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Copyright © 2002 Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies. All rights reserved.
BRIIFS
vol. 4 no 2
Essay,
Exchange
of Views, I
Toby E. Huff
The
Rise of Early Modern Science:
An
author, such as myself, can only be grateful when a leading
historian of Arabic science takes one of his books so seriously as to
write a long review article on it. Professor George Saliba calls The
Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West “a
refreshing and welcome contribution” to the field “documenting . . . a
whole array of the achievements” of Arabic/Islamic (and Chinese) science
in the ongoing project of modern science (143, 144). At the same time,
Professor Saliba raises a host of issues, not all of equal importance, nor
even connected to the main thesis of my book. In this reply, I shall
present my comments under four headings with the intention of making the
themes and thesis of my book evident to the reader. These headings address
the main issues raised in Saliba’s essay, namely, the nature of
‘modern’ science, the possibility that economic factors have played a
significant role in its rise, innovation in Arabic/Islamic astronomy after
Ibn al-Shatir and the fourteenth century, and the nature and role of free
inquiry.
At the outset, one must say that there is a defensiveness in
Professor Saliba’s essay, which, as it unfolds, repeatedly begs the
question that was at the centre of my original inquiry. In addition,
Saliba rather surprisingly opposes the idea that past and present human
communities, institutions, governments and so on ought to grant greater
freedom of expression, inquiry and action to their participants. This is
surely counter-intuitive.
Saliba gets started on the wrong track by labeling the study of the
rise of ‘modern’ science as the search for “origins,” a term I
never use. Throughout my book, I suggest that the propensity to look into
the nature of existence and to propose explanations for it is universal.
If we start with that assumption, then we can focus upon the beginnings
that people made in various places around the world to construct
proto-scientific theories and explanations. Clearly, some groups,
communities, societies and civilizations have been more successful than
others in this process and the question then becomes one of analyzing
contrasting cultural and institutional settings that either encouraged or
impeded the progress of scientific inquiry.
My particular inquiry began with what I called the ‘problem’ of
Arabic science, namely, the intellectual question of how it happened that
scholars communicating mainly in Arabic excelled in scientific inquiries
during certain periods of time and, yet, failed to continue those inquires
so that there was a decline, indeed, such a steep and long-lasting decline
that people in later centuries might conclude that the ‘Arabs’ had
never been masters of science.2 I submit that this is a fascinating
and vexatious intellectual problem. It is also obvious that dozens of
Middle Eastern scholars and observers have agonized over this puzzle and
sought to understand it for a very long time.
Moreover, in my book, I reviewed the most impressive advances in
astronomy and mathematics that were accomplished by Middle Eastern
scholars by the end of the fourteenth century; in later chapters, I also
recounted a number of achievements in medicine. Then, I asked why this
development did not lead to ‘modern’ science in the Arabic/Islamic
context. It is curious that Professor Saliba does not want to acknowledge
that this is an intellectual puzzle worthy of intense study. For, as he
himself points out in his review, Arabic science was “superior” to
Western science (140) prior to the Renaissance. He even claims that “the
most innovative mathematical and astronomical ideas that were employed
during the European Renaissance were themselves borrowed from Arabic/
Islamic” civilization.3 If these great advances were “the very
ideas that made the astronomy of the European Renaissance possible, in the
mathematical technical sense,” (143) why did they not make it possible
in the Arabic/Islamic context? Indeed, the first four pages of Saliba’s
review, with their apparent emphasis on ‘methodological’ issues, serve
no purpose other than to avoid facing this central problem. Stated
differently, it is claimed by Saliba that certain advances in astronomy in
Arabic lands made modern astronomy possible in Europe, but apparently not
in the Middle East. This is surely an intellectual problem worth
investigating, one that goes far beyond his methodological diversions.
