Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 182 - Aftermath - Philosophy and Science in the Mongol Age.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode... Aftermath. Philosophy and science in the Mongol age. What comes from Central Asia arrives on horseback, kills everyone in sight, eventually toppling one of the world's great civilizations, and has a leader whose name will be borrowed by a German pop band from the 1970s. If you said the Huns, you're almost right. They did help cause the fall of the Roman Empire by unleashing chaos among barbarian tribes. But as far as I know, there has never been a German pop band named Attila, whereas the German entry in the 1979 Eurovision Song Contest was in fact a group called Shingis Khan. They came forth with their eponymous hit, the classic Shingis Khan, which has a beat almost as irresistible as the Mongol hordes and better lyrics. For instance, Et soikt es sieben Kinde in einer nacht und über seine Feinde hare noer geh lacht, which I suggest translating, He fathered seven children in a single night and just laughed when his enemies came into sight. And then there's the admirably candid line, Las nach Vodka hollen, denvers in Mongolin, meaning, Get some more vodka, because we are Mongols. I almost feel like stopping the episode right there, quite literally on a high note, but I really want to tell you about the real Mongols, this super tribal group once led by Genghis Khan and their surprising role in the history of philosophy. Surprising because it was not entirely negative. The Mongols did wreak devastation and death wherever they went, why else would you name a German pop band after them? But once their army had swept through, they were left with territory to rule and they rose to the challenge. By the middle of the 13th century, a quarter century after the death of the mighty Genghis, the Mongols figured out that they could get more out of the territory they conquered through taxation than by wholesale slaughter. They had burst out of their homeland in Central Asia at the beginning of the 13th century, taking control of Northern China and then laying waste to areas in the Islamic world, including Khorasan, home of many of the philosophers we've met, including Avicenna. By the time of Genghis Khan's death in 1227, their realm reached as far as the Caspian Sea. Within another 15 years, they had defeated the Seljuks to take power in Anatolia. It was only a matter of time until they toppled the Abbasid dynasty, which had in any case been wielding only symbolic power for many years at this point. This occurred when the Mongol ruler Hulagu, accompanied as we saw by the politically flexible philosopher Atuzi, invaded Baghdad and killed the last of the caliphs in 1258. The Mongols' westward expansion was finally stopped only when the Mamluks managed a successful defense of Syria and Egypt. With their borders stabilizing in the year 1260, the Mongols now needed to consolidate their hold over the eastern Islamic realms. They had to become, as Ibn Khaldun's theory of history would predict, sedentary rulers rather than a rampaging horde fueled by tribal solidarity. One important development was the conversion of their leaders to Islam. Prior to that, the Mongols had been varied in their religious beliefs, embracing Christianity, Buddhism, and paganism. The rulers who succeeded Atuzi's patron Hulagu were known as the Ilkhans. One of them converted from Buddhism to Islam, and those Mongols who were not already Muslims followed his lead. So it was that the Mongols went from being an existential threat to Islamic civilization to being the rulers of Islamic civilization. For all the havoc they had wreaked, they proved capable of rebuilding that civilization and even of supporting scholarly activity. They understood the value of skilled laborers among their new subjects and would sometimes move them around their empire to where they could do the most good. Add to this the fact that intellectuals were often among the populations fleeing in terror from Mongol advances. We saw this in the case of Fakhradin al-Razi and Ibn Taymiyyah, for instance. So the Mongols directly and indirectly helped ideas to spread around the Islamic world. The experts that could still flourish within the new Mongol order included philosophers. Especially likely to win favor were those with competence in astronomy and medicine, sciences that were valued by the Mongols no less than by the earlier Muslim dynasties they had now replaced. In fact, they even imported Muslim astronomers into China. In the Islamic world itself, the best example of the phenomenon is a man we already know well, Nasir ad-Din Atuzi. We've discussed how he spent his last years leading scientific research at an astronomical observatory in the city of Maragh. In addition to the works I described in the episode on Atuzi, it's worth mentioning here his edition of Euclid's Elements, which drew on the two main Arabic translations of the work and marked differences in the two transmissions for readers. This philological achievement made Atuzi's version of the Elements the standard edition for successive