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Samenvatting Reinventing Knowledge
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Engelse samenvatting van het boek Reinventing Knowledge van McNeely en Wolverton (voor het vak wetenschapsgeschiedenis).
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Voorbeeld 3 van de 17 pagina's
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Voorbeeld van de inhoud
REINVENTING KNOWLEDGEFROM ALEXANDRIA TO THE INTERNET
IAN F. MCNEELY WITH LISA WOLVERTON
Chapter 1: The Library (300 BCE – 500 CE)
Demetrius of Phaleron (360-280 BCE) initiated the construction of the library of Alexandria and ranks
among the least known but most pivotal figures in the Western intellectual tradition. Demetrius ruled
Athens with a high-handedness arguably typical of intellectuals in power. Demetrius moved to
Alexandria to be Ptolemy’s court philosopher. Then he initiated and supervised the construction of
Alexandria’s library and its equally famous museum.
Three ways to tell the story of the library:
1. Institutional approach: the tale how libraries were founded and funded, how books were
produced, collected, copied, categorized and stored (begins with Mesopotamia and concludes
with the glories of Islamic scholarship)
2. Intellectual approach: begins with the philosophical rationale for collection books. Socrates
and Plato preferred to debate rather than scribble so first Greek libraries are surprising.
Demetrius and Aristotle support writing.
3. Political approach: libraries have been supported by an astonishing variety of political systems
down to the present day. Understanding why the Ptolemies saw fit to establish libraries gives
us insight into why large-scale political powers so often make patronage of learning a key part
of their competition with rivals.
Academic knowledge first emerged in the society of Athens, but only the eclipse of this world made
possible the rise of the library and its characteristic forms of scholarship. Alexandria, not Athens was
the first cultural center. Alexandria’s library became a model for three other imperial civilizations:
Rome, Christendom and Islam.
SPEECH AND WRITING IN THE CLASSICAL POLIS
The shift from tyranny to democracy intensified the need for pedagogy in effective public speaking.
Literary knowledge was more important than scientific knowledge in this world, as it was through the
pre-modern period. Effective speech conferred mastery over people, which in an age before advanced
technology counted for far more than the mastery over nature that science offers. The sophists
became the first true practioners of textual scholarship. Books were indispensable handmaidens to the
sophistic style of argument.
Plato proved his devotion to wisdom by inviting rivals to join him, and his Academy – a brotherhood of
scholars constituted in an Athenian grove – ranged freely over the entirety of what has come to be
known as academic knowledge. When Plato’s student and rival Aristotle failed to succeed him as
leader of the Academy, Aristotle’s followers in turn created their own school, the Lyceum.
ALEXANDRIA: GREECE ABROAD
Ancient books had been in circulation on the open market long before the first Hellenistic libraries, but
their collection was a private affair, not a public one. In 323 BCE Alexander the Great died (one year
before Aristotle). The Ptolemies established a Museum. Imperial patronage marked a critical shift away
from the self-sacrificing public spiritedness of Athenian philosophers toward a newfound concern for
scholars’ private lives, and in particular their incomes. The museum was part of a very shrewd policy to
lure talent from all over the Greek world by providing all the creature comforts and cultural amenities
of Greek life.
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,Critical regain became a source for further writing at Alexandria, spawning new genres like the
commentary, the glossary and the index. Erudition, eclecticism and a penchant for system building
were the manifestations of the new scholarly style.
Cultural patronage
We may wonder why great rulers have so often patronized academic scholarship. One explanation is
straightforwardly, even cynically political. It holds that rulers invest in cultural capital to burnish their
reputations and paint their rivals as base warlords by comparison. Somewhat more satisfying is the
argument that scholars play a special role in the establishment of languages of power and commerce.
Neither of these explanations can account for why specifically writing offered the Ptolemies the most
efficient means of achieving their objectives.
GREEK VS. CHINESE
China’s “Warring States” epoch had been philosophically brilliant, a lot like classical Greece: this was
the era of Confucius, Plato’s rough contemporary, and a host of dynamic rival schools. But in 221 BCE
the Qin/Chin emperor put an end to this. He created China’s first unified empire. Burning of books: he
intended to clear the cobwebs of history and establish Qin as the zero hour in China’s subsequent
development. His book burning policy is inseparably connected with another, more positive cultural
policy: the standardization of written Chinese.
