Islamic Science and the Making of the European RenaissanceThe rise and fall of the Islamic scientific tradition, and the relationship of Islamic science to European science during the Renaissance. The Islamic scientific tradition has been described many times in accounts of Islamic civilization and general histories of science, with most authors tracing its beginnings to the appropriation of ideas from other ancient civilizations—the Greeks in particular. In this thought-provoking and original book, George Saliba argues that, contrary to the generally accepted view, the foundations of Islamic scientific thought were laid well before Greek sources were formally translated into Arabic in the ninth century. Drawing on an account by the tenth-century intellectual historian Ibn al-Naidm that is ignored by most modern scholars, Saliba suggests that early translations from mainly Persian and Greek sources outlining elementary scientific ideas for the use of government departments were the impetus for the development of the Islamic scientific tradition. He argues further that there was an organic relationship between the Islamic scientific thought that developed in the later centuries and the science that came into being in Europe during the Renaissance. Saliba outlines the conventional accounts of Islamic science, then discusses their shortcomings and proposes an alternate narrative. Using astronomy as a template for tracing the progress of science in Islamic civilization, Saliba demonstrates the originality of Islamic scientific thought. He details the innovations (including new mathematical tools) made by the Islamic astronomers from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, and offers evidence that Copernicus could have known of and drawn on their work. Rather than viewing the rise and fall of Islamic science from the often-narrated perspectives of politics and religion, Saliba focuses on the scientific production itself and the complex social, economic, and intellectual conditions that made it possible. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 40
... find its wellsprings. Critique of the Classical Narrative In what follows, I would like to subject this classical narrative to some criticism and to point to some of the problems that it fails to solve, before I propose, in the next ...
... find translators such as Hunain b. Isha ̄q (d. 873) searching for classical Greek scientific texts all over the old Byzantine domain, and sometimes failing to find what was needed.5 Under such conditions, when books were not taught or ...
... find a single scientist or philosopher of any importance who could have produced any work that could demonstrate his or her sophisticated understanding of the classical Greek scientific and philosophical texts, let alone match them in ...
... find ourselves at a loss to explain how this transmission took place. This, to say nothing of the motivation of the early Abbasid caliphs for the acquisition of these ancient sciences, which had been already abandoned for about 700 ...
... find at least one astronomical work, the so-called Zı ̄j-i Shahriya ̄r, which was later translated from Persian into Arabic. And since the Zı ̄j itself was composed during Sasanian times, this does indeed indicate an interest in ...
Contents
1 | |
Question of Beginnings II | 27 |
3 Encounter with the Greek Scientific Tradition | 73 |
The Critical Innovations | 131 |
The Case of Astronomy | 171 |
The Copernican Connection | 193 |
The Fecundity of Astronomical Thought | 233 |
Notes and References | 257 |
Bibliography | 289 |
Index | 307 |