In so far as astronomy is concerned, conventional wisdom says that
the breakthrough to modern astronomy occurred with the appearance of
Nicholas Copernicus’ The
Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. This was the book in
which the author proposed abandoning the geocentric orientation of the
celestial system in favour of a heliocentric one. It was revolutionary not
only in this astronomical sense, but in that it challenged the authority
of the Christian Church. Copernicus (who was a Church administrator
himself) and his followers thus claimed to know the composition of the
universe better than the official Church hierarchy. This is a perfectly
good landmark for establishing the advent of modern
science, as it unleashed a whole series of intellectual struggles within
the scientific community and within the established religious authority of
Europe. Furthermore, it is obvious that the work of Galileo directly
derived from Copernicus’ great hypothesis and it was he who bluntly
challenged the Church on virtually all epistemological grounds, claiming
that there was a source of knowledge about the world other than religion
and the Bible―namely, natural science.
My book focuses upon the preceding legal, institutional and
intellectual developments that made the Copernican innovation possible.
That is, long before Copernicus and Galileo, there was an intellectual
tradition established in Europe, above all in the universities,
that, yes, institutionalized the
study of natural phenomena, particularly by placing the corpus of
Aristotle, along with a number of Arabic works and commentaries, at the
centre of the university curriculum. This occurred in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. In short, the Copernican revolution was a product of
the educational system put in place by Europeans several hundred years
earlier. As is well-known, the madrasas of the Middle Eastern world systematically excluded
philosophy and the natural sciences from any ‘formal’ teaching
conducted within their confines during this period of time. (I put
‘formal’ in quotation marks because there was no formal curriculum in
the madrasas.) Evidently, the teaching of philosophy and the natural
sciences ran against the religious commitments and identity of the madrasas,
an identity that persisted into the twentieth century.4 This was a
major issue in my book, but Professor Saliba is entirely silent on the
subject. I shall return to it later. Whether or not Copernicus benefited directly
from Arab astronomers, other than possibly borrowing ‘the Tusi
couple,’ remains an open question, one upon which I remain to be
convinced.5
The highly significant Copernican year of 1543 also contains
another milestone in the rise of modern science: the publication of
Vesalius’ nonpareil, On the Fabric
of the Human Body. This famous work, containing a huge number of
highly-detailed anatomical drawings, is generally regarded as laying the
foundations for modern medicine because of its illustrations of the human
body’s main systems―bones, muscles, veins, nerves and internal
organs. At the same time, it represents the expression of an empirical agenda, the first-hand examination of the body through
human dissection (autopsy). This was the culmination of several centuries
of empirical anatomical investigation extending back to the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. As we know, human dissection was generally
considered to be forbidden in Islamic thought and practice, mainly, it
seems, because it was seen as a form of ‘mutilation’ that was
forbidden by various legal texts.6 Briefly, then, this is another
area in which we may point to a new spirit of inquiry (and routinized
activity) that encouraged modern science. It broke with various
intellectual and moral traditions of the past and subjected various claims
to empirical testing. And again, unlike the madrasas, the universities incorporated medical training, including
the practice of human dissection, into their curricula.
In an effort to deflect the reader from focusing upon these
disparities between the progressive nature of modern science and the
stagnating nature of scientific thought in the Arabic/Islamic context,
Saliba cites a comment from A. C. Graham to the effect that we cannot know
whether the ancients or the moderns have come closer to scientific truth.
Yet, it should not escape our attention that Copernicus and Galileo did
argue about the truth of their work or, at least, about which set of
hypothetical constructions, those of the geocentric or the heliocentric
system, better described the world. Despite Saliba’s role as devil’s
advocate, I think that we can fairly conclude that heliocentrism is a
better description of the world and that, although the Copernican system
is not a complete and final theory, it is a better
approximation of the celestial movements than the geocentric view.
‘Science,’ as I understand it, entails this element of seeking to
arrive at a better description of the world and is not just a calculating
device.
Similarly, the anatomical drawings of Vesalius and his discussion
of all the parts and systems of the body are, in fact, a better
description of the human body than the one provided by Galen. Indeed,
Vesalius claimed to have corrected over 200 errors in Galen’s account of
human anatomy, which was based almost wholly upon animal dissections.
Moreover, Vesalius’ illustrations are far superior to anything to be
found in the Arabic/Islamic tradition (where pictorial representation of
the human body was particularly suspect) or, for that matter, in the
Chinese and (I presume) Indian traditions.7 This is not to sound a
note of triumph, but rather to clarify the point that modern science
represents scientific progress, a point that Saliba seeks to obscure.
