re: #92 Fairly Sure I’m Still Obdicut

Without having read much of him, my understanding is that the singling him out as some sort of extreme metaphysical evil who retarded all science is dumb; he said some things that were not helpful to science but there are oodles of Christians who said similar stuff and we managed to have an Enlightenment just fine.

The reasons for the lack of an Islamic enlightenment seem like a long, complex story, and I’d blame the Ottoman empire a lot more than any individual Islamic scholar.

The “great man” theories of history that attribute large social changes exclusively to the actions of specific individuals are usually too simplistic to be take seriously, especially in relation to philosophy where using military force to create a decisive victory isn’t an option.

My pet theory about the lack of an Islamic enlightenment is that early Islam didn’t have decades of persecution by civil authorities like the early Christians did under the Romans. IMO that persecution helped embed the idea in Christianity that the church and the state need not be identical.