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. |
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... continued to be written almost exclusively in Arabic from the ninth century on. This is also the astronomy that forms the main focus of this book. Furthermore, there were no times, throughout Islamic intellectual history, when the term ...
... continued to take place in Byzantine4 or Sasanian civilization that could have put those texts in circulation and thus made them readily available to the translators who worked in the extensive translation movement of early Abbasid ...
... continued to advise al-Mamu ̄n to treat those “who advised him about gold like gold” (an apparent reference to alchemists), and then he is supposed to have said “and you should adhere to the oneness of God (alaika bi-l-tawhı ̄d).” The ...
... continued: “La portée de ce chapitre n'est donc pas très grande; il mérite neanmoins d'etre lu à titre de curiosité.”71 This was said of the chapter that was most relevant to the astronomy of Copernicus, who himself used the results ...
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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 |