|
Post by bjorn on Feb 7, 2009 0:06:13 GMT
As this ( www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Islam-History-Ehsan-Masood/dp/1848310404/seems to have been a BBC series (which as such is not available for us inferior foreigners), I would be interesting to hear any native opinion on Ehsan Masood's series. It may have been commented on before, in which case I don't quite find the link. I have som fancies about it being rather biased toward the Muslim side, though it may also portray things a bit in context.
|
|
|
Post by James Hannam on Feb 9, 2009 11:29:19 GMT
Hi Bjorn,
I've seen the show but not read the book.
I'll do a blog review of the show later. Hopefully today.
Best wishes
James
|
|
|
Post by zameel on Feb 9, 2009 13:03:57 GMT
|
|
|
Post by James Hannam on Feb 9, 2009 22:03:37 GMT
The blog is now up.
Must be my first for a while...
Hmm. Felt good. Maybe I'll do another.
|
|
|
Post by zameel on Feb 9, 2009 23:18:58 GMT
Hello James, A few quick points on your blog post The problem is that nitric acid was first isolated by Christian alchemists in the 13th century and not Muslim ones. For a long time, no one realised this because the Christians wrote up their discoveries under the name of Geber, a mythical Islamic alchemist of the eighth or ninth century The notion that Jabir b. Hayyan (Geber) is a myth is an early twentieth century disclaimed hypothesis. There were Christian writers using his name, but this does not mean he did not exist. And it was Arabs who first isolated nitric acid, before the thirteenth century. Ahmad Y Hassan concludes: We find a recipe for nitric acid also in De inventione Veritatis which is a work in Latin ascribed to Jabir (Geber) that appeared at the end of the thirteenth century. Berthelot (end of nineteenth century) thought that this recipe for the preparation of nitric acid was the first of its kind. He went further to assume that Geber was not Jabir. This hypothesis of Berthelot is now baseless since there are in fact several Arabic recipes for nitric acid preceding the thirteenth century as we have just mentioned (http://www.history-science-technology.com/Articles/articles%2072.htm) For instance, he kept telling us that Arabic philosophers were following the scientific method when it was obvious that they were doing nothing of the sort Al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) gave precise epistemological grounds for his scientific work, as did al-Biruni (both in the 10th/11th century) which correspond with science as we know it. How is it obvious that they were doing nothing of the sort? And an expert on the show explained clearly that Avicenna’s canon of medicine ceased to have any influence in the nineteenth century when modern medicine took off. But, in his summary later, Al-Khalili said we had seen how Avicenna was still relevant today, contradicting his own expert The expert said with the discovery of bacteria and viruses in the nineteenth century, medicine was revolutionised, not that Avicennan medicine had no influence on modern medicine. Although Avicenna is no longer mentioned in the classroom (nor is Copernicus or Brahe), he had a lasting influence on medicine, and is still relevant particularly in experimental medicine, clinical pharmocology and drug trials; further relevance has been suggested in medical ethics. Finally, he seemed to blame the decline of Islamic science on western imperialism even though the decline happened centuries before Muslim countries were colonised in the nineteenth century I'm not sure that he blames the decline on imperialism, but that an impression of cultural inferiority was used as a pretext to colonise, downplaying the significance of Arabic science and technology. He moreso places the blame on the lack of a printing press (although the Arabs did revolutionise paper-making, it wasn't on a mass-scale, and printing was introduced by Ibrahim Mutaferrika in the 17th/18th century: www.history-science-technology.com/Articles/articles%2072.htm); the overtaking of the Western civilisation as a result of learning from the Arabs and economic affluence due to the discovery of the New World; and the political fragmentation of the Muslim empire and military defeats starting from the Mongol invasion in 1258 [although Arabic science remained the dominant scientific tradition until the sixteenth century].
