A meeting of doctors at the university of Paris. From a medieval manuscript of “Chants Royaux”, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Click on the image to the right to go to the source, an online publication we have consistently enjoyed so far:

The lone survivor of traditional Western European ‘scientific’ culture is science.

It has survived because it is now the handmaid of technology, without which contemporary civilization would collapse utterly. Anyone who doubts this should try to get a research grant for genuinely “pure” research.Today, in European cultures, and in other cultures that have borrowed it, science per se is strictly peripheral at best. It is not only inseparable from technology; it is all but completely divorced from philosophy. This is a far cry from the Middle Ages.

The centrality of science in all spheres of Western European culture was ensured when the crucial elements — all of them — were borrowed during the Crusades, more or less simultaneously, from Classical Arabic civilization. There, science had never become integrated into Islamic culture, but was considered “foreign” to Islam, and so fell to the onslaught of anti-intellectualism that swept the Islamic world at its peak in the Middle Ages. By contrast, Western Europeans were enthralled by science from the 13th century down to the 20th, when Humanism — now redefined specifically as a collection of ‘non-scientific fields’ — replaced science as the default mode of higher education. Science has come under attack not only by fundamentalists, but even by philosophers and other scholars, who seem not to understand science. What happened?

Warriors of the Cloisters is about the origins of the medieval ‘scientific method’: the medieval ‘disputed questions’ method of argumentation used in oral disputations and written works by some of the most famous scientists and theologians of the Middle Ages, which is the ancestor of the ‘ideal’ modern ‘scientific method’. It is also about the origins of the college, and what we now call the university. Other scholars have already shown that the disputed questions method, which I call the recursive argument method, was the ‘scientific method’ par excellence of medieval science. It is recursive, and was not an independent invention of Western Europeans, as has been argued; it was borrowed from Classical Arabic civilization, along with the college, in the mid-12th century.

But the recursive argument method and the college were not inventions of Classical Arabic civilization.

Read the entire article here.