> On May 6, 2015, at 6:46 AM, John Young <j...@pipeline.com> wrote a splendid > bit of Younglish: > > Anselm or another really smart Arab philosopher […]
<further crypto-leftist mid-twentieth-century libtard pseudo-intellectual jiggery-pokery elided…> ObPedantry: Anselm was not an Arab, his reductive "proof of god" as “perfect" parlor trick notwithstanding. There were *no* Arab philosophers, much less "really smart" ones. Avicenna, for instance, was Persian, and like most Arab-conquered middle eastern types by then, regurgitated earlier Greek text using Indian astronomy math, including the zero, finance, (the foreign exchange contract, the letter of credit, and the demand-deposit check, say), and science. A bare fraction of which was actually “saved” by rampaging Islamic Arab rapine, physical, intellectual, and otherwise. There were *copies*, even better ones, of the contents of the Library at Alexandria, all over the ancient middle east, and even after it was burned by both Ceasar and a Bishop or two, it was the Muslims who actually burned its entire contents. And all the other libraries besides. Averroes, another leading “Arab” philosophical light, was a Spaniard. And an Aristotelian. So no new philosophy there, either. All of Arab “contributions” to “civilization” were derivative. The lateen sail was Roman (“Lateen”, geddit?), for instance. Damascus steel was Indian wootz steel. The Arabs' principal accomplishment, if you can call it that, was destroying the ancient world wherever they went, and replacing it with abject barbarism for most of a thousand years. Their piracy in the Mediterranean killed trade between east and west, (and north and south) for the entirety of their command of it and was the proximal cause of the Dark Ages in the West. Their contribution to philosophy, if one could call it that, was to declare, after they got sick of listening to Persians and Egyptians prattle badly-regurgitated Greek for a century or so, that *nothing* happens without god’s will, which obviated the need for cause and effect at all. You struck two stones together, and god *decided* that there would be a spark, you see. Which is how the world got blessed with Sharia “law” and all the rest of Islam’s barbaric world view. As long as there can be nothing unless God wills it, there can be no Islamic science. At least the Orthodox and the Catholics had to somehow incorporate cause and effect into their view of the world, or there would not be any sin. Seeding their own intellectual demise, at least, at the hands of the scientific method later on. In the west, philosophy was made the “handmaiden” of theology for more than fifteen hundred years. For a thousand of those years, philosophy in Islam was a shit-house slave. Philosophy didn’t actually occur in the west until Newton figured out how to use mathematics to deal with infinity in order to calculate the motion of objects. Discovered *again*, apparently. Palimpsests have been recovered from Orthodox codices made of scraped-over scrolls containing Archimedes (who else? :-)), dealing in infinitesimals, at least, if not the actual epsilons and deltas which finally nailed calculus to mathematical terra-firma by Bolzano in 1817. After Newton, a veritable festival of philosophical navel-gazing began in the West after, with the possible exception of the Stoics and Cynics, almost two thousand years. All to collapse again after Godel proved he was his own grandpa. Or, at least, he *could*, Groucho, belong to a club that would have him as a member. And, of course, Existentialism, like Freudianism, is merely literature. Okay. Freudianism is really *bad* literature, with Freud conflating Oedipus with Hamlet. Besides, being, you know, proven to be unfalsifiable pseudoscience, in the same breath that Karl Popper took it out with Marxism in the 1950’s. Existentialism isn’t even that. It’s another example of Eric Raymond’s "Gramscian Damage”: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260>. The bush weed here on Anguilla’s okay, but it’s clearly not as good as John’s stash. :-) Cheers, RAH
