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Post by timoneill on Sept 22, 2015 22:29:40 GMT
I'll just leave THIS here.
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Post by evangelion on Sept 23, 2015 6:06:55 GMT
I'll just leave THIS here. Wow, that's some top shelf nutbaggery right there.
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Post by wraggy on Sept 23, 2015 7:14:13 GMT
I'll just leave THIS here. I cannot argue with this article. It has this undeniably true image in it.
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Mike D
Master of the Arts
Posts: 204
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Post by Mike D on Sept 23, 2015 8:47:25 GMT
"Since this vandalism started the Dark Ages, it is difficult to proveā¦"
Kind of says it all, really...
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Post by unkleE on Sept 24, 2015 12:48:51 GMT
I'll just leave THIS here. I cannot argue with this article. It has this undeniably true image in it.
That means we should have been landing astronauts on the moon by 1000 CE, William the Conqueror could have conquered Mars instead of England, and we'd all still be speaking Anglo Saxon. Sounds about right to me, but Shakespeare would have had a smaller vocabulary to work with, so it wouldn't all be progress!
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Post by ignorantianescia on Sept 24, 2015 17:22:48 GMT
That's what I get after a few seconds on the site. I guess the worst mess can clear itself after all.
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Post by MedievalGirl on Oct 10, 2015 15:12:32 GMT
Diagrams like the one above are in danger of amusing me slightly. As if in Science and the writings the classical authors represented the entirety of human learning and intellectual achievement. The Good old Romans were happy to leave the 'Barbarians' beyond the reaches of their Empire, such as the Germanic and Celtic peoples, as illiterates. Yet it was in the so called 'Dark Ages' that the written language was bought to the Irish, to the Anglo-Saxons, Franks and others- largely by Christian Clerics...and what happened? Some chaotic hotchpotch of barely literate ramblings of bumbling medieval twits, mired in the slough of their ignorance, superstition and delusion?
No. We see these barbarians like Bede producing works of history, astronomy and theology. We see epic poems like Beowulf (generally held to be far earlier than the earliest surviving version) and those of the Celtic tradition. We see legal codes, personal correspondence, and works of Philosophy and on educational instruction. We see the foundation of 'court schools' under Charlemagne, and later Alfred the Great.
In other words we see the foundations of learning and Literacy in the post-Roman Western world, and many of its most famous books and texts. And yet we whinge and whine because they were not all copying Homer, or extolling Aristotle.
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jonkon
Master of the Arts
Posts: 111
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Post by jonkon on Oct 11, 2015 18:16:25 GMT
Excellent post MG. Stahl, et. al., hold up Martianus Capella as an exemplar of the DECLINE of science under the Romans. The pragmatic bent of the Roman mind had little patience for the "convoluted proofs" of Greek mathematical philosophy and wished to go directly to the "bottom line" in such matters. Another barrier to empirical science was the disdain for manual work in a slave owning society, so that theoretical speculation was not followed up by experimental observation. Thus while the water wheel and wind mills were known to the Romans, they were not put into widespread use, out of concern for putting slaves out of work, until the 10th century "industrial revolution" of the Cistercians, who believed that a child of God should not be forced to do the work of animals.
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