali's Tahāfut al-Falāsifa translated as "The Incomprehensibility of the Philosophers".

 

[Kyriakos]

I've never seen the title for Al-Ghazali's Tahāfut al-Falāsifa translated as "The Incomprehensibility of the Philosophers".

Just replace 'Incomprehensibility' with 'Incoherence' then Although not synonyms, they aren't that mutually exclusive or crucially different in a number of cases (although in some they may even get to be nearly opposite views on something one does not accept; namely the view it is very hard to follow, and the view that it is inherently fractured and not having a self-sustaining progression). Besides, the point was to refer to a historic point from which the Islamic world started to drift away from the original interest in Greek thought (which led to the development of philosophy and math in those realms)

 

[Masada]

The problem is that Al-Ghazali clearly understood Aristotle and didn't object to him because he's found him hard to read but because he thought his philosophy was junk. It's also incorrect to say that Tahāfut al-Falāsifa had anything to do with the abandonment of Greek thought. Al-Ghazali famously criticized Aristotle using Greek thought and also stated that he had nothing against Greek maths. Put bluntly, Al-Ghazali's work is profoundly misunderstood something that can be blamed on Orientalists looking for some sort of figure to pin the blame for Muslims supposedly becoming stupid as a result of their abandoning Greek learning.

 

[Kyriakos]

Ok, but if we go by 'famousmuslimscholar'>previous guy, then Averroes>Al-Raz-A-Ghul

(let alone that Aristotle is not all of Greek philosophy; to argue anything like that simply shows lack of any info on either the preplatonic philosophy or the post-aristotelean neopythagorian or stoic or neoplatonic etc)

edit: since you added stuff there now, so Averroes is an 'orientalist' now?

 

[Masada]

(let alone that Aristotle is not all of Greek philosophy; to argue anything like that simply shows lack of any info on either the preplatonic philosophy or the post-aristotelean neopythagorian or stoic or neoplatonic etc)

Al-Ghazali wasn't writing a polemic against Greek philosophy, so it shouldn't be surprising that he didn't write about the whole of Greek philosophy. Rather, the aim of Tahāfut al-Falāsifa was to criticize another school of Islamic philosophers whose metaphysics he disagreed with. His criticism of some Greek philosophers was incidental to this purpose and flowed naturally from it because his targets relied on those Greek philosophers to inform their metaphysics.

since you added stuff there now, so Averroes is an 'orientalist' now?

No, because Averroes wasn't a time-traveler and lived long before Orientalists decided that Muslims just decided to become stupid narrow-minded bigots in the 1100s.

 

[Traitorfish]

Descartes and Hume rejected Aristotle, too. Guess that means Europe abandoned Greek philosophy too, huh?

 

[Kyriakos]

^Descartes, yeah. I have read his entire "philosophical" work (cause it is a small book) Well, if i was Descartes i would not really try to cancel any philosophy if i also planned in the same work to argue that god has to exist cause if god did not exist then i could not be certain that when i think something is true it has to be true (due to god being good and helping me see truth if i try a lot) I mean it takes some trying to produce a circular argument which needs backing from both circular courses at the same time, and otherwise does not link to anything nor is it based on anything.

Re Hume: Who cares?

 

[Traitorfish]

Descartes and Hume are simply the modern philosophers who most explicitly rejected the Aristotelian tradition, but they represent a broader movement away from Aristotelian philosophy from the seventeenth century onwards. And as you seem to have equated rejection of Aristotelianism with the rejection of "Western civilisation" altogether, it seems that Europe is as non-Western as the Islamic world.

I suspect, mind, that you're just playing devil's advocate with this, because you've made it quite clear that only Greece can lay claim to the Greek inheritance, and the rest of us are just so many barbaroi. Which, to its credit, is a slightly more coherent position than the grand arc of Plato-to-NATO.

