Antipope Innocent II

And with that error, I realised that it's not even worth bothering to respond to Amedo's post. Carry on with the puppet show with little strawmen Amedo. It seems to be enthralling a certain type of spectator.

Amedeo

P.S to # 250

You have reason to find Aquinas disappointing... and bear in mind that he is one of the most learned men of the Middle Ages! As I mentioned, he is Aristotelian in philosophy, and as he was acquainted with Aristotelian "philosophy of nature," he sided with him on the issue of the flatness or roundness of the earth. (Actually Aristotle built on Anaximander's original theory that the earth is round and is equipoised at the center of the round universe.) The whole Middle Ages was split between the Biblical view of the flat earth with its four corners, which is also the pre-Anaximandrian Greek/Homeric view, and the philosophical view. The Middle Ages did not advance any theory of its own, nor did it investigate the issue. The issue was resolved when Columbus persisted on sailing around the round world, while the learned Dominican monks of Salamanca foresaw that, as a ship would keep on sailing west, it would reach a point when it would fall off the earth. (The issue was not about the shape of the earth, but about something NEW in the civilized world... staying with your feet on the ground while you walk on the down-side of the earth. There would be no Newtonian gravitational physics, if the earth were not navigable underneath.)

On the issue of the relationship between the sun and the earth, there were two Greek philosophical theories: The Anaximandrian or traditional one, which had the sun revolving around the earth, and the Pythagorean, which had the earth and the planets revolving around a central fire, or the sun. The Medieval men had no doubts about this: the Bible says that God made the sun stop for a while; so, the sun must be moving, exactly as we see it, and it was heresy to think differently.

They were not concerned with astronomy as such, even though it was part of the quadrivium (or four-way curriculum) in the education of theologians; the trivium, which included logic, was more important, since it was useful in theological disputations, and it is actually here that a few contributions were made by the schoolmen. But the theologians of old and the Scholastic ones did their fallacious reasoning when it came to defining and defending church dogmas, as if they had never seen Aristotle's work on fallacies. All their learning of already-made philosophy was a thin veneer that left their religious irrationalities intact.

The pack and parcel of medieval darkness had to be, and was, surpassed by a new spirit, by the rebirth of the long-dead pagan spirit of investigative reason, freedom, creativity, and utilitarian activities.

Antipope Innocent II

This was an "issue" in Aquinas' time?! Really? How fascinating.

If there was this split, perhaps you can name a Medieval thinker of Aquinas' time that was on the "flat earth" side of this split.

Probably because it wasn't an issue at all.

Where the hell are you getting this stuff? Can you cite a single source of information that supports this cartoonish nonsense?


You don't need a grasp of Newtownian graviational physics to understand the idea that the centre of the Earth (and therefore gravity) is "down" no matter where on the globe you stand. This was common knowledge which you know if you'd bothered to read Dante. Clearly you haven't.

{*remainder of the cartoonish pseudo history snipped*}

Get back to me when you've found any of the people on the flat earth side of your imaginary "Medieval split on the issue".

I'm beginning to wonder if your posts aren't actually just obscure jokes.

Amedeo

Cf.: # 191

Of course, these posts of mine are not a book, but I should have added a paragraph after the one below in bold blue letters -- about the antecedents of one aspect of the Italian Renaissance, namely the revival of classical Greek books, which had been translated into Arabic, and, in the 12th century, were being translated into Latin. (Needless to say, the Latin translation were amply used by the scholastic theologians in France, who knew neither Greek nor Arabic.) Incidentally, one of the Italian revivals was that on the classical Latin language: Most of the scholarly works in Italy and, later on, in other European countries were in Latin.

Antipope Innocent II

These posts of yours contain some very odd claims - not least your claim that the idea that the Earth may be flat or round was an "issue" (according to you) in the Thirteenth Century.

That's total nonsense.

So instead of posting some stuff about Gerard of Cremona (which, if you'd bothered to read the thread, we've already covered thanks), how about you back up that bizarre claim about the flat earth with some evidence.

Make it good.

Virginia-American

I was under the impression that the "dark" in "Dark Ages" had to do with the sparsity of manuscripts and other historical records from the 5th to the 10th centuries.

