Thread by @arya_amsha

In 1025, Private Letters between two Catholic Scholars - Raoul of Liège and Ragimbold of Cologne tell us that Catholic Europe lacked basic geometrical knowledge such as the sum of the angles of a triangle makeup 180 degrees. Why was this?

vriitrahan.wordpress.com/2021/05/14/pag…

The reason was simple, Latin Christian Europe had been cutoff for 800 years from the Science & Philosophy of the Ancient Greeks after the Roman Empire collapsed & fluency in Ancient Greek vanished from Western Europe.

Latin Europe did not have its own scientific system.

For nearly 800 years, the only Platonic & Aristotelian texts available to western europe were partial latin translations of the originals (such as the Timaeus of Plato or the Aristotelian Corpus of Boethius). No Euclidean geometry was available to them either. Dark Ages.

On a side note, the 12th century renaissance happened when plato & aristotle were reliably brought back to latin europe when the spanish reconquered the moorish kingdoms, whose libraries housed arabic translations of virtually all of ancient hellenic philosophy.

The arabs had conquered the greek speaking parts of byzantine in the 800s and taken prompt efforts to translate all original works into arabic. The private library of the abbasid caliph harun al rashid the baghdad house of wisdom housed the creme de la creme of greek science.

The real question that we must ask is - why have only a handful of ancient civilizations on earth been capable of producing their own scientific & philosophical systems? (India, Greece & China)

Keep in mind, the Arabs & Christians both used Aristotle well until the 1500s even!

Greco-Roman science, poetics, natural philosophy diffused across the jewish christian and muslim worlds. The Indian system diffused across south, central, east and SE Asia.

We must seek to investigate what made these civilizations become so creative in the first place.

For this same creativity is seen in Europe once again from the 1400s which leads to the production of the modern european system which all of us use today. Some other civilization will create a new & better system someday.

Understanding the past might clear up the future.