Thus, Saliba is correct to say that “no one seems to question the
proposition that the ‘modern’ scientific tradition made its first
appearance” in the “West” (140), a term that he finds problematic,
which I grant, in part. This is so because there is a scholarly consensus
on this point and it comes after at least a century of intense exploration
of the historical records of other sciences and civilizations, above all
the Arabic and the Chinese traditions.
A year after my book was first published, Professor Saliba
published an article about the sixteenth-century astronomer, Shams al-Din
al-Khafri (d. 1550).8 According to Saliba, Khafri was a figure of
creative continuity in Arab astronomy and he―and perhaps others of
that period―represented a new ‘golden age’ of Arab astronomy,
not a period of decline. On the basis of this, Saliba suggests that all
that I say in my book on this subject, especially the idea of decline in
Arab astronomy, “has to be reassessed” (148). Saliba makes many other
claims in this connection, most of which I consider excessive.
Although I have no special training in astronomy and the jury is
still out among historians of science regarding Saliba’s claims, the
suggestion that Khafri was a progressive innovative astronomer, given the
fact that he apparently sought to preserve and perfect the Ptolemaic
system, seems highly improbable. As suggested above, the Copernican model
was a progressive new model that brought us closer to the true
constitution of the universe than the Ptolemaic system. As A. I. Sabra put
it, speaking of Khafri’s work, “it would be odd to call
‘revolutionary’ a reformist project intended to consolidate Ptolemaic
astronomy by bringing it into line with its own principles.”9
Saliba’s effort to take refuge in the argument that, “without a theory
of universal gravitation, this new cosmology [of Copernicus] could not be
developed” (150) is counterfactual. As Noel Swerdlow says, Kepler
“went far beyond Ptolemy’s methods, and discovered entirely new
principles for the precise description of the motions of bodies in the
heavens based upon an entirely new physics.”10 The new Copernican
theory was fleshed out by a variety of astronomers who followed, above all
by Kepler. It was he who proved the elliptical (and hence not perfectly
circular) orbit of Mars and related astronomical theorems on the basis of the assumption that the sun was the approximate
centre of our universe. He was also aided by the more exact observations
of Tycho Brahe. The absence of a universal theory of gravitation until the
time of Newton was no impediment to the early adopters of Copernicanism
and even Tycho Brahe, who developed a geo-heliocentric model, was not
stymied by this putative absence, even after he discovered that the
planets were not encased in ‘crystalline’ spheres. This came about
with the observation of the comets of 1577 and 1585, whose trajectories
took them through what would have been the ambiguously understood
‘crystalline’ spheres of Venus and Mercury. To be sure, he was not a
committed follower of Copernicus, but he was willing to entertain a theory
that entailed a partially heliocentric orientation and without the
possibility of crystalline spheres holding the planets in place.
In a word, the absence of a universal theory of gravitation offered
no impediment to Copernicus himself, nor to his student Rheticus, nor to
Galileo, Maestlin, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Christoph Rothmann and the other
Copernicans. Thus, rather than showing how Europeans might have been held
back from pursuing all of the implications of the new Copernican
hypothesis, Saliba’s comments make us wonder all the more just why Arab
astronomers, who were, according to Saliba, experiencing a golden age (Khafri
died only seven years after Copernicus), were so reluctant to advance bold
new theories, theories that would break with the unworkable Ptolemaic
model. At the same time, the wide discussion―pro and con―of
the new Copernican hypothesis over all of Europe points again to the fact
that the study of modern science, especially astronomy, had been
institutionalized, that is, that it had been made a regular and acceptable
part of public discussion (and teaching) in universities, royal courts and
so on. This stands in contrast to the situation in the madrasas
of the Arab/Muslim lands.
Before taking up the putative role of economic factors, I want to
consider the issue of ‘neutral space’ and free inquiry. It is most
puzzling that Saliba rejects these ideas so vehemently, discussing them no
less than six times in as many pages. In my book, I argued that the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a social, intellectual and
legal revolution that laid the intellectual and institutional foundations
upon which modern science was later constructed. At the heart of this
development was the jurisprudential idea of a corporation,
a collection of individuals who were recognized as a singular ‘whole
body’ and granted legitimate legal autonomy.
