
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
The extraordinary spread of Islam after 632 - from Central Asia to North Africa in a century - reached Europe from the eighth century, generating issues still energising to this day. Not ones of religion, though, but of technology.
Within a few generations, the devices 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. Were we becoming uncoupled from the cosmos? How might our existence relate to our essence? Can the human 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.
Their questions about occasionalism, the eternity of the cosmos, and unified intelligence can help us now. These reflections reveal how existence flows from divine being, the momentary nature of time reflects eternity, many minds echo the one intelligence.
Their work offers us imaginative, spiritual space to refind participation with spirit and God as the millennia-long story of the machine continues.
4.8
1212 ratings
The extraordinary spread of Islam after 632 - from Central Asia to North Africa in a century - reached Europe from the eighth century, generating issues still energising to this day. Not ones of religion, though, but of technology.
Within a few generations, the devices 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. Were we becoming uncoupled from the cosmos? How might our existence relate to our essence? Can the human 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.
Their questions about occasionalism, the eternity of the cosmos, and unified intelligence can help us now. These reflections reveal how existence flows from divine being, the momentary nature of time reflects eternity, many minds echo the one intelligence.
Their work offers us imaginative, spiritual space to refind participation with spirit and God as the millennia-long story of the machine continues.
162 Listeners
1,532 Listeners
424 Listeners
385 Listeners
86 Listeners
586 Listeners
1,563 Listeners
823 Listeners
342 Listeners
243 Listeners
470 Listeners
949 Listeners
225 Listeners
110 Listeners
45 Listeners