One of the more important events (at least IMO) in the transition from Medieval to Renaissance was the introduction of Hindu-Arabic numbers in Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci)'s Liber Abaci of 1202. This made bookkeeping and commercial math (like interest, profit and loss calculuations, and weight, measure, and currency conversions) much easier. It also allowed arbitrarily large numbers to be written.

A bit off topic, but Indian scripts are left-to-right, Arabic right-to-left, and European ones left-to-right, but decimal, place-value notation remained the same (units to the right of tens to the right of hundreds ...) in all three.

Amedeo

The scarsity of manuscripts in those centuries was only a small part of the reults of the damages that wereainflincted on the Graeco-Roman civilization. We can say that the onslaught upon that civilization started in 313 with Constantine's Edict of Milan, which gave political power privileges to the Christians. They destroyed temples, burnt books, and suppressed anything that had to do with human culture. As renouncers of the world, Christians were not to study classical literature or imitate it in church hymns or songs. The exception was Ambrosius, a Roman who had a military post in Milan toward the end of the 4th century. He was acclaimed bishop by the local population, and he did also the unthinkable: He composed poems in the classical Latin style, which he fitted to some popular Roman songs of the day. (He was thus accused by some of alluring people to Christianity through music.) Ambrosian music is still alive in some Italian churches, while the Gregorian music prevails. (If you speed up a bit the Ambrosian hymns, you hear the music of the 4th century Romans.) The Ambrosian music was exported, especially to France, and it prompted also the rise of the Beneventan school of music, which was supported by the Longobard chiefs [after the invasions to the north and the south of Italy]. (The Longobards went as far south as my native Greek town in Calabria, which around 700 became known as oppidum Longobardorum or, today, Longobardi.)
As I stated in my early posts, the invaders of western Europe contributed to the "dark Ages", for they instituted feudalism, where the people had been landowners and free men of the Roman republic. But the Longobards assimilated culturally, though unable to make any cultural contribution of their own. (The Dark Ages was of the mind and of social conditions of the majority of the people.)

Ambrosius was a learned man and became one of the theological "doctors" of the Church. He explicitly stated that no one could really believe in many things [errors, etc.] stated in the Old Testament, wherefore he adopted the method of allegorical interpretation, as other theologians had done.

Despite some cultural activities of later Christians in the established Church, the major damage was done and persisted till the 14th century: The minds of men were subjugated by "revealed truth", and their hearts were turned aware from the cares of the earth.
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The old geometry and the new arthmetic was introduced into Europe by the translations of Gerard da Cremona.

The European writing of numbers according to the place-value notation is technically from right to left (even though the words are from left to right, like "twenty seven" rather than "seven and twenty"). This is evident in the process of addition: you start from the unit-digits on the right and proceed toward the left. (The decimal fractions of 1 are mechanically written from left of the decimal point to right, but additions and subtractions always start from the right.)

Antipope Innocent II

Hey Amedeo - you keep forgetting to back up your previous weird comments about people debating the shape of the Earth in the Thirteenth Century with any actual evidence.

Why the delay? Is there a problem? Bring on the evidence.

Virginia-American

Archimedes' classic work On Floating Bodies starts off with some axioms. One of these is (paraphrasing) "the surface of any liquid at rest is a part of the surface of a sphere whose center is at the center of the Earth". Archimedes simply states this (sometime around 250 BCE) as though it were common sense or a well-known fact. In fact, the spherical Earth theory goes back at least to Pythagoras, who noted that the Earth's shadow on the Moon during an eclipse is always circular, the only body that always casts a circular shadow is a sphere .... therefore .... Not to mention the fact that Eratosthenes actually calculated the diameter of the Earth around 200 BCE, and got a fairly accurate answer.

Also, consder the symbolism of the orb that kings and emperors carried.

I too, would be interested in any evidence that there were Medieval scholars who thought the Earth was not a sphere. I'd also be interested in how influential they were.

Virginia-American

True enough, all I said was the the reason for the phrase "Dark Age" was the sparsity of records from the 5th through the 10th centuries, approximately.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Hindu-Arabic notation follows the abacus faithfully (hence Liber Abaci), the point I was making is that the notation for numbers did not change even though the orientation of the writing systems did. In English, 24 is pronounced "twenty-four", but in German it is pronounced "vier-und-zwanzwig", but in both languages it's writen "24". As it is in Sanskrit, Arabic, Italian, and nowadays everywhere in the world.