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    God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science
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    God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science
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    God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science
    Ebook702 pages9 hours

    God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science

    By James Hannam

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    About this ebook

    This is a powerful and a thrilling narrative history revealing the roots of modern science in the medieval world. The adjective 'medieval' has become a synonym for brutality and uncivilized behavior. Yet without the work of medieval scholars there could have been no Galileo, no Newton and no Scientific Revolution. In "God's Philosophers", James Hannam debunks many of the myths about the Middle Ages, showing that medieval people did not think the earth is flat, nor did Columbus 'prove' that it is a sphere; the Inquisition burnt nobody for their science nor was Copernicus afraid of persecution; no Pope tried to ban human dissection or the number zero. "God's Philosophers" is a celebration of the forgotten scientific achievements of the Middle Ages - advances which were often made thanks to, rather than in spite of, the influence of Christianity and Islam. Decisive progress was also made in technology: spectacles and the mechanical clock, for instance, were both invented in thirteenth-century Europe. Charting an epic journey through six centuries of history, "God's Philosophers" brings back to light the discoveries of neglected geniuses like John Buridan, Nicole Oresme and Thomas Bradwardine, as well as putting into context the contributions of more familiar figures like Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIcon Books
    Release dateAug 7, 2009
    ISBN9781848311589
    Unavailable
    God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science

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    Reviews for God's Philosophers

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    • 4/5
      Hannam makes the argument that the development in philosophical thinking and study of the natural world in the middle ages is the cornerstone on which science was built during the later “scientific revolution” and that the role of the Catholic Church and medieval philosophy in the development of science is undervalued today. Hannam is a fantastic writer, in that he provides an engrossing history of the middle ages—especially providing interesting biosketches of the important philosophers of the time. Therefore, I recommend this book to popular readers of medieval history, history of science, or church history. However, Hannam’s book is not thorough enough to be considered a good academic history. He tends to provide the most interesting stories, ignoring the fact that some of his stories are controversial. Hannam also has a slightly defensive tone about the role of the Catholic Church during the middle ages. To most popular readers, I think the shortcomings of this book can be ignored, since it is a smooth and interesting read.
    • 3/5
      It seems that I sometimes have and controversial and nonconformist taste in history books. I don’t generally like tabloid style, sensationalistic controversy for its own sake, especially if this is based on dubious assumptions or modern judgement- but sometimes controversy might spark my interest. One thing that attracted me to this book was the extreme polarization of opinion- the way that historians and interested laypeople seemed to love it, but many with secular humanists hated it. As a student of medieval history I have long known that the notion of all Medieval Europeans being backwards and stupid was a fallacy, so I was inclined to side with the author, and bought the book shortly after it first came out.

      After nearly two years I finally got around to reading and finishing it. On the one hand God’s Philosophers is an accessible and necessary work. Necessary because it challenges popular views and misconceptions which still exist to this day, especially where the history of science and philosophy are concerned. Hannam demonstrates that it was in the Universities of Medieval Europe that natural philosophers, theologians and intellectuals made important discoveries and theorized, analyzed, and strove about the world around them in many subjects from astronomy to mathematics, physics to rationality. More importantly, especially to Hannam’s line of argument is that most of these important thinkers were churchmen.

      The most common misconception that the author seeks to correct is that the church sought to suppress learning and rational inquiry. It may be based perhaps on a modern, humanistic understanding of reason which holds itself to be the antithesis of faith, and therefore incompatible. However, those who read anything of the scholastic thinkers of the 11th century onwards will realize that their definition of reason was different. It was not the enemy of faith, for they were men of faith, but rather a gift from God to help men. A creation based belief system told them the universe was ordered and adhered to certain laws, and so men could understand and interpret the creation and the world around them.

      Of course there was conflict, especially when some scholars sought to use philosophy to challenge Orthodoxy or formulate beliefs deemed heretical. The paranoid heresy hunting church hounding innocent scientist is however not truthful or accurate picture of the time- a time in which a English blacksmith’s son by the name of Richard of Wallingford would in his closing years create one of the world’s first mechanical clocks, in Italy the first spectacles appeared, as well as many other inventions and innovations in agriculture, architecture and many other areas. So much for the supposed ‘intellectual stagnation’ of Medieval Europe which did not end until ‘the Renaissance’- in fact there was more than one Renaissance.

      On the other side of the coin, there are some drawbacks to this work. Hannam is to my knowledge, a scientist first and foremost, not a historian. Hence he does seem to apply the preconceptions and attitudes of modern science and ‘progress’ to his work sometimes, and they do not always sit well. His view of medieval medicine is rather scathing, for instance, but does not seem entirely justified. At least, a medical historian at my University would not agree with his generalisation that all medicine of the time was useless and more likely to do harm than heal. To the contrary, there is some evidence that herbal remedies of past may have been effective.

      Conversely, whilst having little good to say about medical practitioners and quacks, credit it given to some astrologers, alchemists and even occultists in spite of the dubious basis of their beliefs- even by the standards of the time. Also, I felt there was some bias against Creationism and Protestantism on the part of the author, which came through in the work, so the accusations of a Pro-Catholic slant may not be entirely unfounded.