Such entities were given the right to sue and be sued, to buy and
sell property, to make rules and laws regulating their activities, to
adjudicate those laws and to operate according to the principle of
election by consent as well as the Roman legal aphorism, “what affects
everyone should be considered and approved by everyone.” Among the
entities granted status as legitimate corporations were cities and towns,
charitable organizations, professional guilds (especially of physicians)
and, of course, universities. Nothing comparable to this kind of legal
autonomy emerged in China or under Islam. In short, the European medievals
created autonomous, self-governing institutions of higher learning and
then imported into them a methodologically powerful and metaphysically
rich cosmology that directly challenged and contradicted many aspects of
the traditional Christian world-view. This disinterested agenda was no
longer a private, personal, or idiosyncratic preoccupation, but involved a
shared set of texts, questions, commentaries and, in some cases,
centuries-old expositions of unsolved physical and metaphysical questions
that set the highest standards of intellectual inquiry. Through the
incorporation of Aristotle’s books on natural science into the
curriculum of the medieval universities, a disinterested agenda of
naturalistic inquiry was institutionalized. It was institutionalized as a
curriculum, a course of study.11
Since these bodies were, in fact, legally
entitled to study and teach whatever they elected to make part of the
curriculum, one could say that they occupied a neutral zone protected by
and from political and religious authorities. At the centre of their
curriculum was the main body of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, that is,
his Physics, On the Heavens, On
Generation and Corruption, On the Soul, Meteorology and Small
Works on Natural Things, and biology, such as his History
of Animals, Parts of Animals and Generation
of Animals. It is in these books, as Professor Edward Grant argues,
that we find “the treatises that formed the comprehensive foundation for
the medieval conception of the physical world and its operation.”12
In contrast to this, the Islamic madrasas
deliberately excluded all of the natural works of Aristotle, as well as
philosophy, logic and natural theology. Instead, they taught the
‘Islamic sciences,’ consisting of the Qur’an, the Sunna, Islamic
law, Arabic poetry, literature, history and genealogy, and some
arithmetic. (Later, they did admit the teaching of logic and Islamic
theology.) Furthermore, in Europe (for example, in Paris), the study of
the Aristotelian corpus was fully legitimized by statute in 1255, although
it remained in dispute. As a result, the universities generated a whole
literature of naturalistic questions that became, in turn, a shared agenda
of naturalistic studies. Centred upon Aristotelian natural philosophy,
this agenda served as the intellectual core of university instruction for
the next 400 years (including the education of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler
and others).
Speculative questions were pursued, such as whether the world is
singular or plural; whether the earth turns on its axis or is stationary;
“whether every effecting thing is the cause of that which it is
effecting; whether things can happen by chance; whether a vacuum is
possible; whether the natural state of an object is stationary or in
motion; whether luminous celestial bodies are hot; whether the sea has
tides; and so on for virtually every charted field of enquiry.”13
Surely, the permissibility of these studies in an officially-recognized
and legally-defined context suggests something more than a random,
spasmodic pursuit of the natural sciences and something more than the
pursuit of economic gain. I submit that they also indicate the existence
of a very significant intellectual zone of free inquiry that was publicly
available to scholars, as well as laymen. The continuity of this ongoing,
university-centred debate with respect to Copernicus’ heliocentric
hypothesis has recently been reiterated. As Bernard Goldstein puts it,
Copernicus’ initial commitment to heliocentrism “was a response to an
issue debated in the philosophical community at the time when he attended
universities in Italy, ca. 1500.”14
At least three additional points need to be made. The legal
autonomy that existed in the European universities did not exist in the
Muslim world because the legal concept of a corporation, a groups of
actors treated as a collective whole, did not exist. This legal defect had
major implications for Islamic civilization, not least in the sphere of
economic development, as Timor Kuran has made clear.15
Second, it is one thing if an activity is pursued randomly by
various actors; it is something else altogether if that activity is
carried on collectively as a result of a regularized process―that
is, an institutionalization of the activity by the enactment of rules,
norms and regulations. Clearly, the pursuit of science in Europe via its
institutionalization in the universities provided it with a powerful
advantage unknown in the Arab/Muslim world until very recently.16
Third, this institutionalization of scientific pursuits gave
European scholars a surprising degree of freedom of inquiry, not least of
all to subject the Holy Book―the Bible―to naturalistic