|
|
|
Post by humphreyclarke on Feb 11, 2009 10:27:04 GMT
|
|
|
Post by James Hannam on Feb 11, 2009 10:30:25 GMT
Hi Zameel, The notion that Jabir b. Hayyan (Geber) is a myth is an early twentieth century disclaimed hypothesis. There were Christian writers using his name, but this does not mean he did not exist. And it was Arabs who first isolated nitric acid, before the thirteenth century. Geber/Jabir may have existed, but we know almost nothing about him and he didn't write any of the works attributed to him. These are either later Arabic compositions or Latin originals. In this sense he is a myth (rather than a legend). I'd need to see a scholarly source that tells me nitric acid was isolated by Arabs before the thirteenth century. The website you referred to is Islamic propaganda and not reliable. Also, distillation alone will not be sufficient to produce nitric acid of the strength required to dissolve gold. Other sources I've seen, primarily Newman and Multhauf are quite clear that the mineral acids were not previously isolated. So does Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics but he's not using the scientific method either. The expert was perfectly clear on this point. Avicenna has no influence on modern medicine as I have explained before. If the expert had said something different then he would have been wrong. No. This is post factum cherry picking. We do not see Avicenna used as a source for modern medicine. On the contrary, much strong 19th century rhetoric is aimed at the importance of utterly discarding the old authorities. Best wishes James
|
|
|
Post by zameel on Feb 11, 2009 13:44:12 GMT
Geber/Jabir may have existed, but we know almost nothing about him and he didn't write any of the works attributed to him. These are either later Arabic compositions or Latin originals. In this sense he is a myth (rather than a legend). There are many works the originals of which we do not possess but we do not propose they were written in the time in which the manuscripts are dated to. The Geber problem was not a problem at all until Berthelot and his defence by Newman (Newman even went so far as to find a Latin author for Jabir's works). It is merely a historical assumption that because the Arabic texts do not exist, the Latin must have been the original, whereas authors and Arabists from the sixteenth and seventeenth century said they saw Jabir's original Arabic (and other Arabic manuscripts of Jabir that were only available in the Latin have recently been unearthed, e.g. the Kitab al-Sab'in, hence this is a slippery slope). Holmyard from the early twentieth century successfully falsified Berthelot's assumption. See Ahmad Y Hassan, The Arabic Origin of Jabir's Latin Works: A New Light on the Geber Question, 1994 (http://www.history-science-technology.com/Articles/articles%204.htm) which is not Islamic apologetics but published in a peer-reviewed journal by a renowned scholar in this field. Also see the more detailed A Critical Reassessment of the Geber Problem, available here: www.history-science-technology.com/Geber/Geber%201.htm www.history-science-technology.com/Geber/Geber%202.htm www.history-science-technology.com/Geber/Geber%203.htm and A Refutation of Berthelot, Ruska and Newman on the Basis of Arabic Sources: www.history-science-technology.com/Geber/Geber%204.htmI'd need to see a scholarly source that tells me nitric acid was isolated by Arabs before the thirteenth century Hassan provides a few examples of pre-thirteenth century Arabic recipees for nitric acid in his Potassium Nitrate in Arabic and Latin Sources, 2001 (reproduced here: www.history-science-technology.com/Articles/articles%203.htm). Again, the article is a scholarly one (as the article is cited in several academic sources) and he references others who attest to this (including Holmyard). As Hassan writes elsewhere: "Berthelot (end of 19th century) and Newman (end of 20th century) and all supporters of the idea of a Latin pseudo-Geber during the one hundred years that passed since Berthelot’s claims, assumed that Jabir could not have been the author of the Latin works because these materials and processes were known only in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries and not before. We have published a comprehensive article on “Potassium Nitrate in Arabic and Latin Alchemy” in which we gave sufficient proofs that potassium nitrate was known since the earliest days of Arabic alchemy in the eighth century, and that processes for nitric acid and aqua regia were also known before the thirteenth century." Hence the existence of Jabir should not be a source of difficulty or doubt anymore. So does Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics but he's not using the scientific method either Do clarify what exactly the scientific method is and what element of it was lacking in Ibn al-Haytham.
|
|
|
Post by rfmoo on Feb 11, 2009 20:41:14 GMT
I highly recommend to all non-experts (that certainly describes me) the Wikipedia article on Avicenna. Avicenna was obviously a towering figure, a universal genius, and his methods and results certainly look scientific and currently influential to this layman.
