Revealed Sciences

Revealed Sciences

Author: Justin K. Stearns

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-07-08

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1009038664

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Demonstrating the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society through a study of the natural sciences in seventeenth-century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how the natural sciences flourished during this period, without developing in a similar way to the natural sciences in Europe. Offering an innovative analysis of the relationship between religious thought and the natural sciences, Justin K. Stearns shows how nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Middle Eastern scholars jointly developed a narrative of the decline of post-formative Islamic thought, including the fate of the natural sciences in the Muslim world. Challenging these depictions of the natural sciences in the Muslim world, Stearns uses numerous close readings of works in the natural sciences to a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in scholarly and educational landscapes of the Early Modern Magreb, and considers non-teleological possibilities for understanding a persistent engagement with the natural sciences in Early Modern Morocco.


1001 Distortions

1001 Distortions

Author: Sonja Brentjes

Publisher: Ergon Verlag

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783956501692

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This book reflects on debates among historians of science, medicine and technology as well as Islamicate societies about fundamental questions of how we think and write about the intellec-tual and technological past in cultures to which we do not belong any longer or never were a member of. These debates are occasioned by the manner in which amateurs have taken bits and pieces from our academic narratives and those of our predecessors, stripped them of their richness in detail and their often agonizing efforts to interpret these details, and rearranged them in simplifying and often misguided fashion as outdated stories about glory, success, pri-ority and progress. Our texts are accompanied by reflections of professional curators and mu-seum directors about the difficulties of translating academic research into representations that attract different groups of visitors. They are followed by experiences in northern Europe with Islamophobic adversaries of any narrative about Muslim contributions to the sciences, medi-cine and technologies, and in one of the Gulf States with alleged reformers of the political, economic and educational landscape of the sheikhdom and their use of such amateurish narra-tives for blocking efforts of critical questioning of such self-congratulatory representations.


The Middle Ages

The Middle Ages

Author: Winston Black

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-07-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 144086232X

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This book guides readers through 10 pervasive fictions about medieval history, provides them with the sources and analytical tools to critique those fictions, and identifies what really happened in the Middle Ages. This book is the first to present fictions about the medieval world to serious students of history. Instead of merely listing myths and stating they are wrong, this volume promotes critical historical analysis of those myths and how they came to be. Each of the ten chapters outlines a pervasive modern myth about medieval European history, describing "What People Think Happened" and "What Really Happened," and illustrating both trends with primary source documents. The book demonstrates that historical fictions also have a history, and that while we need to replace those fictions with facts about the medieval past, we can also benefit from understanding how a fiction about the Middle Ages developed and what that says about our modern perspectives on the past. Through this innovative presentation, readers are introduced to a wide range of sources, from Roman imperial perspectives on the "Fall of Rome" to songs of chivalry and chronicles of the Crusades, scientific treatises on the shape of the Earth and the creation of the universe and early modern stories and textbooks that developed or perpetuated historical myths.


Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies

Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies

Author: Sonja Brentjes

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-01-24

Total Pages: 876

ISBN-13: 1351692690

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The Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies provides a comprehensive survey on science in the Islamic world from the 8th to the 19th century. Across six sections, a group of subject experts discuss and analyze scientific practices across a wide range of Islamicate societies. The authors take into consideration several contexts in which science was practiced, ranging from intellectual traditions and persuasions to institutions, such as courts, schools, hospitals, and observatories, to the materiality of scientific practices, including the arts and craftsmanship. Chapters also devote attention to scientific practices of minority communities in Muslim majority societies, and Muslim minority groups in societies outside the Islamicate world, thereby allowing readers to better understand the opportunities and constraints of scientific practices under varying local conditions. Through replacing Islam with Islamicate societies, the book opens up ways to explain similarities and differences between diverse societies ruled by Muslim dynasties. This handbook will be an invaluable resource for both established academics and students looking for an introduction to the field. It will appeal to those involved in the study of the history of science, the history of ideas, intellectual history, social or cultural history, Islamic studies, Middle East and African studies including history, and studies of Muslim communities in Europe and South and East Asia.


Finding, Inheriting or Borrowing?

Finding, Inheriting or Borrowing?

