George wrote:
"John Wilkins" wrote in message
...

I think we should return western civilisation to its Ilamic Arab roots at
Toledo, myself. They worked in harmony between religions, in common
scholarship, with an eye to the truth, until some ill-mannered quandam
crusader reintroduced Christian barbarity.



What a hoot! You actually hold a degree?

We have only to look at Islamic fundamentalist states and movements to
discover that the Koran allows for all sorts of barbarities. A lot of which
were committed on populations in north Africa on the way to Toledo, if you
take your blinders off.

Pragmatism, not religion, led to tolerance. Dead goldsmiths make little
jewelry.


It's true. Irony does not work on Usenet...

You can find good and bad aspects of any historical movement. I chose Toledo
because it was the source of the great revival of classical learning that
resulted in the Renaissance, and the rediscovery of Aristotle's Historia
Animalium, translated by Michael Scot at Toledo, was the intermediary from
which modern biology developed, as it abandoned the Etymologia tradition of
using nature purely as a source of moral tales, which had been the Christian
tradition of "natural history" since the 2nd century CE.

The University of Toledo was critical to the development of modern western
scholarship. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas both got going from the
distribution of Avicenna's (Ibn Sina) work on Aristotle and commentaries. The
Summa Theologiae is a sustained response to this. And at that time and place
the Caliph allowed a cosmopolitan and open tolerant society. This was in the
eleventh century, when most of Europe was intolerant and barbaric.

--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
"Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other
hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122