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vulvamancer posted:I was watching the Lindybeige video on routed units/armies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBQT6To2bLg and it got me wondering, were there historical battles where units that were routed got reorganized and came back to affect/swing the battle? I know there were feigned retreats, but any units that actually broke? Hastings 1066 might fit the bill, where the story goes that a general retreat happened, and even a rumour Duke William had been slain – so he had to take off his helmet to rally the men and show his face so they could see he was alive – and then Duke William launched a counterattack against the pursuers which defeated those units at least. There was the flight, and then the army was able to launch new assaults on the English/Saxon line later. I haven't looked over it in enough detail to know if the fleeing units were specifically instrumental, but it's entirely possible that was not mentioned. Perhaps Verneuil 1424, although I'm not as sure about that. I know the archers were routed, the mercenary knights assisting the French stopped to loot the baggage train rather than consolidate their victory, and then Bedford led an attack by the English knights against the remaining French while the mercenaries were busy with that. I would assume for it to be so effective that at least some of the English forces had to rally, but I don't find the rallying troops explicitly pointed out.
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Sep 25, 2016 21:11
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Hogge Wild posted:hah, I wasn't being sarcastic, I really did find it interesting Oh, fair enough.     "this is fine. I am OK with this situation". Ghost of Babyhead fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Sep 26, 2016 |
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Sep 26, 2016 20:44
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What's the writing up there? "Ban cunthail"? Probably for camping the stairs. Looks and sounds like goon shenanigans in Mount & Blade.
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Sep 26, 2016 20:58
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The Battle of Nicopolis (1396 CE) is something like what you're asking about, but not exactly. A combined Hungarian-German-French Crusade was in the Balkans to stop the advancing Ottoman Empire. When Sultan Bayezid advanced his army towards them, the French Crusaders made a headlong attack by themselves that routed the Ottoman archers and infantry. This left them some distance ahead of their allies and in considerable disorder. The Hungarians advised they should take a break to reform so they could advance as one force, but the French thought that they had broken the entire Ottoman army and began the pursuit to complete their victory. Bayezid had been holding his cavalry in reserve and he separately crushed first the French and then the Hungarians and Germans. So, it wasn't because the Ottoman infantry was able to reform, but it does show the dangers of a disorderly pursuit.
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Sep 26, 2016 22:01
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Look at this loving space helmet. [x]
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Sep 26, 2016 22:09
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I love this dude
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Sep 26, 2016 22:18
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JaucheCharly posted:What's the writing up there? "Ban cunthail"? Probably for camping the stairs. Not sure what the first word is, but the second looks like it might be "civitas?" I'm no paleographer though.
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Sep 26, 2016 23:28
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EvanSchenck posted:The Battle of Nicopolis (1396 CE) is something like what you're asking about, but not exactly. Robert E. Howard (of Conan the Barbarian fame) wrote a short story about this battle - titled "Lord of Samarcand." He's got a book of Middle Eastern historical fiction under the same name. The story itself is on Project Gutenberg, though.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:41
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On wagon chat: What gives, people who know more about history than I do have told me the dark age wasn't really a thing, but this really suggests otherwise.
