[Buddha-l] science #4 web links

[Dan Lusthaus]

In case some of you might be interested in pursuing this line further, but
lack the inclination or opportunity to read some of the recommended books,
here are links to get you started:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/nasr.html

http://web.mit.edu/mitmsa/www/NewSite/libstuff/nasr/nasrspeech1.html

http://www.stnews.org/News-1115.htm

http://www.crosscurrents.org/islamecology.htm


For a criticism of the above approach -- a criticism that has its own
problems -- see

http://www.islamonline.net/english/Contemporary/2002/05/Article21.shtml

This last piece, by Ziauddin Sardar, criticizes some trends of the last two
decades to deal with "Islamic science," labeling Nasr's approach as mystical
fundamentalism. While there is some legitimacy to Sardar's critique, it is
somewhat overstated, not to mention the irony of his touting the following:

(quote)
 the mathematical models of 14th century scientist ibn Shatir, and the work
of astronomers at the famous observatory in Maragha, Azerbaijan, built in
the 13th century by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, laid the foundation for the
'Copernican revolution'. The Maragha astronomers developed the Tusi couple
and a theorem for the transformation of eccentric models into epicyclic
ones. Copernicus not only used these two basic theorems to build his notion
of heliocentricity but also used them at exactly the same point in the
model.
(end quote)

If my recollection of science history is correct, it is the epicyclic
portion of Copernicus' theory that today is considered the most flawed
aspect, so that heliocentrism did not really get established until Kepler
worked out that the orbits that Copernicus was still treating as epicycles
of circular orbits were more easily (and, as it turns out, correctly)
explained as elliptical orbits. See

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Orbits.html

The truth of Islamic science lies somewhere between Nasr and Sardar (and I'm
not sure the decline and disappearance of Islamic science can be so fully
blamed on Western imperialism as Sardar claims).

Dan Lusthaus