generations. And it wasn't only Atuzi who was doing math in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. He gathered around him a formidable group of scholars working on astronomical, medical, and philosophical topics. We already met one of them, Qutb ad-Din Ashirazi. You may remember him as the illuminationist philosopher who had a flair for performing magic. One trick Qutb ad-Din tried to pull off in astronomy was to solve an age-old problem that had already bedeviled the ancients. The planets are supposedly seated upon spheres, which are revolving in simple circular motions around the earth. Yet, we do not see them moving along a steady course. Rather, when their movements night to night are tracked, they seem to stop and even move backwards. Ptolemy had offered two possible solutions to this problem of retrograde motion. One was to suppose that the planets are indeed on single spheres, but say that they revolve around a different point than the center of the earth. These spheres would be eccentric, meaning quite literally off-center. The other was to postulate smaller spheres embedded within the large single sphere with its own rotating motion. These smaller spheres, or epicycles, would be the seats of the visible planets. The irregular motion of the planets could then be described as a combination of the revolution of the larger sphere around the earth, plus the smaller revolution of the planet around the epicycle. Considering all this, Qutb ad-Din concluded that although a mathematical model could be made to fit the phenomena either way, the first solution with eccentric spheres is preferable, for its simplicity. He defended this Occam's razor-style preference for simple scientific explanations on theological grounds. God would not make his cosmos more complicated than necessary. As this example shows, the scholars gathered around At-Huzi saw no conflict between the science of astronomy and the verities of Islam. This was in part because they pursued astronomy as a relatively autonomous science, which did not involve the more controversial claims of Avicenna's philosophy. One might compare the cultural position of astronomy at this time to that of logic. Both disciplines had come into Islamic culture as part and parcel of the Hellenic legacy. Now though, they were being studied independently and were seen as perfectly appropriate for religious scholars. This was fully in accord with the advice of al-Ghazali, who had poured scorn not only on those who questioned the validity of logic, but also on those who rejected the mathematical sciences. Even if these sciences might occasionally lead to error, he said, a rational foe is better than an ignorant friend. Qutb ad-Din also contributed to another science with longstanding ties to philosophy, medicine. He wrote a commentary on the Kanem, Avicenna's encyclopedic work of medicine. This is a reminder that Avicenna was as dominant in the later medical tradition as in later philosophy. The greatest medical writer of the 13th century, this age of Mongol invasion, was not Qutb ad-Din, but the somewhat earlier Ibn Anafis. I haven't mentioned him before, and it's a bit of a digression to bring him up now to be honest, because he didn't live in the territories conquered by the Mongols. Born in Damascus, he moved to Cairo, and thus lived within the rather less dangerous realm of the Mamluks. But I can't pass over him for two reasons. First, he made one of the most remarkable medical advances of the Islamic world, by being the first person to realize that blood is passed from one ventricle of the heart to the other through the lungs, contravening the teaching of Galen and Avicenna, and making a big stride in the direction of an accurate understanding of the circulatory system. The text in which he announced this discovery? His own commentary on the Canon of Avicenna, a reminder that the commentary traditions he provoked were full of original and valuable ideas. The other reason it's worth bringing up Ibn Anafis is that he wrote another very different work, a critical response to Ibn Tufail's island fantasy Hayy ibn Yaqdan, meaning Living Son of Awake. Ibn Anafis understood all too well the implication of Ibn Tufail's book. It dramatizes Avicenna's belief that a human can reach wisdom on his or her own, using nothing but the innate capacity for reason. To counter this, Ibn Anafis wrote his own island story in which the hero is named Fadil ibn Natik, or Virtuous, Son of the Rational, or in an alternate translation Virtuous, Son of the One Who Speaks. Like Ibn Tufail's protagonist, Ibn Anafis's main character Fadil is able on his own to realize that God must exist, but then his island is visited by a ship whose passengers expose him to the revelation. Ibn Anafis's message is clear—no man is an island. Attainment of the necessary truths requires the access to prophecy provided by a religious tradition. This constitutes an inversion of the lesson taught by Ibn Tufail, whose story ends with Hayy turning his back on society because the religious faith of its citizens falls short of his own independently discovered philosophical and mystical insights. From