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Sep 27, 2016 08:43
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Splode posted:On wagon chat: Many things regressed during the Early Middle Ages, but the term "Dark Age" is a bit overly dramatic imo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
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Sep 27, 2016 12:33
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Hogge Wild posted:Many things regressed during the Early Middle Ages, but the term "Dark Age" is a bit overly dramatic imo. cheers
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Sep 27, 2016 13:04
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Splode posted:On wagon chat: I have serious criticism for Weller's particular evidence, and indeed her core premise. I find it entirely unreasonable, and even intellectually dishonest, that she should use the Oseberg wagon as evidence of decline from Roman technology. Oseberg was never part of the Roman Empire (nor indeed Christian Europe in the wagon's time), and cannot reach the Roman road system by land. She provides no evidence that the Oseberg wagon is typical of other parts of Europe in the Middle Ages, nor indeed that wagons in Norway were better before 850 AD. She also makes very heavy use of the fact that wagons were not described in much detail until the 14th c., but, to borrow a phrase, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. We have very little writing surviving from the 5th-11th centuries, and what we do have to the best of my knowledge is not concerned with wagon construction, even after this period. While I certainly believe wagons might have become simpler in the Middle Ages, I think this requires more contextualization than Dr. Weller has given, and here we must examine her core premise, specifically that these wagons, by virtue of being more complex, were of superior usefulness. This is a questionable conclusion. While the wagon at Oseberg might not be technologically impressive, the ship is. This makes sense, as Norway was highly maritime. I find it very unlikely that the best woodworkers would be drawn to being cartwrights rather than shipbuilders, and I do not know how much use carts provided compared to ships. More broadly speaking (and possibly applicable to the rest of the Middle Ages) we must ask whether some of these technologies, like iron tires, were all that useful to the medieval wagoner. Without the broad political framework necessary to maintain the Roman roads at large, I am not sure the advantage was worth the associated expense, or if, for many parts of the Medieval world, it was an advantage at all. We can also ask why, for all the Romans' technological superiority, the wheelbarrow does not appear in Europe until the High Middle Ages. The answer can be made (fairly, I think) that it was not really needed. I take issue, therefore, with the idea that the presence or absence of a certain technology makes one society more technologically advanced (and, implicitly, superior) than another. Without any sort of impetus, toward complicating, modifying, or replacing existing technology (cultural, monetary, existential) then developing more advanced technology is wasted effort. That sort of after-the-fact judgement is always subjective, and generally includes assumptions about the value of the technology that are decontextualized. Technology outside of context, however, is meaningless. In this same way we can ask ourselves what is meant by the "Dark" part of the Dark Ages. Though the period saw decentralization of government, reduction in some infrastructure, and reduction in literacy, it also saw less slavery, fewer parasites and better swords. Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Sep 27, 2016 |
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Sep 27, 2016 16:40
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Just found out about the A Statute forbidding Bearing of Armour (1313) i.e the "you cannot wear a suit of armor in Parliament" law. Ignore the joking picture on the wiki, that armor is Historically Inaccurate with respect to an early-1300s edict. It was effectively a response to disgruntled nobles trying to intimidate King Edward II; when ordered to attend Parliament they did so fully armed, with personal armies camped outside. To re-assert the monarch's authority in the face of this nonsense, this sort of behavior became banned in Parliament and all other assemblies in England. It was a very reasonable decision to make at the time. To my limited knowledge, it looks like a reaction against the pro-noble trend established by stuff like the Magna Carta. The best part is that it's still in force today! It is, tragically, illegal to march into Westminster in full plate harness and challenge Boris Johnson to an honorable duel. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try though: its enforcement is historically quite lax.
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Sep 27, 2016 17:49
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the good news is i can contact several people who could do this, the bad news is they cannot speak english would he accept a challenge in german, polish, or czech
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Sep 27, 2016 17:50
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Sponsor me a harness and I'll gladly do it.
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Sep 27, 2016 17:51
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HEY GAL posted:the good news is i can contact several people who could do this, the bad news is they cannot speak english they might have to fight nearby ukip mps to get through to him, but i don't see why he wouldn't. Siivola posted:Sponsor me a harness and I'll gladly do it. you want gothic or greenwich?? Bendigeidfran fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Sep 27, 2016 |
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Sep 27, 2016 18:01
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There wasn't so much a loss of technology in the middle ages as there was a loss of industrial capacity from the downfall of the roman empire. I don't think there are too many examples of actual innovations being lost to the ages except for the exact recipe for greek fire and that one time it turned out Archimedes discovered calculus. Far more important to the layman perspective, is the fact that if you look at a glance at the shift from ancient to medieval is that the narrative that most of us follow along shifts location by a couple thousand miles, while the actual resources and power structures of the world moved a couple thousand miles in the opposite direction towards anatolia and the middle east. Rome may have seen better days, but it was still a massive city. In comparison to the glories of ancient Rome, England and Germany seemed like a much of idiot mud farmers, but they weren't any better during the ancient era. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Sep 28, 2016 |
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Sep 27, 2016 22:16
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English, and by extension British, history seems to basically be one long tug of war between the nobles/parliament and the monarchy.