In even more humility than usual,
Richard
|
|
|
Post by jamierobertson on Feb 12, 2009 0:56:49 GMT
Wikipedia? *HHHHHSSSSSsssssssss*
|
|
|
Post by James Hannam on Feb 12, 2009 10:40:58 GMT
There is a quite dedicated team of Muslims working on Wikipedia. If you have a look at the articles on many Muslim scholars such as Averroes, Avempace and others they are all fantastically detailed. They also use Arabic rather than western names in the body of the article, even though this conflicts with the article headings and the Wikipedia policy of using English names. Much of the discussion on these pages is about whether the individuals are Shia or Sunni Muslims or whether they are Persians or Arabs. Clearly, this betrays the origins and priorities of those actively working on the pages. That this group of Wikipedians have been working so hard is commendable but we need to realise that theirs is essentially an apologetic point of view intended to aggrandise Muslim culture. Avicenna was indeed a great thinker and writer, but his medical theory was wrong from top to bottom. Not his fault, he was following the Greek tradition, but it does show he was not nearly so original or wedded to experimental reason as the Wikipedia article implies. Let’s look briefly at what it says on clinical testing:
From a Galenist point of view, this is all sensible stuff, if nothing like as original as the author implies. Galen himself says much the same thing. But it is a million miles away from modern clinical testing which relies on double blind testing. The absolute key to testing is the use of a control group and Avicenna actually says the opposite when we advocates using the same drug for two difference diseases. His method would give the wrong answer. For instance, imagine you want to know if essence of quince cures chicken pox. You give the essence to both chicken pox and small pox sufferers. All the chicken pox sufferers recover and most the small pox sufferers die. Does this mean essence of quince works or not? Who knows, but Avicenna’s method simply cannot tell us.
This is a good example of how a failure to understand the scientific method leads to all sorts of silly claims that so-and-so (Avicenna, Alhazen, Roger Bacon, Leonardo or whoever) invented it. Modern clinical testing, for example, started when we rejected Avicenna’s methodology and adopted a completely new one.
Best wishes
James
|
|
|
Post by rfmoo on Feb 12, 2009 13:19:52 GMT
Thanks, James.
My trepidation in answering appears to be well founded. I am put in mind of a man who was recommended to Churchill as virtuous because "He is so modest." Churchill replied "But he has so much to be modest about."
I agree to a point about Wikipedia, but I think that contempt is premature. The specialist doesn't need it, but it is a useful starting point for most not in the know, and an incipient revolution in universalizing knowledge that has made life a lot easier for me. I don't accept it as a reference in my students' papers, but I would rather have it there than not.
I quite agree about the roseate glasses through which apologists see their own traditions. Intellectual Christians have more or less have had their own tinted shades ripped from their faces (if they ever wore same) and they must defend their faith and its history warts and all (except in cases where defense is impossible: William Donohue, the head of the Catholic League--a Catholic equivalent of the Jewish Defense League--was asked by a reporter to defend the Church for its handling of the sex scandals of priests: he responded: "I'm not here to defend the indefensible). Sooner or later, in an open intellectual atmosphere all apologists will face the same challenge.