 

[Kyriakos]

^That does not follow at all, cause:

-I did not equate the polemic against Greek philosophy by that archenemy of Batman (Al-Ras-A-Gul or something near that) begins, to a merely anti-aristotelean position. Greek phiplosophy is very obviously not in tautology with Aristotelean claims and works; Aristotle is one of the most known names and one of those most of whose works survived, but he is neither the only figure of great significance in Greek philosophy, nor one can assume his own work was the most populous one for most of the time examined (Even Simplicius, 6th century Byzantine scholar/philosopher, refers to a multitude of earlier philosophy books and texts which we no longer seem to have remains of).

-Averroes clearly did not mock the anti-Greek philosophy work of the previous very popular islamic scholar out of some bickering over a single philosophical figure. The decline in Islamic philosophy seems to be evident in following aeons, and later on in Islamic math too, along with the rest.

-Modern philosophy (whatever that can mean) is notably occupied with Presocratic thinkers, as in the 20th century example of Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' which refers to the Parmenidian/Eleatic claim that 'Nothingness' is a human fallacy (anyway, not meaning to go on about that due to Volumes ), and Being and Time, by a professional nazi and amateur philosopher (Heidegger) has direct examinations of the presocratics, as does of course the work of Nietzsche.

 

[Masada]

I did not equate the polemic against Greek philosophy by that archenemy of Batman (Al-Ras-A-Gul or something near that) begins, to a merely anti-aristotelean position.

This is wrong on so many levels from the casual racism to the fact that Al-Ghazali did not write a polemic against Greek Philosophy.

Averroes clearly did not mock the anti-Greek philosophy work of the previous very popular islamic scholar out of some bickering over a single philosophical figure. The decline in Islamic philosophy seems to be evident in following aeons, and later on in Islamic math too, along with the rest.

Averroes didn't attack Al-Ghazali because he penned an anti-Greek polemic he attack him for writing a critique of Averroes own philosophical school. It's also nonsense to somehow link Al-Ghazali who was quite careful to note that his dislike of some Greek philosophers didn't mean that all Greek knowledge should be thrown out. Here's Al-Ghazali on his view of maths in his al-Munqidh min al-Dalal (Deliverance from Error):

A grievous crime indeed against religion has been committed by the man who imagines that Islam is defended by the denial of the mathematical sciences, seeing that there is nothing in revealed truth opposed to these sciences by way of either negation or affirmation, and nothing in these sciences opposed to the truth of religion.

 

[Kyriakos]

^I guess that settles it, a single quote, without any source for translation either

But in the case it is a true quote and decent translation: well done to him to try to argue that math is not against Islam. I mean clearly this debate took forever to establish in the Greek world

 

[Traitorfish]

Today I learned that all philosophy can be classified as "Greek", "anti-Greek" or "who cares".

 

[GreekAnalyzer]

See, it's precisely because I was raised in the West that I find it kinda boring. Been there, done that. Learned about it in school and life for years. It's old. That's one of the reasons I find places like the Caucasus, Persia, Central Asia, and occasionally modern Africa so interesting.

This ^^

 

[Quackers]

I am an ardent chauvinist of the western heritage, from Greece to England. This is the tradition I was grounded it; from its stories I draw my metaphors, my allusions. Its history delivers my heroes, its philosophy my hopes. If I had been born in Arabia or China, my home tradition would be different. But I was born in America, tied to England, tied to Europe, tied to Greece and Rome. I will not let go, or even loosen my hold on this tradition, in the name of dreary, wretched, contemptible academic desiccation of culture that reduce all to the same status. There are many great civilizations, but the west is mine.

That is a beautiful piece of text. I agree.

 

[Takhisis]

Today I learned that all philosophy can be classified as "Greek", "anti-Greek" or "who cares".

I think we can classify anything into as many sorts of things as we can make up…

That is a beautiful piece of text. I agree.

So you approve of sticking a sword in someone's back to guess the future?

 

[ParkCungHee]

So, while we're all patting ourselves on the back about belonging to western culture, how many people here are practicing orthodox Christians?

 

[Tee Kay]

I see no reason to limit myself to Western or some other culture. I consider all of human civilisation part of my heritage, as it were.

Maybe that's why people don't like me