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Sep 27, 2016 23:14
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Holy gently caress  Between this and that ancient Greek steam engine and the Antikythera mechanism it makes you wonder how many other incredible scientific inventions or discoveries were lost. There's a typo in your URL btw 
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Sep 27, 2016 23:22
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Bendigeidfran posted:Just found out about the A Statute forbidding Bearing of Armour (1313) i.e the "you cannot wear a suit of armor in Parliament" law. Ignore the joking picture on the wiki, that armor is Historically Inaccurate with respect to an early-1300s edict. I imagine the law exists to prevent Brian Blessed from entering parliament and threatening them while wearing armor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHihAPr2Rc
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Sep 29, 2016 22:26
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I promised elsewhere to post about the medieval papacy and the 'crisis of church and state'. The idea here is to kind of explore how, in broad survey, the church grew a pair of balls big enough to issue a number of very aggressive papal bulls, the most famous of which is Unam Sanctam of 1302, and how the likely author of that bull felt intellectually justified in claiming in his own treatise that the pope was the owner of all the property in the world. To do that, I'll present you with a lot of background material about the intellectual framework underpinning the medieval papacy, and explain some key concepts of medieval political thought. Medieval Political Thought I: Augustine of Hippo It is often said about the medieval period (as well as the Renaissance) that these are the periods in which Europe re-discovers the legacy of Greece and Rome, as opposed to a more stark Christian vision. When you read Augustine you can see where those people are coming from while simultaneously seeing that they are wrong. St. Augustine (354-430) was a late Roman bishop in the city of Hippo Regius in Algeria who spent a lot of time ruminating about the chaos of late-Roman civilization. He was also a great admirer of Rome’s achievements, and saw a kind of providence in the development of a world empire that could facilitate a world embrace of Christianity. Then he got jaded about it. Augustine’s greatest contribution to medieval political thought comes in his great work of 426, De Civitate Dei contra Paganos [On the City of God Against the Pagans] . One of Augustine’s many achievements in his majesterial 1000 page text is to reconfigure the classical political vocabulary to work with his view of Christianity, particularly by reworking Cicero. The first ten books of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei are concerned with repudiating the arguments made by Roman pagans (there was a lot of pro and anti-Christian polemic in late Rome) that the misfortunes of the empire were caused by the rejection of the ancient pantheon of Roman tradition: such was the stigma in Roman society against the adoption of new ideas against old traditions that this was often referred to as renovatio rather than innovatio in classical Rome to avoid the suggestion that tradition could be broken from or shunned. Breaking with tradition was a terrible taboo; Christianity threatened tradition. Augustine attempts to show how inconsistent it is to claim both that the Pantheon of Roman gods was strong and able to protect the eternal city, when the same gods could not protect Troy – indeed, some of them destroyed it. Minerva showed no power in intervening to prevent such an atrocity against Rome’s mythical father. Moreover, Rome had suffered its own misfortunes over time, Augustine argues, before Christ ever came: “The second Punic War, however, brought with it the greatest loss and calamity to the commonwealth. For eighteen years, indeed, it drained, and almost consumed, the strength of the Romans…Let those who read history therefore recollect how protracted were the wars waged by the Romans of old, and how varied was their outcome, and how lamentable the slaughter which they occasioned.” (Book V, Ch. XXIV) Augustine basically just demolishes Roman paganism at every turn both by pointing to examples of where the Gods have seemingly behaved inconsistently, but also the way in which Roman society has been inconsistent about them. For example, in the ten tables of Roman law, death can be the punishment for slander of a real person; slander of the gods in the theatre, however, is entirely permitted: “Why then, O Scipio, do you praise the fact that Roman poets were denied such licence, lest they inflict any dishonour upon the Roman People, when you see they spared none for your gods? Does it seem to you that your Senate house should be held in greater esteem than the Capitol, and Rome alone than the whole of heaven?” (Book II, Ch. XIII) It’s a devastating onslaught, and once he feels like he’s shown Rome’s paganism to be both immoral and ineffective, Augustine then feels capable of making a more philosophical argument in favour of Christianity and against paganism. Here Augustine makes a couple of moves. In book XIX, Augustine retreads the dialogues of Cicero to lay out Cicero’s definition of the res publica – the republic, or the commonwealth. The commonwealth is defined by Cicero (through the voice of Scipio) simply as ‘the property of a people’. So what is a people? A people is a group ‘united in fellowship by common agreement to what is right and by a community of interest.’ Here Cicero hilariously claims rhetoricians founded the first cities, since they could inspire such agreement. They can use this apparatus to establish justice, which gives each man his due and preserves the life of the commonwealth – the commonwealth fails without justice, and becomes a vile mutation without it is no true commonwealth at all. Then Augustine strikes: ‘But the unjust institutions of men are neither to be called right or supposed to be such’...Where there is no justice there is no commonwealth. Moreover, justice is that virtue which gives to each his due. What kind of justice is it, then, that takes a man away from the true god and subjects him to impure demons? Is this ‘giving each his due’...?’ (Book XIX, Ch. XXI) Augustine therefore denies that the Roman Republic deserved the name Republic at all. For if the republic requires justice, and an agreement as to what is right, how can it ever be a republic without the only true moral precepts, namely, those of Christianity: ‘No such commonwealth ever existed, because true justice was never present in it. There was, of course, according to a more practicable definition, a commonwealth of a sort; and it was certainly better administered by the Romans of more ancient times than by those who have come after them. True justice, however, does not exist other than in that commonwealth whose Founder and Ruler is Christ.’ (ibid) This rich passage is one of the most significant foundations of the political thought of the medieval church. It has a lot going on. On one reading Augustine is saying that true justice exists only in the spiritual world, in which people are seperated in to two celestial cities: the City of God, in which men love god in contempt of self, and the City of self-love, in contempt of God. But on the other hand, Augustine is also talking about reality: though he has contempt for the entire concept of politics, he still thinks it best that the world be governed in accordance with Christian virtues, because it’s as close as we can get to a true commonwealth on earth, and provides us with a framework for contemplating God’s grace. Augustine therefore applauds Constantine and Theodosius as Christian rulers. But in the end he goes further: “The millennial kingdom is not a future reign of Christ in the world, like the Chiliasts say, but the present kingdom of the church. This is the binding of the devil. It began with the spread of Christianity outside Judaism. The ‘thrones and they that sat upon them’ are the rulers of the churches. The souls that reign with Christ a thousand years are the martyrs. The beast is the society of wicked man, opposed to the company of God’s servants and fighting against His holy city.” (Book XX, Ch. VI) This opens the door to a whole line of argument that the Church belongs not only at the head of spiritual affairs, but also at the head of worldly ones. It makes the church the only means by which political unity can be attained because it is only through the church that grace can be conveyed and only with God’s external agency that justice can be attained. But it's not actually Augustine's intention to make the church and state one, he's much to pessimistic about the murky nature of the real world to try to make paradise in it. But these passages allow later thinkers to easily conflate the idea of the ‘two cities’ with the later tension between secular and religious power. There are a few other quick things to say about how Augustine gets here. For one thing, his view of human nature is much dimmer than that of, say, Aristotle or Cicero. Plato and Aristotle maintained that man was a social being capable of virtue and rational thought, and that by a conscious application of at least some men’s natural gifts they could attain a state of happiness within an ordered society, the highest virtues of which were justice and reason. This, to Aristotle, was man’s natural purpose, and by reaching it one could attain the highest virtue and therefore the highest good, happiness. The later Augustine, having immersed himself in the bible after his ordination, could not accept this: “Felicity consists in the full attainment of all desirable things…it is…a gift of God. Therefore no god should be worshipped by men except one who is able to bestow felicity on them…if felicity itself were a goddess, we might fairly say that Felicity alone would be the proper object of worship….” Augustine saw all good as emanating from god, and evil merely defined as his absence; when Adam committed the original sin, he made a wrong and wilful choice to turn away from God. There is a contempt for the worldly and profound religiousity, however, in Platonism, and insofar as Augustine owes a deep philosophical debt to the Greeks, it is to that part of the neoplatonist tradition (though he did not have the Laws in which Plato himself shows himself to be sceptical of secular life). This will be important later. Moreover, Adam’s original sin, also lost for his entire race the natural order in which man was intended to live: man, then, was fundamentally flawed, bound for the duration of earthly time to endure pain and suffering and the scourge of temporal power. In Aristotle, man is the ‘political animal’ - political association is a high expression of his nature. For Augustine, the polis is emblematic of man’s defects, and is unnatural: we require the state to hold off the utmost anarchy, and, moreover, as a scourge from God to punish us for sin. To quote directly: “sin is the mother of servitude and the first cause of man’s subjection to man.” (Book XV, Ch. XV) Living in divine love and good will, man would have dwelled in spontaneous peace and cooperation, and in total equality and without government except before god. ‘Not man over man, but man over the beasts. Hence, the first just men were established as shepherds over flocks, rather than as kings of men.’ (Book XIX, Ch. XV.) Augustine was not a politician, and his views on these matters were scattered and inconsistent. He didn’t actually care about church/state arguments very much, he was too busy trying to work out predestination and observing his world explode. Augustine, after his own personal conversion, and particularly after his experience of the sack of Rome, valued political association and all other temporalities with a far greater sense of skepticism; the ultimate value of all things, for Augustine, related only to the spiritual benefits that could accrue from them. What Augustine does here is subvert the classical political vocabulary in a Christian way, opening a door through which ambitions men will follow. And he leaves belief in worldly institutions and human virtue at a very low level. Which is where we'll pick up with Aquinas. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Oct 4, 2016 |