explanation. As I argued in my book, some scholarly clerics actually
sought to separate the ‘natural’ from the ‘supernatural’ in an
attempt to explain by naturalistic
means certain problematic passages in the Bible. For example, a certain
Andrew of St. Victor argued that one should first consider all
naturalistic possibilities before offering miracles as explanations in the
interpretation of Scripture. The interpreter, he wrote, “should realize
this: in expounding Scripture, when the event described admits of no
naturalistic explanation, then and only then should we have recourse to
miracles.”17 Scholars have pointed to such discussions during
this period of time as the beginning of so-called ‘Higher Criticism,’
the intellectual task of evaluating all of the strands, sources and
meanings of the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. I submit that this level of
freedom of inquiry did not exist in the Arab/Muslim world then and does
not exist now. Anyone who has had contact with Muslim circles in the West
or elsewhere in the world knows that this subject is one of utmost
sensitivity to the Muslim community. H. A. R. Gibb gives the example of an
Egyptian shaykh who published,
in 1930, an annotated edition of the Qur’an that criticized the old
commentaries and interpreted supernatural references in simple,
naturalistic ways. Although the purpose of the work was to encourage the
younger generation to study the Qur’an, the book was confiscated by the
police and an injunction was secured to prevent the writer from preaching
or holding religious meetings.18 This sort of response is what I
meant when I wrote of the “barriers to freedom of thought, expression,
and action in the interests of primordial religious and ethnic
identities,” but which Saliba apparently doubts (145). Today, one could
also add the various restrictions on internet use in various parts of the
world to indicate such restrictions. (More on which below.)
While there are always some constraints on intellectual inquiry, I
am not as jaundiced as Professor Saliba who seems to believe that “free
inquiry is essentially a fiction determined, for the most part, by the
exigencies of the market place” (144). This sad commentary takes us back
to the putative role of economic factors that constitutes Saliba’s pet
theory.
I have suggested that the breakthrough to modern astronomy (with
all its implications) and the anatomical investigations of European
medical students are constitutive of modern science.19 But what, we
might ask, was the economic motive of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Tycho
Brahe and all the others, to fashion the new astronomy? I don’t know of
any. There was no profit to be made by their inquiries, which
elicited―especially in the early stages―the wrath of
traditionalists and even religious authorities. Likewise, what was the
economic motive of all those physicians from the thirteenth through
sixteenth centuries who carried out and documented anatomical inquiries
based upon dissection? Although Church authorities approved of this
practice and, in at least two cases, ordered autopsies for forensic
purposes, it must be said that human dissection is repulsive to most
people. Moreover, these practitioners were hardly in a position to perform
new surgical procedures upon live subjects, for which they might expect
remuneration. Finally, medieval medical practice had been such as to
stigmatize those who used their hands
in the practice of medicine; this is why some forms of surgery and,
especially, human dissection had previously been given over to barbers and
uneducated folk. This was a custom that Vesalius specifically rejected in
his master-work. In general, there was no application for this new
knowledge, although a certain prestige probably accrued to those who had
an intimate knowledge of human anatomy.
The capstone of this whole line of inquiry was William Harvey’s
discovery, in the early seventeenth century, of the greater circulation of
blood throughout the body. But that knowledge did not lead to major
changes in surgical procedures until the twentieth century, when blood
types and a whole range of other discoveries made transfusions, for
example, possible. It seems more plausible to say, as Roger French has,
that the knowledge of anatomy gained by the medieval and early modern
physicians allowed them to argue
with each other over the makeup of the body and to disprove various
medical authorities, especially Galen, who may have got it wrong.20
If we push back the institutionalizing of naturalistic inquiry to
the medieval universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, I am
again baffled as to how this might be interpreted as an expression of
powerful “economic forces.” It is the implicit crude Marxism of
Professor Saliba’s assertion that clouds vision here. As indicated in my
book, there was indeed a ‘commercial revolution’ sweeping Europe from
about the twelfth century, but that hardly explains the great interest in
Aristotle in the universities of that period or the decision by medical
practitioners to undertake dissections and to incorporate medical
education into the university curriculum. Similarly, there was another
rise in commercial activities in the sixteenth century, but this hardly
explains either the motivation of the clerical Copernicus, or of Galileo,
Kepler, or Tycho Brahe in developing a new astronomy against the interests
of the Church.