a historical point of view, Ibn Anafis's riposte to Ibn Tufail is noteworthy as an example of the impact of Andalusian thought outside of Andalusia. Nor is this the only example. Averroes's works were known to Ibn Taymiyyah, and of course the Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi exercised immense influence in the later Eastern traditions. But, if we turn away from Ibn Anafis's Mamluk setting and back to Mongol-controlled territory, we find that the philosophical action during and after the Mongol invasions resembled what had been going on before they arrived. We saw how Fakhradin Ar-Razi fused Avicennan philosophy with the ideas and methods of Asharite Kalam. The seeds planted by Ar-Razi reach full flower with a sequence of influential theologians named Al-Baydawi, Al-Iji, and At-Taftazani. Collectively they span the whole 14th century, with Al-Baydawi dying in 1316, Al-Iji in 1355, and At-Taftazani in 1390. Their influential works were composed, not in spite of Mongol political hegemony, but actually within the elite circles of Mongol political life. Al-Iji was a highly placed judge under the Ilkhans, and by the end of his life At-Taftazani held a high position at the Mongol court in Samarkand. He provides us with a nice link between two centers of intellectual activity under the Mongols. At-Taftazani studied with Qutb-Ad-Din Ashirazi, the illuminationist and student of At-Tuzi we just saw trying to work out the details of Ptolemy's astronomical system. So, he was one of the scholars who continued the legacy of the Maraga Observatory, and he brought this legacy to Samarkand. The reason this is important is that Samarkand was the location for the court of the great Timur, known in Europe as Tamerlane. Timur really deserves a German pop group of his very own. He inflicted a new round of destructive conquest upon Persia and Central Asia, and launched a new Mongol dynasty, the Timurids, whose rule extended from the late 14th down to the early 16th century. At-Taftazani died holding office under Timur himself. His works and those of his predecessor theologians, Al-Baydawi and Al-Iji, would remain required reading at Samarkand when another research center and observatory was established there by Timur's grandson, Uleg Beg. The sequence of names and events may be slightly bewildering, but the take-home messages should be clear enough. Mongol rulers and their armies remained hazardous to the health of anyone standing in their way, yet they continued the traditions of patronage familiar to us from the high point of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Seljuks. And the scholars they patronized defy our expectations. They were Sunni theologians, but also astronomers, experts in logic but also deeply learned religious scholars. Most unexpected of all, they were sometimes Christians. One of the scholars who worked at Maraka was known as Bar Hebraeus. He hailed originally from Anatolia, but found himself in Aleppo when it was overcome by the Mongols in the year 1260. In some respects, Bar Hebraeus is typical for the era. In philosophy, he was influenced by Avicenna, he wrote on astronomy, and he was a doctor, serving at one point as physician to a Mongol ruler. And, as a participant in the scientific endeavor at Maraka, he was yet another associate of Atuzi. We even have a manuscript that once belonged to him, containing mathematical works that had been revised by Atuzi. Less typical, though, is the fact that he was a Christian. Also, he wrote some of his works in Syriac, a language that has not appeared in our story since we looked at the first translations of Greek works into the Semitic languages. In an inversion of that original translation movement, and one entirely appropriate to the Mongol age, Bar Hebraeus produced Syriac versions of works by the foremost philosophical authority of his time, Avicenna. Were all these scholars of the Mongol age really philosophers, or just pious traditionally-minded Muslims and Christians who were broad-minded enough to take an interest in less controversial disciplines like logic and astronomy? On this question I'd like to quote the great scholar of Islamic theology, Wilfrid Madelung. I'll translate his remarks from German, which between Madelung and the 1970s pop group Genghis Khan is clearly the language to know, if you want to find out more about Mongol history. He writes, When the Mongol rulers converted to Sunni Islam in the 14th century, the study and teaching of philosophy was most certainly allowed, and was practiced openly. This intellectual freedom in the East stood in sharp contrast to the situation in the central Islamic lands ruled by the Mamluks, where in the wake of the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate there was a restrictive atmosphere with little patience for departures from Sunni orthodoxy. A phenomenon like Ibn Taymiyya would hardly have been possible in the East. In other words, and again probably contrary to our expectations, the situation for philosophical development under the newly Muslim Mongols was arguably better than the situation under the stricter Mamluks. Men like Ibn Taymiyya, of