[Buddha-l] science #2

[Stephen Hopkins]

Dan Lusthaus's comments:

A compelling argument could be made that what held some of these scientists
back was not their Jewish or Islamic orientation, which, on the contrary,
motivated and encouraged them, but rather the Aristotelean "sciences" (by
which I mean ptolemaic astronomy, etc, not just Aristotle proper), but
that's an issue for another day.

reminded me, on this other day, of this, from John Hobson's fascinating
"Eastern Origins of Western Civilization" (CUP 2004):

'One of the most radical aspects of the Islamic scientific revolution was
the notion that Ancient Greek thought was by no means perfect and could, if
not should, be challenged.  Thus: 'While Muslim scientists did not wholly
abandon Greek tradition they reformulated it by introducing a revolutionary
new concept of how knowledge ought to progress, a concept that still governs
the way science is done today.  Better instruments and better methods, they
reasoned, would bring about more accurate results' (Bloom & Blair, 'Islam',
2001).  This was something that the Greeks had not fully comprehended.  And
it was the paucity of Greek scientific experiments that the Islamic scholars
sought to rectify.  Moreover, Islamic scholars  began to question the
inherited tradition of many areas - of medicine, hygiene, optics, physics
and so on.  In this new scientific mode of thought the Egyptian Ibn
al-Haytham (965-1039) produced a book on optics that came to have an
enormous impact on Europe.  The Egyptian physician, Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288),
was no less important.  His work on the human body, which contradicted the
traditional position of the Greek physician, Galen, fully pre-empted the
much-heralded work of the Englishman, William Harvey, by no less than three
and a half centuries.'

Hobson has much more to say on this, and on many other aspects of, in
particular, the West's adoption of Arab and Chinese knowledge - but, alas,
there's no Mandatory Buddhist Content, as far as I can see.


Regards,

Steve Hopkins