Finally, I offer some comments about the general role of science in
society―a role about which Saliba is highly skeptical. Indeed,
Saliba’s essay is replete with disparaging remarks about science and its
utility, not to mention the benefits of freedom of expression. It is my
view that scientific inquiry includes not just the natural sciences, but
all of the social sciences. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the
social sciences― economics, political science, psychology and
sociology―have added something to our understanding about how
governments and economies work. Social and economic development are not
aided solely by “scientific production,” as Saliba proposes (146), but
by a vast array of insights drawn from the social sciences concerning, for
instance, the nature of labour and financial markets, the role of
technology and other factors in production, and social and political
processes. It should also be obvious that the social sciences (and the
natural sciences) cannot function properly in societies where there is
great secrecy, where all information is considered the unique purview of
the government, where permission must be received from state officials
before any surveys or related inquiries may be carried out, and where
there are prohibitions against the release of such information.
Nevertheless, Saliba is of the opinion that “[i]t is foolhardy to urge
underdeveloped countries to adopt the imagined benefits of such slogans as
‘freedom of thought and expression’ in order to obtain the golden key
to modernity assumed to be so intrinsically embedded in the processes of
modern science” (146). This is such a counter-intuitive claim that I
leave it for others to defend. More neutral observers will have noticed
that the recently released Arab
Human Development Report 2002, sponsored by the United Nations and
written entirely by Arab scholars, specifically points to the lack of freedom as one of three major factors holding back
development in Arab societies.21 What is needed is a great
enlargement of what many would call the public
sphere (and I called neutral
space), that zone of interaction in which public and private needs and
aspirations merge, so that new alternatives to prevailing ideas and
policies may be proposed, discussed and evaluated without fear of personal
harm. The prevailing inhibition of the free flow of
information―scientific and non-scientific―in the Arab world is
dramatically highlighted by the authors of the Arab development report
when they estimate that Spain translates more books in a single year than
have been translated into Arabic since the beginning of the Arabic/Islamic
era.
This brings me to Saliba’s objection to my suggestion that
“science is especially the natural enemy of authoritarian regimes”
(145). If we begin with the assumption that the social sciences have a
place alongside the ‘hard’ sciences, then it seems evident that
authoritarian regimes in general cannot maintain their grip on power while
allowing free rein to economists, sociologists, political scientists, or
environmentalists. Their national accounts simply will not balance and
they know it. Hence, they routinely crack down upon those who offer
accounts of the way things are that differ from the official line. I am
not aware of the “tremendous achievements” of science during the Nazi
regime. If one considers the highly-developed state of scientific
knowledge in Germany prior to the Nazi takeover and then compares it with
the results achieved by the end of the regime, its scientific achievements
seem unimpressive. Hundreds, if not thousands, of highly trained
scientists fled Nazi Germany―to the great benefit of the United
States and England, among others. Recently, a great debate has broken out
over the fact that the Nazis were unable to develop the atomic bomb,
despite considerable effort. The Nazis did carry out a large number of
absolutely horrendous medical experiments on human subjects who lost their
lives in the process. I would not count this as a “tremendous
achievement,” although it is true that some of the information gathered
is unique, precisely because of the inhumanity involved in its collection.
Nothing I have written discounts the possibility that totalitarian regimes
may embark upon some grand research project for nationalistic purposes and
actually be quite successful for a time. On the other hand, I believe all
such regimes are doomed and that, in the final accounting, their
scientific achievements are likely to be marginal.
