Quick thoughts on Averroes

This book didn't make a strong impression on me.  He starts by noting some places where the Koran proclaims that some fact of religion is apparent from observation of the world, and from that concludes that reasoning from those facts is also commanded. Commanding people to embrace a lesson that is easily apparent from observation is different from commanding them to engage in subtle reasoning and laborious deduction.  To be fair, he concedes that people can err in long chains of deduction, and thereby be led astray.  Consequently, he argues that literalism is fine and even best for the ordinary masses, and philosophical inquiry is only for those who are skilled enough to not be led astray.

In this regard he is making an argument similar to that of Galileo's critics--the Church was unperturbed when Copernicus published heliocentric theory in Latin and as a hypothesis, but they were quite upset when Galileo published heliocentric theory in vernacular Italian and proclaimed it as a truth that he could expound without clerical permission.  So I am unlikely to assign Averroes for a comparative perspective on science/religion debates if I ever teach the Galileo affair.  OTOH, I do understand now why the faculty at Paris cited arguments by Averroes 400 years earlier when the Church was upset about Aristotelian philosophy: Averroes only defended the right of the intellectuals to pursue truth in scholarly debate, not indiscriminate dissemination to the masses.  And the faculty at Paris were seeking similar rights.

Lindberg, chapter 1-3

Honestly, the really ancient science, being so wrong, just doesn't appeal to me.  Yes, yes, I'm aware of the significance of Aristotle, and I understand why philosophers and historians would pay attention to him.  Be that as it may, it's just really hard to motivate myself to pay attention to him.  Still, Lindberg made one point that I liked:  Aristotle didn't eschew experiment simply because he was too dumb to understand the value of it, or because he was too elitist to dirty himself with hands-on science; indeed, he seemed to enjoy dissection.  However, he considered observation and reasoning superior to experimentation because experimentation requires one to manipulate the system in unnatural ways, thereby perturbing the findings.  The experimental method is nowadays sold as common sense, or even intellectual humility, but that humility is advertised with considerable arrogance at times.  It actually takes quite a bit of careful thought to judge that an experiment is telling you something about the "natural" world (whatever that is), rather than just giving you experimental artifacts.

Intellectual Freedom in the 1200's

I'm only 25 pages in, but three quick thoughts:

First, Hofstadter rightly distinguished between policing ideas via formal sanctions and policing ideas via peer pressure.  This distinction matters in a great many contexts, and has deep political significance in areas well beyond the campus.  From the smallest workplace to the largest nation-state, it is arguable that social pressure's dominance over formal rules is the only thing that keeps the world from descending into endless lawyering.

Second, I was not entirely surprised to learn that for centuries universities have functioned quite effectively as institutions that can secure the right of their members to question (most) orthodoxies of the outside world but were (and arguably are) ineffective at protecting dissent from the accepted orthodoxies of the campus itself.  (Speaking of dissent from orthodoxy, it is strange that I spend more class time in the computer lab with students learning to use and develop simulations than anyone else in my department, yet I am the most vocal critic of most things offered under the "technology and learning" banner.)

Finally, I was mildly amused to learn that when the European academic world rediscovered Aristotle in the 1200's some of his adherents were treated as heretics by the Church, and a few even found their institutions unable to defend them, but 400 years later Galileo's ruthless critiques of Aristotle's followers earned him the wrath of the Church.  Time is a wheel.