Week 3 - The Revival of Natural Philosophy Flashcards
The Rise and Fall of Rome - Overview of the Roman Empire
- founded 753 BCE
- name given by Romulus
- Romulus and Remus (raised and abandoned by a she wolf). Legend has it that Romulus kills brother and becomes first king of Rome (mostly legend)
-Etruscans were dominant over Romans from 753-509 BCE
-509 BCE Roman republic established
-3rd century BCE - not a dominant power yet, fragments of Alexander the Great’s empire, Carthaginian (North Africa and southern Spain, descendents of Phoenicians) empire - 264-146 BCE Punic wars between Carthaginians and Romans. Romans win and Carthage is destroyed in 146 BCE
-Rome continues to be a dominant force for several hundred years - conquers Greece in 146 BCE
- 27 BCE Roman empire established by Caesar and son Augustus
- 1st century BCE - general Caesar conquers Gaul (modern day France)
- when he returns, civil war ensues and he is able to win and declare himself dictator
- Augustus declared as first emperor in 27 BCE
-decline of Rome begins around 200 CE
-western empire gets sacked in the 5th century multiple times - 476 CE - end of western Roman empire
- 4th century CE - Rome splits into western (centered at Rome) and eastern (centred in Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul) empires
- Byzantine empire (eastern empire) goes on until 1453, when it gets conquered by the Ottomans
The Legacy of Rome
-built on Greek natural philosophy (and engineering), and applied it to the utility of running their sprawling empire
-323-31 BCE, geometry, physics, astronomy and other disciplines developed by pre-socratics, Plato, and Aristotle spread through the hellenistic world (parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe influenced by Greek thought due to ATG’s rule)
- Alexandira - museum (research library)
- Pergamon - Library
- Architecton - job of building war machines
- Archimedes - invented water screw and compound pulley
- best known for their contributions to modern architectural and engineering practices. buildings, roads, aqueducts, and many other magnificent structures that have survived into the modern world
- the Roman elite adopted Greek education and studied Greek philosophy, holding many Greek philosophers in high regard
-keys to their success was the widespread use in their architecture of the arch (rotated in three dimensions produces a dome, which was another innovation in
Roman architecture)
- Pantheon
- also introduced the use of hydraulic cement as a mortar; because it set even under water, it was a very useful tool for building bridges, piers, and docks.
- 150 BCE Romans mied volcanic ash, rocks, water, and lime to make Roman concrete
- innovative sewer system to drain marshes
- politician and civil engineer Sextus Julius Frontinus wrote report on design for aqueducts and sewers of Rome
- greatest engineering accomplishment of the Roman era was the road system. While the majority of Roman roads did not represent the most complex engineering problems that had to be mastered, they were the key to the centralized control of the empire. Roman power functioned because the roads not only provided a
communications system and a safe trade route but also allowed the rapid deployment of military forces.
- i.e. Appian Way
- State - developed complicated legal system, well supplied army, public food assistance, and massive public games
- Spartacus - led slave revolt 73 - defeated by army
- Marcus Vitruvius - wrote about buildings, urban planning, and human body, inspired Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man
Natural Philosophy in the Roman Era:
Claudius Ptolemy
-Roman citizen, but ethnically Greek/Hellenized Egyptian
-produced material on astrology, astronomy, and geography, using complex math-ematics and a large body of observations. His methods of astronomical calculation in particular shaped the Western view of the heavens for more than 1000 years
-optics, music science, investigated how the cosmos were organized - came up with theory of cosmos where earth is at the centre, and the planets are perfect spheres
- epicycles - tiny circles that planets moved along around bigger circles
- great astronomical work Mathematical Syntaxes renamed Almagest by Arabic scholars - Hypatia
- his book Geography discusses date he uses, why, and provided a resource for other scholars to use in more accurately picturing the world
- believed world was round
Natural Philosophy: Galen
- Born in 129 CE
at Pergamum, second only to Alexandria as a centre of learning in the period, Galen studied mathematics and philosophy before beginning his medical training at the
age of 16. In 157 CE he became surgeon to the gladiators at Pergamum
-got first-hand experience of human anatomy by tending
to wounded and dead gladiators. He saw the structure of muscle and bone, sinew and intestine laid bare by violent injury and was responsible for trying to set the
parts back in place when possible - Hippocratic theory - Health was considered to be the correct balance of physical action, diet, and lifestyle; illness represented an unbalancing of the elements
- Galen brought to his work his philosophical training, which covered Plato,
Aristotle, and the Stoics, who believed in a physics based on the material world,