Soviet Russia was, perhaps, the most successful of such regimes
but, in the end, it did collapse, exposing all of the social, economic and
environmental damage that it had done. A not insignificant point seems to
be that such a regime was only able to persist so long as it maintained a
very large repressive apparatus, stifling dissent (people like the
physicist Andre Sakharov and hundreds of others) and preventing
disinterested inquiry into its economic and ecological problems, patterns
of governance and so on. Indeed, Manuel Castells has made a good case for
the proposition that the Soviet Empire collapsed precisely because it
could no longer control information in a computer age, with the result
that significant numbers of citizens, including crucial members of the
power structure, called for radical reform.22
But let me add one final example of a global scientific movement
that is clearly not motivated by greed, anticipated remuneration, national
aggrandizement, or the “exigencies of the market place”: the
international environmental movement. It is evident that there is
presently a global view
according to which the environment can and must be treated as a single
system of natural processes. It is also evident that this point of view
was created and shaped by natural scientists who carried out the studies
illustrating this fact. And, third, it is now evident that preserving the
environment costs money. The
champions of environmentalism wish to show that preserving the environment
is in the global interest, but the irreducible fact is that the human
community―and, hence, all nation-states―will have to pay
financially and in terms of economic development for the apparently
long-term interests revealed by science. Scientists and sympathetic laymen
have rallied to the cause, in effect creating a global environmental
movement complete with all sorts of international treaties and
organizations, the objective being what some call a “global
institution” dedicated to preserving the environment.23 Moreover,
this movement began in the nineteenth century and continued to strengthen
throughout the twentieth and now the twenty-first.24 This is as
good an example of ‘free inquiry’ being carried out in the service of
the human community as one can find. It clearly shows that scientists
investigate natural phenomena with a view to improving more than the
financial bottom line. This is not so say that vested interests―for
example, chemical and pharmaceutical companies―have never paid
scientists to pursue scientific questions that have purely commercial
applications for those interests. It is only to say that the claim that
all free inquiry is just a fiction supporting the market-place is greatly
exaggerated. I continue to believe in the possibility and the necessity of
dispassionate inquiry―of the past as of the present―for the
purpose of better understanding how the world came to be the way it is
and, not least of all, for making the future better than the past.
Notes 1 George Saliba, “Seeking the Origins of Modern Science?” Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 1, no. 2 (1999) : 139-152, a review article on Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The revised second edition of The Rise of Early Modern Science will be published in the spring of 2003. 2 The reader should note that, in my book, I stated clearly that I used the term ‘Arab’ to refer collectively to the whole range of people from diverse ethnic groups throughout the broader Middle East. For the purposes of my study, this common identity was based upon the language they employed, not ethnic identity in the strict sense. From my point of view, science is always a civilizational undertaking produced through the cooperation of individuals from diverse societies and communities who share, nonetheless, an identity on the highest levels, especially regarding religion and law. 5 I say this after having read the fascinating recent study by F. Jamail Ragep, “Tusi and Copernicus: The Earth’s Motion in Context,” Science in Context 14, nos. 1-2 (2001) : 145-163. The similarity of arguments regarding the possible daily axial rotation of the Earth in the writings of Copernicus and many other writers extending back to the Greeks?and including many Muslim astronomers?provides evidence not only of possible influence, but more strongly of the often simultaneous, independent, and multiple discovery of major ideas in the history of science. Hundreds of such cases have been documented by William F. Ogburn (in the 1920s) and Robert Merton (in the 1960s); for this literature and discussion, see The Rise of Early Modern Science, 149-51. In the present context, I can recall three independent discoveries of the physical explanation of the rainbow? by Theodoric of Freiburg (ca. 1304), by al-Shirazi and by Kamal al-Din al Farisi (ca. 1310). 6 I have discussed these issues in “Attitudes towards Dissection in the History of European and Arabic Medicine,” in Science: Locality and Universality, ed. Bennacer El Bouazzati (Rabat, Morocco: Mohamed V University, 2002), 1-26; and also in the revised edition of The Rise of Early Modern Science. 