Best,
Richard
|
|
|
Post by zameel on Feb 12, 2009 13:32:31 GMT
But it is a million miles away from modern clinical testing which relies on double blind testing. Useful in this regard is the analysis on the evolution of clinical trials by Craig Brater and Walter Daly in their Clinical Pharmacology in the Middle Ages: Principles that Presage the 21st Century and its companion article Medieval Contributions to the Search for Truth in Clinical Medicine (2000). Though they agree ‘It cannot be said that the rules for testing efficacy of Peter, John, and Avicenna [the first two were influenced by Avicenna’s Canon] laid the foundation for future clinical research, because there was no discernible direct extension from their thoughts’, they qualify this, ‘They do however present important reflections of critical thinking from an era usually thought to have been possessed by tradition-based medicine, magic and astrology. Even though these medieval scholar-physicians were not cited through the centuries as sources for clinical science, their logic may have become part of the discourse that conditioned those who followed.’ The authors represent this correlation in medieval and modern clinical trials by comparing principles related to clinical pharmacology: www.nature.com/clpt/journal/v67/n5/fig_tab/clpt200047t1.html#figure-titleModern clinical testing, for example, started when we rejected Avicenna’s methodology and adopted a completely new one And this too developed gradually, not suddenly in the nineteenth century. Ambroise Pare in the sixteenth century perhaps first outlined modern clinical experiments and James Lind in the eighteenth century conducted the first controlled trial in clinical science (see: The Causes and Cures of Scurvy, 2005, where Erik Weber concludes James Lind was almost modern in his therapeutics though not so in his pathology). This is a good example of how a failure to understand the scientific method leads to all sorts of silly claims that so-and-so (Avicenna, Alhazen, Roger Bacon, Leonardo or whoever) invented it And you have yet to show why Alhazen's optical science did not follow the scientific method.
|
|
|
Post by James Hannam on Feb 12, 2009 13:33:14 GMT
Richard,
Actually, I agree entirely that Wikipedia is a reasonable first place to look. Also, I generally think the long articles from the Muslim apologist team are pretty good.
So two cheers from me on Wikipedia.
I reserve the third cheer because, as you know, it is often treated not as a first stop, but the last word. Its fans seem to think it is somehow better than expert sources. Letting anyone edit is a good idea because it is quick, uncomplicated and generates a vast amount of content. It is not because the herd is somehow more knowledgeable than the experts.
Best wishes
James
|
|
|
Post by James Hannam on Feb 12, 2009 14:00:52 GMT
Zameel,
I think I'll rest my case on Avicenna as you've conceded 99% of my point.
On Lind, see some interesting comments by David Wooton in Bad Medicine. But yes, we do see some of the first steps taken in the eighteenth century. I'm not really convinced that Pare's work on wounds qualifies, but it is certainly intriguing. He should have done nothing in one of the tests instead of his essentially random treatment. Also, his work was not followed up.
On Alhazen, the problem is we don't see a method but a series of unrelated investigations. He developed his hypothesis on vision but then did not test this. It clearly had problems and these should have been isolated and investigated. Although he lacked lenses, he could use prisms to show that complete inference of light does not occur.
But even if we grant him a proto-scientific method in optics, we are stuck with the fact that he and his colleagues continued to support Aristotelain precepts in mechanics, never took to accurate measurement in chemistry and despite their brilliant astronomical observations remained wedded to an erroneous metaphysical view of the heavens.
None of this is their fault. It is not a stain on their genius that ideas that developed gradually did not emerge fully formed in their brains. But it is anachronistic and belittles their achievement to try to shoe-horn it into modern categories and attribute its value entirely to how much it influenced later western science. Rather, you should celebrate how they influenced the development of Islam and preserved a rational thread when not all Muslims choose to interpret their faith in such a way.
Obviously, Islamic science involved the rational investigation of nature. But modern science goes further by showing that radically counter-intuitive ideas (that the earth moves, that heavy objects fall the same speed of light ones, that behaviour is largely independent of upbringing etc) can be demonstrated by asking the right questions of nature in the right way. Modern science really hit on this by accident and it is still not accepted by most of the population today (witness hostility to my remarks on genetics).
That science can be both rational and defy common sense never occurred to the Greeks and hardly to western medieval natural philosophers. I've seen no evidence that it occured to Islamic thinkers either.
Best wishes
James
|
|