Al-right, Robert, the white thinking guy's burden. Al-beit Al-coholic.
At 08:17 AM 5/6/2015, you wrote:
> 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 gods
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 Islams 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 didnt 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 1950s.
Existentialism isnt even that. Its another
example of Eric Raymonds "Gramscian Damage: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260>.
The bush weed here on Anguillas okay, but its
clearly not as good as Johns stash. :-)
Cheers,
RAH