7 For the Asian tradition regarding dissection, see Saki Shizu, “Concepts of Anatomy in Traditional Chinese and Japanese Medicine,” in History of Traditional Medicine: Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd International Symposia on the Comparative Study of Medicine: East and West, ed. Teizo Ogawa (Osaka: Division of Medical History, the Taniguchi Foundation, 1986), 287-302. 8 George Saliba, “A Sixteenth-Century Arabic Critique of Ptolemaic Astronomy: The Work of Shams al-Din al-Khafri, Journal for the History of Astronomy 25 (1994) : 15-38. 9 A. I. Sabra, “Configuring the Universe: Aporetic, Problem Solving, and Kinematic Modeling as Themes of Arabic Astronomy,” Perspectives on Science 6, no. 3 (1998) : 322. For Saliba’s response and Sabra’s reply, see George Saliba, “Arabic versus Greek Astronomy: A Debate over the Foundation of Science,” Perspectives on Science 8, no. 4 (2000) : 328-41 and A. I. Sabra, “Reply to Saliba,” Perspectives on Science 8, no. 4 (2000) : 342-45. 10 Noel M. Swerdlow, “Astronomy in the Renaissance,” in Astronomy before the Telescope, ed. Christopher Walker (London: British Museum, 1996), 187 and 214ff. 11 The material in this and the following paragraphs is taken from my book, The Rise of Early Modern Science, 187-89 and 335-338. 13 See Edward Grant, ed., A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 199-200; and Grant, “Science and the Medieval University,” 82ff. In his impressive study, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Professor Grant has catalogued 400 questions in the area of cosmology alone that were raised during the period that the medieval cosmology persisted. This generated 1,176 known responses and these were by no means slavish replies. Many contained innovations: During the 14th century, other dramatic departures from Aristotle occurred when scholastic natural philosophers demonstrated that an infinite extracosmic void space might lie beyond the world itself; that motion in a hypothetical vacuum was feasible; that the existence of other worlds was possible; and that the daily axial rotation of the earth was an intelligible, astronomical concept, even though it was ultimately rejected (677). 14 Bernard R. Goldstein, “Copernicus and the Origin of His Heliocentric System,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 33 (2002) : 231. 15 Among his various papers on this topic, see Timur Kuran, “The Islamic Commercial Crisis: Institutional Roots of Economic Underdevelopment in the Middle East,” USC Center for Law, Economics & Organization, Research Paper No. C-1-12, 20 November 2001. This is one of a series of papers he has written on this subject. See <http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=276377>. 16 I discuss the fate of higher learning in the Arab/Muslim world from the eighteenth century to the present in the new epilogue to The Rise of Early Modern Science (2d ed.) and in a forthcoming article, “Science and Civilization ‘East’ and ‘West’: The Legacy of the Past in the Internet World,” Society. 17 As cited in M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century (Boston: Little Brown, 1968), 17, n. 35. 18 H. A. R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 54.
19
This is not the place to enter into a broader discussion of the
epistemological foundations of the scientific revolution. A highly
informed analysis of the conceptual, mathematical and empirical aspects of
the revolution, including a discussion of issues in the medical revolution
can be found in John Henry, The
Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (London:
Macmillan, 1997), especially chapter two.
20
Roger French, Dissection and
Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
21
See United Nations Development Program,
Arab Human Development Report 2002; available online at <www.undp.org/ahdr>.
22
Castells has made this argument on the basis of Russian documents
and field work in the former Soviet Union; see Manuel Castells,
The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 1998), vol. 3, chapter 1. A useful comparative analysis of the
science and technology programs of these two totalitarian regimes may be
found in Paul R. Josephson, Totalitarian
Science and Technology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press,
1996).
23
David John Frank, Ann Hironaka and Evan Schofer,
“Environmentalism as a Global Institution,” American
Sociological Review 65 (February 2000) : 122-27.
24
There is now a significant amount of literature on this subject;
see, among others, David John Frank, “Science, Nature, and the
Globalization of the Environment, 1870-1990,” Social
Forces 76, no. 2 (1997) : 409-37; and Evan Schofer, “Rationalized
Environmental Discourse in World Policy Formation,” in
World Policy Formation, eds. John Boli and George M. Thomas (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 81-99.
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