Posted by:
Human
(
)
Date: January 15, 2020 09:33AM
While getting out of LDSinc, I went into a deep dive through Western History, from Sumner on up, in chronological order as much as possible, and got stuck around Quattrocento Florence (neo-Platonism has always bedevilled me). One impression that has stuck with me three decades later is that the life and achievement of Roger Bacon gets short shifted, egregiously so by writers pimping for The Enlightenment.
I was cheered this morning by reading this:
“The frescos in Assisi heralded a revolution both in representation and in metaphysical leaning whose consequences for Western art, philosophy, and science can hardly be underestimated. It is here, too, that we may locate the seed of the video gaming industry. Bacon was giving voice to an emerging view that the God of Judeo-Christianity had created the world according to geometric laws and that Truth was thus to be found in geometrical representation. This Christian mathematicism would culminate in the scientific achievements of Galileo and Newton four centuries later and continues to resonate in contemporary physicists’ quest for a hyper-dimensional “Theory of Everything.” In The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry, Edgerton argues that the idea that the world exists as a geometric void—which is the foundation on which Galileo and Newton built the new physics and cosmology—was patterned into Western consciousness by three centuries of perspectival representation beginning with [Roger] Bacon’s missive to Clement. Thus the scientific revolution was birthed in the visual revolution of geometric figuring.”
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/wertheim.phpThere are many ways to leaving LDSinc, and all ways are good ways.
Human, enduring forty below zero with a windchill of -60F