A C Grayling The Age of Genius

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A C Grayling The Age of Genius
OP - April 04, 2016, 06:21 PM

Just got this, and it is disturbing how the world truly was turned upside down in the seventeenth century.

Arguably, people in different places with different beliefs are actually living in different times and do understand things "backwards".

It was believed until then that everything revolved around the earth, with God above in the heavens.

Watching the transit of Venus upset the apple cart. The old ways of thinking, God did this and that, are wrong. Full stop.

Grayling argues that the wars then (and now?) are actually related to these changes of world view.

Religion must be confined to the private and personal. It has nothing to say about morality or science because it's basic assumptions are wrong.

This has been known for four hundred years. It is time to say good night to our myths, however strongly their truthiness is asserted.

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #1 - April 04, 2016, 06:32 PM

Quote
The Age of Genius
The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind
By: A. C. Grayling

About The Age of Genius
What happened to the European mind between 1605, when an audience watching Macbeth at the Globe might believe that regicide was such an aberration of the natural order that ghosts could burst from the ground, and 1649, when a large crowd, perhaps including some who had seen Macbeth forty-four years earlier, could stand and watch the execution of a king? Or consider the difference between a magus casting a star chart and the day in 1639, when Jonathan Horrock and William Crabtree watched the transit of Venus across the face of the sun from their attic, successfully testing its course against Kepler's Tables of Planetary Motion, in a classic case of confirming a scientific theory by empirical testing.

In this turbulent period, science moved from the alchemy and astrology of John Dee to the painstaking observation and astronomy of Galileo, from the classicism of Aristotle, still favoured by the Church, to the evidence-based, collegiate investigation of Francis Bacon. And if the old ways still lingered and affected the new mind set – Descartes's dualism an attempt to square the new philosophy with religious belief; Newton, the man who understood gravity and the laws of motion, still fascinated to the end of his life by alchemy – by the end of that tumultuous century 'the greatest ever change in the mental outlook of humanity' had irrevocably taken place.
- See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-age-of-genius-9781408843291/#sthash.UnTTNv5F.dpuf

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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A C Grayling The Age of Genius
Reply #2 - September 06, 2016, 09:10 AM

Missed this thread and the book itself. I love Professor AC Grayling, and this sounds excellent — so I'll definitely endeavour to get a hold of this!
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Reply #3 - September 06, 2016, 12:01 PM

I'll argue that the scientific revolution is a largely peripheral development, which can largely be undone over the course of a few generations, and that has left us only slightly less vulnerable as a species.

I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but science sucks!

Quote from: yeezevee on February 11, 2016, 02:05 PM
how fuck works without shit??

Let's Play Chess!

harakaat, friend, RIP
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Reply #4 - September 06, 2016, 03:59 PM

Quote from: asbie on September 06, 2016, 12:01 PM
science sucks!

So 'science' is yo' mama's nickname then?
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Reply #5 - September 06, 2016, 05:43 PM

well let me add old cemb link on that here

http://www.councilofexmuslims.com/index.php?topic=8974.0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ket6_3rAXL4

Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything
I renounced my faith to become a kafir,
the beloved betrayed me and turned in to a Muslim
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