An audio version of this talk is at my podcast, Inner Life, available via podcast feeds.
The extraordinary spread of Islam after 632 – from Central Asia to North Africa in a century – reached Europe in the eighth century, generating issues that still matter to this day. Not ones of religion, though, but of technology.
Within a few generations, the technologies of the new civilisation hit the Iberian peninsula: vertical axis windmills, the clocks of Ibn Khalaf al-Muradi, astrolabes.
Anxiety about machines, remaining to the present say, was born. Where we becoming uncoupled from the cosmos? How might our existence relate to our essence? Does our mind still fit the divine mind?
But with the technology came ideas, those discussed and disputed by Al-Ghazali, Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas – all drawing on “the first teacher”: Aristotle.
Questions about occasionalism, the eternity of the cosmos and unified intelligence can help us now. Their work offers us space to refind participation with spirit and God as the millennia-long story of the machine continues.
The extraordinary spread of Islam after 632 – from Central Asia to Spain in a century – entered Europe in the eighth century, generating issues that still matter to this day. Not ones of religion, though, but of technology.
Within a few generations, the technologies of the new civilisation hit the Iberian peninsula: vertical axis windmills, the clocks of Ibn Khalaf al-Muradi, astrolabes.
Anxiety about machines, remaining to the present say, was born. Where we becoming uncoupled from the cosmos? How might our existence relate to our essence? Does our mind still fit the divine mind?
But with the technology came ideas, those discussed and disputed by Al-Ghazali, Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas – all drawing on “the first teacher”: Aristotle.
Questions about occasionalism, the eternity of the cosmos and unified intelligence can help us now. Their work offers us space to refind participation with spirit and God as the millennia-long story of the machine continues.