On his book Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance
Cover Interview of April 05, 2017
A close-up
One chapter of the book, for which I have a
particular liking, bears the title “Humanists on Laxatives.” It tells the story
of the reception of Arabic pharmacology in the Renaissance by focusing on a
specific drug: the laxative senna. It leads the reader from the Arabic sources
to the famous Renaissance botanists and from there to the eighteenth century.
For some humanists, pharmacology was a textual science that needed to be purged
of all Arabic accretions – which these authors achieved by way of deceptive textual
manipulations. Other humanists were more empirical: they planted and tested
senna themselves, comparing it with other laxatives. In the course of the
sixteenth century, most pharmacologists realized that their Arabic predecessors
in fact wrote very useful things.
However, I know from personal experience that
not everybody is as enthusiastic about the history of laxatives as I am. Other
parts of the book may have more appeal to those readers. Those with a taste for
exquisite polemics might like the chapter on how the humanist Juan Luis Vives
demonstrated what he believed to be Averroes’s ignorance. Vives analyzes a
passage from Averroes’s Aristotle commentaries, debunking the Arabic
commentator in grand fashion. In spite of all the rhetoric, Vives was right on
much of the philological detail: The quality of Averroes’ exposition indeed
suffered severely from the accumulated errors of transmission and translation.
But Averroes was able to balance some of these defects with his enormous
knowledge of the Aristotelian corpus. This is the secret behind his continuing
success as a commentator on Aristotle in the Renaissance.
Some readers may feel deterred from reading a
whole chapter about astrology, a discipline that most of us today, including
myself, do not believe to be a serious science. But many Renaissance intellectuals
did, and immersing oneself into the technical structure of famous astrological
doctrines can be a real intellectual pleasure. For example, when important thinkers
of the time, such as Girolamo Cardano and Johannes Schöner, compare competing
Greek and Arabic astrological doctrines, with great acumen.
Personally, my favorite protagonists are those
Renaissance scholars who take impressive intellectual turns in the midst of the
heated controversies about Arabic sciences – such as Jacob Mantino, whose elegant
and precise Hebrew-Latin translations successfully adopt Arabic scientific
traditions to the expectations of humanist readers; or Giovanni Manardo, a hard-nosed
humanist physician, who does not find fault with commenting on Arabic
pharmacological sources; or Agostino Nifo, the Averroist philosopher who
suffers from the pressure of orthodoxy, but finds a way out by molding himself
into a champion of Averroes’s interpretation, without adopting any contentious doctrine
himself.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
A close-up
One chapter of the book, for which I have a particular liking, bears the title “Humanists on Laxatives.” It tells the story of the reception of Arabic pharmacology in the Renaissance by focusing on a specific drug: the laxative senna. It leads the reader from the Arabic sources to the famous Renaissance botanists and from there to the eighteenth century. For some humanists, pharmacology was a textual science that needed to be purged of all Arabic accretions – which these authors achieved by way of deceptive textual manipulations. Other humanists were more empirical: they planted and tested senna themselves, comparing it with other laxatives. In the course of the sixteenth century, most pharmacologists realized that their Arabic predecessors in fact wrote very useful things.
However, I know from personal experience that not everybody is as enthusiastic about the history of laxatives as I am. Other parts of the book may have more appeal to those readers. Those with a taste for exquisite polemics might like the chapter on how the humanist Juan Luis Vives demonstrated what he believed to be Averroes’s ignorance. Vives analyzes a passage from Averroes’s Aristotle commentaries, debunking the Arabic commentator in grand fashion. In spite of all the rhetoric, Vives was right on much of the philological detail: The quality of Averroes’ exposition indeed suffered severely from the accumulated errors of transmission and translation. But Averroes was able to balance some of these defects with his enormous knowledge of the Aristotelian corpus. This is the secret behind his continuing success as a commentator on Aristotle in the Renaissance.
Some readers may feel deterred from reading a whole chapter about astrology, a discipline that most of us today, including myself, do not believe to be a serious science. But many Renaissance intellectuals did, and immersing oneself into the technical structure of famous astrological doctrines can be a real intellectual pleasure. For example, when important thinkers of the time, such as Girolamo Cardano and Johannes Schöner, compare competing Greek and Arabic astrological doctrines, with great acumen.
Personally, my favorite protagonists are those Renaissance scholars who take impressive intellectual turns in the midst of the heated controversies about Arabic sciences – such as Jacob Mantino, whose elegant and precise Hebrew-Latin translations successfully adopt Arabic scientific traditions to the expectations of humanist readers; or Giovanni Manardo, a hard-nosed humanist physician, who does not find fault with commenting on Arabic pharmacological sources; or Agostino Nifo, the Averroist philosopher who suffers from the pressure of orthodoxy, but finds a way out by molding himself into a champion of Averroes’s interpretation, without adopting any contentious doctrine himself.