as well as many other elements of classical thought. He accepted the Hippocratic
humors but wanted to make clear the functions of the human organs, so he
applied Aristotelian categories, particularly the four causes, to his anatomical
work. His close observation demonstrated, for example, that arteries carried blood
rather than the older theory that they carried “pnuema,” or air. Each organ and
structure in the body had a purpose, and dissection and vivisection were the
key tools to establishing what that purpose was - teleological philosophy
Introduction to the Islamic Renaissance (500 CE - 1050 CE)
- Islamic scholars did not accept Greek thought
unchallenged and added not only their critical thinking to the body of material available but also their own original research. - Many mosque schools, or maktab, developed into more
extensive educational institutions and became essentially the first universities, offering
advanced studies for students and research facilities, such as libraries, for scholars. - the Islamic world received large collections of Greek and Roman
material along with their conquests, and its proximity to the Byzantine Empire
meant, at least in times of peace, a potential for intellectual exchange. Educated
Persians and Syrians, with their knowledge of Greek culture running back to the
time of Alexander the Great, became bureaucrats within the empires and brought
with them their intellectual heritage - The Abbasid Caliphate was the third caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was founded by a dynasty descended from the prophet’s uncle, Abbas ibn Abdul-Muttalib, from whom the dynasty takes its name
- When a new dynasty started under the Abbasids, there was increased interest in the
intellectual heritage of the Greeks. e early Abbasids were intellectually tolerant
and had a strong interest in practical skills, employing educated Persians and even
Christians in government. - e head of al-Mamun’s research centre was Hunayn ibn Ishaq who grew up bilingual (Arabic and Syriac) and
later learned Greek, perhaps in Alexandria. He translated over works, many of
them medical. His son and other relatives continued the translation work, in par-
ticular Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almages - ere was a great flowering of culture,
known as the Islamic Renaissance, starting in the ninth century and running
until about the twelfth century. During this period Islamic scholars continued the
intellectual traditions of the Greeks, but there were important dierences. Islamic
scholars had to conduct their work within the framework of their religion. While
there were liberal and conservative periods, often varying with a change in rulers,
Greek material could not simply be adopted outright. Some aspects were accepted
with little change, such as Ptolemaic astronomy; some were modified, such as the
introduction of God rather than an indefinite “unmoved mover” in Aristotelian physics - Islamic scholars
were also more interested in testing observations than Aristotle or Plato had been,
in part because they had a less intellectualized concept of the acquisition of natural
philosophic knowledge - Two examples of this high level of skill can be seen in glass-making
and metallurgy.
-Technical abilities and tools extended
to abdominal surgery and cataract removal. Eye surgery was linked to theories
of vision and the more theoretical study of optics. us, medicine was a perfect
conduit for natural philosophy in the Islamic world - agriculture - partial list of transplanted crops includes bananas, cotton, coconut palms,
hard wheat, citrus fruit, plantain, rice, sorghum, watermelons, and sugar cane. - encyclopedias of plants such
as Al-Dinawari’s (828-896) e Book of Plants and Ibn al-Baitar’s (c. 1188-1248)
Kitāb Al-jāmi li-mufradāt al-adwiya wa al-aghdhiya, a pharmacopoeia listing over
1400 plants and their medicinal uses - Abu ‘ali al-Husain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina (980-1037) - producing over works covering medicine, physics,
geology, mathematics, theology, and philosophy. He wrote so much that he had a
special pannier made so he could write while on horseback. His two most famous
books were the Kitab al-Shifa’ (e Book of Healing) and Al Qanun fi Tibb (e Canon
of Medicine). Despite its title, Kitab al-Shifa’ is actually a scientific encyclopedia cov-
ering logic, natural philosophy, psychology, geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and
music. Although including many aspects of Greek thought, particularly Aristotle and
Euclid, it does not simply recount those works. e Al Qanun fi Tibb became one of
the most important sources of medical knowledge. It was both a translation of and a
commentary on Galenic medicine and contains what is perhaps the first discussion
of mental illness as a form of disease. - Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (c. –
c. ). Although ibn al-Haytham was not trained as a physician, he worked on
vision, diseases of vision, and the theory of optics. In his Kitab al-Manazir (Book of
Optics) he presented the first detailed descriptions and illustrations of the parts of