course, saw that strictness as a big advantage of Mamluk rule. Meanwhile, thinkers who took advantage of the more open intellectual atmosphere of the Mongol dynasties included the aforementioned al-Baidawi, al-Iji, and At-Taftasani, each of whom deeply influenced the next. For all their interests in topics like logic and astronomy, they considered themselves to be theologians, and understood this to mean that they were not doing philosophy. Yet, they knew their Avicenna, and were well acquainted with the Avicennan kalam of Fakhradina Razi. So, their theology was shot through with Avicennan themes, something we can observe in the very way that they define their discipline of theology. It was standard practice for these authors to explain the scope of theology when they began writing their Summaries of Islamic Doctrine, texts that will be read for centuries to come. Following Razi, they naturally enough identify God as the central object of study in theology, along with topics like prophecy and the afterlife. But, they conceive of the study of God in rather Avicennan terms, calling him the necessary existent, and seeing him primarily as the cause of existence for contingent beings. On the other hand, they are also committed to the conception of God as an absolutely free and unfettered agent that had been defended many generations ago by their fellow theologian al-Ghazali. We can see this even from their work on astronomy. This tends in a rather skeptical direction, a tendency we already detected in Fakhradina Razi. In this case, the skepticism is founded in their conviction that God could have chosen any one of a large number of ways to construct the cosmos. Also, according to the Asharite teaching, God's intervention from moment to moment is needed to perpetuate the existence of that cosmos and all it contains. So, al-Iji wonders whether we really need to suppose that the planets are seated upon transparent spheres, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had assumed. Wouldn't it work just as well if they were on hoop or belt shaped rings surrounding the earth? Excitingly, he also questions the long-standing philosophical assumption that the earth is standing still, while the heavens turn above us. Perhaps it is the earth that is spinning, and we just can't tell because we are spinning right along with it. Al-Iji anticipates that the philosophers will object to this by pointing out that earth falls, and thus has a tendency to move down towards the midpoint of the cosmos rather than rotating. To this, al-Iji replies that earth might have two tendencies or inclinations at the same time, one making it tend to fall, the other making the earth as a whole revolve once each day. Here, we may detect the continued influence of Abul Barakhat al-Baghdadi, the Jewish Muslim convert who first proposed this dual inclination theory. The fact that such ideas were being put forth in the Mongol era suggests that to some extent, the Mongol dynasties were like the Muslim political regimes that preceded them. As I've said, they went so far as to found astronomical research centers. Whether they did so out of genuine curiosity and admiration for science, or as a way of shoring up political legitimacy or both, is of no concern to us. What matters is that they made it possible for philosophy, philosophically tinged theology, and science to survive and even thrive in this period. The greatest example is probably Maragha, a home for several significant scholars and supposedly a library containing hundreds of thousands of volumes. Later, as we've seen, Samarkand became another important center. But other places fared less well. The Mongols redrew both the political and cultural maps, and cities that had been hotbeds of intellectual activity now became stagnant backwaters. Above all, the former Abbasid capital Baghdad could not recover from the Mongol devastation. Iraq more generally lost its status as the cultural center of the Islamic world. There was also massive destruction elsewhere, for instance in Khurasan. In compensation, the territory corresponding to modern-day Iran became ever more defined as a political entity and as a region at the forefront of cultural developments in the Islamic world. Persian culture has been important right from the beginning of philosophy in the Islamic world, with some Greek works being translated into Persian early on, and with numerous scholars of Persian background flourishing in the Buyid period. Now, though, Iran is going to occupy the limelight as never before. Soon, we'll be taking the story forward to the Safavid empire, seeing a renaissance of interest in the Hellenic philosophical legacy and the rise of great synthetic theologian-philosopher-mystics, foremost among them, Mullah Sadr. First, though, we'll set the stage by focusing on the next great philosophical city—not Athens, Rome, or Baghdad, not even Samarkand. No, we'll be close to the shores of the Persian Gulf in southern Iran. If you, like Avicenna, are fond of a drop of wine, you might want to have a glass of Shiraz on hand as you listen to the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.