Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Trust, but verify

As a follow-up to James' article in the Spectator several months ago, Beyond Necessity has a blogpost up on the pro-Islam bias at Wikipedia, with a particular focus on Avicenna. Via Bill Vallicella.

Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

3 comments:

James said...

Fascinating. Over at our discussion board, Zameel actually cited "Aydin Sayili (1987). "Ibn Sīnā and Buridan on the Motion of the Projectile", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences" as proof impetus was an Islamic idea. The article exposes this as false. Glad I never bothered chase the reference down.

Anonymous said...

Hi, James

I'm a big fan of your blog, and keep 'God's Philosophers' to hand at all times.

Sorry to diverge from the topic, but there's a particularly daft article on the Telegraph site which I thought you'd like to comment on:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/7833070/Michelangelo-hid-anatomical-sketches-in-Sistine-Chapel-in-Church-attack.html

Building on the mythology of conflict of 'science-and-all-that-is-good against the evil-patriarchal-childabusing-antiscientific-witchburning-catholic-church'

Perplexed said...

It seems deeply unfortunate that medieval science (in both Europe and Arabia) appears at times to be surrounded by a smokescreen of ideology. From what little I've read, it seems both the standard "everything happened earlier in Arabia" and "everything happened later in the European Renaissance" are both grossly simplistic. What we need is more objective analysis and less of the whitewashing that seems to be going on at Wikipedia.