the eye in optical terms and challenged the Aristotelian optics of Ptolemy - Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarazmi - symbol set that was the precursor to the modern notation system, introduced zero as a mathematical object, Al-Jabr wa’l muqabalah, which became
known in the West as Algebra, solutions for various quadratic equations including the use of square
roots - Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni - India and Shadows ooks
-Jābir ibn Hayyān - Books of Balances and the Summa Perfectionis (in its Latin
form) cover the central aspects of his alchemy. Jābir starts from an Aristotelian
foundation, accepting the four elements and the four qualities, but extends
Aristotle’s idea of minima naturalia, or smallest natural particles, as the basis for
the dierence between metals. - Abu Bakr Mohammad Ibn
Zakariya al-Razi - al-Judari wal Hasabah (Treatise on Smallpox and Measles) that contained the
first known description of chicken pox and smallpox - Secret of Secrets or the Book of Secrets, does not, despite its title, reveal the secret
of transmutation of base metals into gold. Rather, it is one of the first laboratory
manuals - Zij al-Sindh by al-Khwarazmi in . It was based primarily on
Ptolemaic ideas, setting the theoretical framework for later astronomers, but it also
marks the beginning of independent work in the Islamic world - When Copernicus
began his work, which would transform the model of the heavens by placing the
Sun at its centre, he appears to have had access to both Tusi’s and al-Shatir’s
work, showing how instrumental Islamic astronomers were to the development of
astronomy worldwide. - ibn Rushd - wrote commentary of a aristotle
Introduction to Italian Renaissance (1450s CE - 1600s CE)
This period celebrated the following values:
secularism, rationality, individualism; the pursuit of knowledge and a questioning of taken-for-granted truths; the spread of written literature after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, or the first moveable type; a (re)discovery of Roman and Greek writing, thoughts, art, and architecture.
Development of Science During the Renaissance
- Nicolaus Copernicus - religious figure, astronomer, scholar, scientist, mathematician
- Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)- German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer
- Galileo Galilee (1564-1642) - astonomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher, mathematician, first to identify four large moons of Jupiter
- Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) - scientist, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician, writer, 20 000 pages of notes of ideas
- Vitruvian man, study of proportions, from Vitruvius’s De Architectura, drawing of Torso and Arms, drawing of woman’s torso, anatomical studies of a male shoulder, larynx and legs, comparison of scal skin and onion, womb study, drawings of water lifting devices, giant crossbow, artillery, automobile, robot knight, flying machine, helicopter
- Paintings: The Annunciation, Lady with an Ermine, The Last supper, Mona Lisa, The Virgin and Child with St Anne, St. John the Baptist
- Raphael - school of athens, disputa sacramento, transfiguration
- donatello - Judith and holofernes, feast of herod
- Michaelangelo - Madonna of the stars, David, Sistine Chapel, Pieta,
Was the Renaissance a thing?
- 15th-16th centuries
- in theory, renaissance was a rebirth of European culture after Dark Ages, efflorescence of art, primarily visual but also literary, and ideas that coincided with rediscovery of Roman and Greek culture, ideas, writings
- scholars who translated/commented on these works called humanists (and they were religious) (they studied humanities
- wealth of Italian city states due to them being mini industrial powerhouses, venice (traded with Ottomans) and genoa (Chris C) got rich from trade
- Florence needed alum from Ottomans to make textiles until Giovanni de Castro discovered it locally
- Pope granted mining rights of alum to Florentine family, the Medicis
- this didn’t result in “victory” over Ottomans though
- Muslim world was the source of many of the writings that Renaissance scholars studied, and after the conquest of Istanbul, Byzantine scholars fled to Italy
- Muslim scholars influenced Copernicus
- Most people in Europe were unaware of the Renaissance, it was only experienced by the wealthy (5%), vast majority of Europeans lived on farms as tenants or free peasants who were intellectually guided by the Catholic church
- was not so central to the 15th century
New Models of the Universe
- Both the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution were responsible for the introduction of a heliocentric (sun-centered) universe and laws of planetary motion. This era is sometimes referred to as the birth of modern science, with famed scientist Galileo Galilei touted as the “father of modern science.”
- Galilei (1564-1642), depicted above, built on the foundations of Nicolaus Copernicus’s work. Copernicus (1473-1543) was a Renaissance thinker who proposed a heliocentric (sun-centric) universe a full century before Galilei proved Copernican theory. Galilei was a firm believer in the heliocentric model, and he paid the high political and social cost for his beliefs, which contradicted the teachings of the Catholic Church