Author: Jochen Althoff

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2019-03-31

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 3839442362

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Since the dawn of humanity, people have developed concepts about themselves and the natural world in which they live. This volume aims at investigating the construction and transfer of such concepts between and within various ancient and medieval cultures. The single contributions try to answer questions concerning the sources of knowledge, the strategies of transfer and legitimation as well as the conceptual changes over time and space. After a comprehensive introduction, the volume is divided into three parts: The contributions of the first section treat various theoretical and methodological aspects. Two additional thematic sections deal with a special field of knowledge, i.e. concepts of the moon and of the end of the world in fire.


The Safavid World

The Safavid World

Author: Rudi Matthee

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-21

Total Pages: 961

ISBN-13: 1000392899

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The Safavid World brings together thirty chapters on many aspects of the complex Safavid state, 1501–1722. With the latest insights and arguments, some offer overviews of the period or topic at hand, and others present new interpretations of old questions based on newly found sources. In addition to political history and religious life, the chapters in this volume cover economic conditions, commercial links and activities, social relations, and artistic expressions. They do so in ways that stretch both the temporal and geographical perimeters of the subject, and contributors also examine Safavid Iran with an eye to both its Mongol and Timurid antecedents and its long afterlife following the fall of the dynasty. Unlike traditional scholarship which tended to view the country as unique, sui generis, and barely affected by the outside world, The Safavid World situates Iran in a wider, regional or global context. Examining the Safavids from their foundations in the fourteenth century to their relations with the rest of the world in the eighteenth century, this study is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of the Safavid world and the history and culture of Iran and the Middle East.


How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making

How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making

Author: Johannes Feichtinger

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-03-02

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 3030379221

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This multidisciplinary collection of essays provides a critical and comprehensive understanding of how knowledge has been made, moved and used, by whom and for what purpose. To explain how new knowledge emerges, this volume offers a two-fold conceptual move: challenging both the premise of insurmountable differences between confined, autarkic cultures and the linear, nation-centered approach to the spread of immutable stocks of knowledge. Rather, the conceptual focus of the book is on the circulation, amalgamation and reconfiguration of locally shaped bodies of knowledge on a broader, global scale. The authors emphasize that the histories of interaction have been made less transparent through the study of cultural representations thus distorting the view of how knowledge is actually produced. Leading scholars from a range of fields, including history, philosophy, social anthropology and comparative culture research, have contributed chapters which cover the period from the early modern age to the present day and investigate settings in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Their particular focus is on areas that have largely been neglected until now. In this work, readers from many disciplines will find new approaches to writing the global history of knowledge-making, especially historians, scholars of the history and philosophy of science, and those in culture studies.


Science without Leisure

Science without Leisure

Author: Harun Küçük

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2019-12-13

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0822987104

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Science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Istanbul, Harun Küçük argues, was without leisure, a phenomenon spurred by the hyperinflation a century earlier when scientific texts all but disappeared from the college curriculum and inflation reduced the wages of professors to one-tenth of what they were in the sixteenth century. It was during this tumultuous period that philosophy and theory, the more leisurely aspects of naturalism—and the pursuit of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”—vanished altogether from the city. But rather than put an end to science in Istanbul, this economic crisis was transformative, turning science into a practical matter, into something one learned through apprenticeship and provided as a service. In Science without Leisure, Küçük reveals how Ottoman science, when measured against familiar narratives of the Scientific Revolution, was remarkably far less scholastic and philosophical and far more cosmopolitan and practical. His book explains why as practical naturalists deployed natural knowledge to lucrative ends without regard for scientific theories, science in the Ottoman Empire over the long term ultimately became the domain of physicians, bureaucrats, and engineers rather than of scholars and philosophers.


A Bridge to the Sky

A Bridge to the Sky

Author: Glaire Anderson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-25

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 019091324X

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A Bridge to the Sky explores the close connections between science, arts, and visual culture as they developed in the medieval Islamic lands. It presents a significant study of the career of 'Abbas Ibn Firnas, (d. 887), the most celebrated 'scientist' and polymath of early Islamic Spain, best known for conducting an experiment that has been celebrated as a milestone in the history of human flight.


Brill's Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Author: Irene Caiazzo

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-11-22

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 9004499466

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For the first time, the reader can have a synoptic view of the reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, East and West, in a multicultural perspective. All the major themes of Pythagoreanism are addressed, from mathematics, number philosophy and metaphysics to ethics and religious thought.