Re: The Need for Debate

From:    Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
> I guess I was just thinking of things like galileo and the church when I
> talked of the church and state preventing debate. :)
This particular episode is actually considerably more complicated
than the vast majority of people make it out to be.  The short
answer is that it's an incoherent statement, because Galileo
had both opponents and supporters within the Church, and that
it had more to do with who was proclaiming doctrine than whether
doctrines were false.

> But I certainly got the impression from my teacher in
> school that the church especially supressed progress for centuries,
> indeed I'm sure he gave this as the reason why there was so little
> advancement in a lot of areas.
This is something of a caricature of the position that opponents
of the Church (then and today) had. The fact is that the vast
majority of the scientific and philosophical remains from antiquity
were *exclusively* handled, preserved, and, where possible, improved
upon, by Church officials in most parts of Europe for the better part
of a thousand years. There were *no* nonreligious intellectual
institutions for this entire period. The fact that they didn't get
very far says much more about the extent to which Western Europe had
lost contact with antique culture during the Dark Ages: they simply
didn't have much to go on. Aristotle's teachings were almost unknown
in Western Europe until the Spanish reconquista made some headway and
Moorish libraries were translated and digested under the likes of
Archbishop Raymond of Toledo.  As Ray has already noted, this spawned
great debates, so great in fact that a papal bull was issued in 1272
and again in 1277 banning certain topics of debate in the University
of Paris (not, notably, banning them in general), not so much to
suppress dissent (the Pope himself had taught there and was a moderate
theologically IIRC), but to keep tempers to a manageable level.

> There's also often the problem of
> perspective: for instance, the "barbarians" (Goths, Vandals etc) who
> eroded the roman empire near the end. Were they really that bad? Was
> there nothing important that was good to say about them?
Well, yes and no.  By the late Empire, the Romans had themselves become
so debased in terms of cultural sophistication that it was scarcely
possible to distinguish them -- especially as barbarians had been
highly Romanized, as with Stilicho.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

Reply