Monthly Archives: September 2012

So, what did the Muslims do for the Jews? By David Wasserstein

Posted on by
Reply

The Jewish Chronicle* –

This article on historical perspective of Muslim and Jewish relations is worth reading. The author, David Wasserstein, starts the article by saying;” Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world.”

Even if one may think that it is an overblown claim, but the historical back ground at least gives the reader a pause to reflect upon  misplaced Islamophobia in the Western world and  minorities intolerance in the Muslim world.

The author writes about the early period of fourth century;

“By the fourth century, Christianity had become the dominant religion in the Roman empire. One aspect of this success was opposition to rival faiths, including Judaism, along with massive conversion of members of such faiths, sometimes by force, to Christianity. Much of our testimony about Jewish existence in the Roman empire from this time on consists of accounts of conversions. Great and permanent reductions in numbers through conversion, between the fourth and the seventh centuries, brought with them a gradual but relentless whittling away of the status, rights, social and economic existence, and religious and cultural life of Jews all over the Roman empire.”

The author writes about the seventh century onward;

“Within a century of the death of Mohammad, in 632, Muslim armies had conquered almost the whole of the world where Jews lived, from Spain eastward across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the eastern frontier of Iran and beyond. Almost all the Jews in the world were now ruled by Islam. This new situation transformed Jewish existence. Their fortunes changed in legal, demographic, social, religious, political, geographical, economic, linguistic and cultural terms – all for the better.”

The author states that although the Jews were living as second class citizens under Muslim rule but;

“This should not be misunderstood: to be a second-class citizen was a far better thing to be than not to be a citizen at all. For most of these Jews, second-class citizenship represented a major advance. In Visigothic Spain, for example, shortly before the Muslim conquest in 711, the Jews had seen their children removed from them and forcibly converted to Christianity and had themselves been enslaved.”

The author further writes about this Islamic period;

“Much of the greatest poetry in Hebrew written since the Bible comes from this period. Sa’adya Gaon, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra (Moses and Abraham), Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi, Yehudah al-Harizi, Samuel ha-Nagid, and many more – all of these names, well known today, belong in the first rank of Jewish literary and cultural endeavour. “

The author further writes that the Islamic Spain was the Jewish Golden Age and states:

“What happened in Islamic Spain – waves of Jewish cultural prosperity paralleling waves of cultural prosperity among the Muslims – exemplifies a larger pattern in Arab Islam. In Baghdad, between the ninth and the twelfth centuries; in Qayrawan (in north Africa), between the ninth and the 11th centuries; in Cairo, between the 10th and the 12th centuries, and elsewhere, the rise and fall of cultural centres of Islam tended to be reflected in the rise and fall of Jewish cultural activity in the same places. “

The Author further writes about the Thirteen century and concluding paragraphs;

“This did not last for ever; the period of culturally successful symbiosis between Jew and Arab Muslim in the middle ages came to a close by about 1300. In reality, it had reached this point even earlier, with the overall relative decline in the importance and vitality of Arabic culture, both in relation to western European cultures and in relation to other cultural forms within Islam itself; Persian and Turkish. Jewish cultural prosperity in the middle ages operated in large part as a function of Muslim, Arabic cultural (and to some degree political) prosperity: when Muslim Arabic culture thrived, so did that of the Jews; when Muslim Arabic culture declined, so did that of the Jews. In the case of the Jews, however, the cultural capital thus created also served as the seed-bed of further growth elsewhere – in Christian Spain and in the Christian world more generally.

The Islamic world was not the only source of inspiration for the Jewish cultural revival that came later in Christian Europe, but it certainly was a major contributor to that development. Its significance cannot be overestimated.

To read the complete long article please click on the link below. 

http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/68082/so-what-did-muslims-do-jews

 

 

Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?

Posted on by
Reply

Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss

Philosopher Julian Baggini fears that, as we learn more and more about the universe, scientists are becoming increasingly determined to stamp their mark on other disciplines. Here, he challenges theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss over ‘mission creep’ among his peers.Click link below to read the conversation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/sep/09/science-philosophy-debate-julian-baggini-lawrence-krauss

IS US ECONOMIC GROWTH OVER ?