      Altogether, a useful and necessary work, though with some deficiencies, and perhaps suffering from one or two misconceptions itself.
    • 4/5
      The Dark Ages weren't nearly as dark as we have been led to believe. So argues James Hannam in his 2009 book "The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middles Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution."Historians have told us that human progress pretty much came to a standstill during the Middle Ages. Not until the Renaissance, beginning in the 14th century, did science, technology, the arts, etc., begin to bloom. Hannam contends the Renaissance was actually a step backward in many respects. The Renaissance, he says, was "if anything, even more superstitious and violent" than the Middle Ages. Belief in the occult, especially astrology, became stronger. In terms of science, significant work by scholars of the Middle Ages was ignored, while Renaissance scholars turned back to the teachings of Plato and others from an earlier time for scientific insights.Fortunately the printing press had been invented late in the so-called Dark Ages, and most of the earlier writings on scientific matters had been published and preserved. Later Galileo and other Renaissance thinkers made full use of these books in their own work, even though they did not usually give sufficient credit to those whose work they built on.Those earlier men of science have much less familiar names, but Hannam seeks to give attention to many who led the way, including people like Richard of Wallingford, Richard Swineshead, John Buridan, Nicole Oresme and Cecco D'Ascoli. Today the Church and science are often perceived as being at odds with each other, especially over the question of the origin of life, but most of these scholars from the Middle Ages were men of the Church who saw it as their duty to discover everything they could about the universe God made. Had it not been for the Church, the Dark Ages might actually have been dark.Hannam even argues the Inquisition was not nearly as bad as history has led us believe. The Church did send some people to the stake, but they were relatively few. In most cases the Church sought ways to avoid severe penalties. The Inquisition, the author points out, introduced a new legal system still in use today in which crimes are actually investigated and defendants are given an opportunity to defend themselves."Ironically, by keeping philosophers focused on nature instead of metaphysics, the limitations set by the Church may even have benefited science in the long term," Hannam writes. "Furthermore, and contrary to popular belief, the Church never supported the idea that the earth is flat, never banned human dissection, never banned the zero, and certainly never burnt anyone at the stake for scientific ideas."Hannam writes for the lay reader, not for either scientists or historians. Read his book to see the Dark Ages in a new light.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This is an entertaining read. And if you know as little about mediaeval science as I do, it's very instructive.But it sets out to be much more than that. It proudly proclaims on the cover that it was shortlisted for the 2010 Royal Society Prize for Science books. I don't know how that came about, because the author plainly grasps little of the science and mathematics he describes. A few glaring examples:- p180 "'A moving body will travel in an equal period of time, a distance exactly qual to that which it will travel if it were moving continuously as [sic] its mean speed'This result, dubbed the mean speed theorem by historians, is central to physics because it describes the motion of an object, any object, falling under gravity. Note that it makes no mention of how much the object weighs. (Nor does it make allowances for air resistance, and so strictly speaking applies only to motion in a vacuum...)"Nonsense, the mean speed theorem as quoted Hannam is no more than a restatement of what is meant by mean speed. It's true irrespective of air resistance. What William Heytesbury wrote (in Latin) is that the mean speed of a body undergoing uniform acceleration is the speed halfway through the period of acceleration. (Hannam cites not Heytesbury's text, even in translation, but a 20th book about Mechanics in the Middle Ages.) Heytesbury's statement is generally true also. What is not true is that objects falling under gravity undergo uniform acceleration: that would apply only in vacuum.- p263"...The capillaries pass the blood through the tissues of the body where the oxygen is unloaded. They then carry the deoxygenated blood, now a purple-blue colour, into broader veins."This is a howler. Deoxygenated blood is not purple-blue, it's dark red. Has Hannam never had blood taken from a vein, nor seen it taken?p291"[Kepler's] greatest insight was that orbits are not circles, or even based on circles, but ellipses."Well, I know what he means, but ellipses are circles stretched along one axis.p330-332 has a lengthy explanation of Galileo and Orsesme's remarks on the Mean Speed Theorem, but fails to mention the clarifying fact that the sequence of odd integers 1,3,5,... is the differences between successive square numbers - this was known to the School of Pythagoras.Second, the book purports to tell "the story of how natural philosophy in the Middle Ages led to the achievements of modern science". The introduction defines the Middle Ages as ending in 1500. But the text has little to back that up. Hannam is keen to trumpet the many important inventions during the millennium or so he covers, without noticing that the anonymous inventors owed nothing to natural philosophers. He devotes much of his text to developments in astronomy, but seems not to realise that it was not until Kepler's analysis in the first years of the 17th century of Brahe's meticulous observations that astronomy progressed significantly beyond the best theories of the Ancient Greeks. Hannam includes a chapter on medicine and anatomy, but the only development he mentions that actually occurred during the Middle Ages was the increasing legitimacy of dissection starting in the 13th century. Hannam records no actual improvements in knowledge before the 16th century.Generally Hannam fails to identify the big problem obstructing scientific progress in the Middle Ages, which is the almost total failure to grasp the importance of observation and experiment. Progress was made in mathematics, where cerebration alone is required, and in technology, where experiment took place, but seldom in natural science.Hannam seems to be no more a latinist than he is a scientist - he twice writes of "caroline miniscule". Nor is he much of a stylist in English "Despite lacking a degree, young Galileo's talent for mathematics was obvious."One thing that Hannam does bring to his subject is a very considerable willingness to defend the role of the Catholic Church in promoting science in the Middle Ages and beyond. He manages to tut gently when the Church misguidedly allows a man to be burnt to death for his heterodox views, but otherwise presents it as a voice of tolerance and reason in the face of the provocative discourtesy of scientists and others who presumed to doubt its wisdom.In conclusion: do read this book, it's fun. But don't expect it to be as scholarly as the cover and the presence of copious citations might lead one to expect.