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To: HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity
Lot of Aristotelians in downtown Cairo and Mecca???

Well, yes. The Arabs preserved the Greek literature that would have been lost when the Roman Empire declined. Europe was dark. The crusades brought the knowledge of the knowledge to Europe. There was a reformation and a Renaissance.
36 posted on 06/01/2004 11:40:00 AM PDT by bert (Don't Panic !)
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To: bert; narses; Aquinasfan; NYer; Polycarp IV
Um...The "Reformation" tended to look negatively on Aristotle....You may recall Luther's Disputation AGAINST Scholastic Theology..."Knowledge" of the Logical Treatises came through Boethius, a non-Arab. Just for the record. The "Renaissance" tended towards Platonism and the rhetorical eloquence of copying Cicero, painting and sculpture It had very little to do with Aristotle or the Crusades. Or Islam... The Renaissance occurred in Italy, largely a "Catholic" affair. Protestantism facilitated the growth of fideism and a decline in the study of Aristotle - which continues to this day. The general trend in modern American universities is to reject essentialism and there is not exactly a "renaissance" of Aristotelian teleological ethics going on outside of a few specialized Catholic centers for the study of philosophy.

Most of the same people who brag about a Muslim/Arab role in preserving Aristotelian scholarship reject it emphatically as part of the "Dark Ages" - a metaphorical terminology popularized by Petrarch to describe lack of knowledge of Ciceronian rhetorical Latin - something which has nothing to do with Muslims. IF lack of knowledge of Aristotle is "dark" that makes the modern American era one of the darkest in Western intellectual history.

William of Moerbeke, call your office...

37 posted on 06/01/2004 1:03:20 PM PDT by HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity
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