Posted on by
Reply

Paul Krugman pointed to this provocative paper by Robert Gordon

This paper raises basic questions about the process of economic growth. It questions the assumption, nearly universal since Solow’s seminal contributions of the 1950s, that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. The paper is only about the United States and views the future from 2007 while pretending that the financial crisis did not happen. Its point of departure is growth in per-capita real GDP in the frontier country since 1300, the U.K. until 1906 and the U.S. afterwards. Growth in this frontier gradually accelerated after 1750, reached a peak in the middle of the 20th century, and has been slowing down since. The paper is about “how much further could the frontier growth rate decline?”

The analysis links periods of slow and rapid growth to the timing of the three industrial revolutions (IR’s), that is, IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830; IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present. It provides evidence that IR #2 was more important than the others and was largely responsible for 80 years of relatively rapid productivity growth between 1890 and 1972. Once the spin-off inventions from IR #2 (airplanes, air conditioning, interstate highways) had run their course, productivity growth during 1972-96 was much slower than before. In contrast, IR #3 created only a short-lived growth revival between 1996 and 2004. Many of the original and spin-off inventions of IR #2 could happen only once – urbanization, transportation speed, the freedom of females from the drudgery of carrying tons of water per year, and the role of central heating and air conditioning in achieving a year-round constant temperature.

Even if innovation were to continue into the future at the rate of the two decades before 2007, the U.S. faces six headwinds that are in the process of dragging long-term growth to half or less of the 1.9 percent annual rate experienced between 1860 and 2007. These include demography, education, inequality, globalization, energy/environment, and the overhang of consumer and government debt. A provocative “exercise in subtraction” suggests that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution could fall below 0.5 percent per year for an extended period of decades.Click link below to read full article;

http://av.r.ftdata.co.uk/files/2012/08/IS-U.S.-ECONOMIC-GROWTH-OVER-FALTERING-INNOVATION-CONFRONTS.pdf

Emrys Westacott on Philosophy and Everyday Living

Posted on by
Reply

This interview is from “The Browser”

Philosophy is sometimes assumed to be a dry, academic subject but, in reality, is anything but. A philosophy professor tells us how his subject is at least as much about how we live, love and relate to each other.

Your own book, The Virtues of our Vices makes, I think, a brilliant case for applying philosophy to everyday living, because, as you point out in the introduction, apparently trivial things – like a colleague being rude to us – have a much bigger impact on us on a day-to-day basis than ruminations on the meaning of life.

A lot of philosophy concerns fairly theoretical issues – the correct definition of concepts like justice, the relation between mind and body, or the nature of the soul. These are problems that have been inherited down the years from Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Kant. There is another tradition which sees philosophy as a reflection on life. This includes discussion of ethical problems that we face, but also focuses on the way we conduct ourselves, the way we live, the way we relate to each other. I see my book as a contribution to that tradition. Not so much an attempt to solve complex metaphysical problems, or problems in the theory of knowledge or the philosophy of mind, but a reflection on the way we live.

Do you feel this side of philosophy has been neglected?

I do. In one of the books I’ve chosen, The Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, William Irvine makes this very explicit. In ancient times, Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers did deal with theoretical problems, but the Greeks and the Romans understood philosophy as something that people had and used in everyday life, and there were competing schools of philosophy.

Yes, I love that bit in the book, where Irvine describes how as an ancient Greek you had to choose a school of philosophy for your child – whether to send them to the Cynic school, or the Stoic school, or the Sceptic school – just like today we might grapple with whether to send them to private or public school.

Yes. So that tradition of philosophy, as a reflection on life and a guide to living, has never died out. You can trace it through Plato, Epicurus, the Stoics, Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Thoreau all the way to the present day. But in the past few hundred years, it’s very much taken a back seat while the more heavy duty metaphysics, theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, political philosophy and grand theories of morality in moral philosophy, have tended to take centre stage. When you look at a standard introduction to philosophy or to ethics, it’ll usually be about these great theoretical problems. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with discussing those big theoretical problems, I just think it’s a shame that the tradition of philosophy as a reflection on life and a guide to life has been marginalised. Click link below to read full interview.

http://thebrowser.com/interviews/emrys-westacott-on-philosophy-and-everyday-living?page=1