Whereas Chinese libraries were founded to stem the decay of a vanishing and partly destroyed
intellectual tradition in their own homeland, Hellenistic libraries developed to render an existing body
of knowledge reliably reproducible and physically portable.
TALES OF DESTRUCTION AND LOSS
Destruction:
- Alexandria’s library (by Julius Caesar)
- Military destruction from the East
- Hypatia
Greek knowledge and libraries in particular benefited enormously from Roman conquest.
Knowledge was the contested patrimony of a fractious multicultural metropolis.
Alexandria’s library had now no one left to tend and preserve it. Its collection ebbed away rather than
burning up, and decayed as the result of neglect rather than destruction.
Chapter 2: The Monastery (1000-1100)
Monasteries not only preserved learning through centuries of civilization collapse but forged new links
from the study of written texts to the marking and measurement of time.
In sixth-century Italy the civilization of classical antiquity was in a state of advanced collapse. None of
the schools or libraries of antiquity escaped extinction. But unlike them, Christian monasteries were
formed in conscious retreat from urban civilization, well before that civilization collapsed. They were
therefore remarkably well adapted to the preservation of learning in times of decay and devastation.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE WRITTEN WORD
Christianity began as a sectarian cult within Judaism, which, uniquely in the ancient Mediterranean,
held a well-defined body of written texts, the Torah. Christian texts were from the beginning adapted
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, for the immediate practical use of believers. Christians were the first to adopt a new physical format of
the book: the codex.
Christianity provided a way for learning to survice even in the absence of the living oral competition
that truly defined the ancient world.
BOOKS IN THE WILDERNESS
Desert ascetics, like cloistered monks, built their lives around a different attitude towards words and
texts: lectio divinaI, meditative reading, akin to prayer, devoted to God. The monastery was the first
institution of knowledge specifically adapted to the absence of civilization, to the wilderness. Western
European monks molded their lives around written texts, just as previous desert hermits had done and
indeed all Christians did. But lacking the luxury of steady traffic between desert and city, they had to
bring an entire culture of learning with them. In establishing a new model for European monastic
scriptoria, Casiodorus (ca. 490 – 580S) drew the next logical conclusion: that monasteries must be
deliberately designed to preserve ancient manuscripts.
TEXTS AND TIME IN THE BENEDICTINE RULE
The Rule attributed to Benedict of Nursia has literally provided a handbook for life for more than
fourteen centuries of monks, who follow its instructions on a daily basis, refreshing their
understanding of the text as needed. Time discipline was utterly central to the Rule. The Benedictine
Rule was condensed in the sixth century from the much longer, unwieldier Rule of the Master and
drew as well from Cassian’s Institues. In the prologue to the Rule, Benedict describes the monastery as
a “school for God’s service”, a training ground for the renunciation of personal will and utter devotion
to God.
In Benedict’s model monastery, the written word entirely dominated the spoken word. The Rule
consistently prefers silence to speech.
FROM THE LITURGICAL YEAR TO THE MILLENIAL WEEK
In the Christian worldview, both time and the world were God’s creations. The liturgical year, common
to both monks and laypeople, formed the heart of Christian unity. Feast days gathered believers not
only to recollect the milestones in Christ’s life and death but also ritually to relive them. Two holiday
cycles dominated the liturgical year, the birth of Jesus Christ and the preparation for his resurrection
on Easter Sunday. The precise calander date depends on four different cycles: that of the week (7
days), that of the moon (29,53 days) and that of the sun (365,2422), and that of the calendar year (365
or 366 days).
CODA: A.D. 1000 VS. THE KALIYUGA
Popular anticipation of the world’s end is a common feature of all the Western religions. The Kaliyuga,
our current era of decay and degeneration will culminate in a rolling series of global catastrophes. It is
slated to last 432000 years from its inception with the flood in our 3101 BCE. Then the world will be
reborn in another cucle, comprising bun one day in the life of Brahma the Creator (Buddism), ten
kaliyugas or 4.32 million years in length. Personal, historical and cosmic time unfolded on radically
different scales in India.
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