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Sep 30, 2016 20:40
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Sep 30, 2016 21:27
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:While I certainly believe wagons might have become simpler in the Middle Ages, I think this requires more contextualization than Dr. Weller has given, and here we must examine her core premise, specifically that these wagons, by virtue of being more complex, were of superior usefulness. This is a questionable conclusion. While the wagon at Oseberg might not be technologically impressive, the ship is. This makes sense, as Norway was highly maritime. I find it very unlikely that the best woodworkers would be drawn to being cartwrights rather than shipbuilders, and I do not know how much use carts provided compared to ships. I'm not aware of a word for a Viking fanatic, so I invented Sveaboo. The guy who wrote that ship article is a Sveaboo. There are no massive differences between ancient penteconters and Viking longships. quote:But this particular people had one additional advantage, at least as far as discovery and exploration went. This advantage had nothing to with engineering and everything to do with psychology and the type of thinking that would enable a group of sailors to head for the horizon on the open ocean, not having any idea what would greet them when they got there. In effect, to go on what many would have considered an early middle ages suicide mission. lol Vikings didn't just head for the horizon on the open sea, they were very careful sailors, and found new lands only by accident.
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Sep 30, 2016 21:34
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Hogge Wild posted:There are no massive differences between ancient penteconters and Viking longships. This isn't an area I've got any specialist knowledge on, but isn't the key difference in the construction? As I understand it, the classical equivalent would be basically a self supporting shell of boards mortised 'n' tenoned together, with a supporting frame added afterwards, while the northern Europeans used clinker hulls, which were stronger for their weight, and cheaper to build.
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Oct 1, 2016 01:32
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Hogge Wild posted:I'm not aware of a word for a Viking fanatic, so I invented Sveaboo. The guy who wrote that ship article is a Sveaboo. There are no massive differences between ancient penteconters and Viking longships. I've heard thoraboo
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Oct 1, 2016 18:22
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where the hell were you, my man
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Oct 1, 2016 18:29
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It's a bit silly that all Norsemen in the Viking Age are collectively referred to as vikings when only a portion of them actually were. It'd be like if we talked about Medieval Frenchmen and Englishmen as "The Knights" and called all Japanese during and around the Sengoku Jidai as "the Samurais". Or even if we called modern Americans "Retail salespersons".
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Oct 1, 2016 19:06
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nsfw
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Oct 2, 2016 00:20
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Oct 5, 2016 20:35
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History of Medieval Political Thought IIA – Aristotle returns to the western canon We’ll get in to hard politics eventually, but for now I want to provide some more deep intellectual background and we’ve taken a big leap from the last post about Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas. A great deal of other thinkers of course came between the 400’s and the 1200’s. A few names in particular come to mind: Gregory the Great, Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, the Decretals, Gregorian Reform, Gregory VII, Averroes, the investiture controversy etc. etc., some of which we’ll touch on in future posts. But in terms of fundamental intellectual underpinnings the undoubtedly three biggest names of post 13th century medieval Europe are Aristotle, St. Augustine of Hippo, and Thomas Aquinas, whose project was to try to unify Augustine with the Aristotelian tradition. This post will introduce Aristotle’s political project. Perhaps I should have done this first. I. Aristotle’s political project Aristotle was a commentator on virtually every subject of inquiry of his time. There’s an old saying that he may have been the last person who could have claimed to have known everything a person could know about the world. His influence on the medieval period was wide-ranging, far outside of the political realm – which is why I’m not going to get too far in to it. Suffice to say, he revolutionised subjects like legal theory, artistic theory, logic, ‘biology’, as well as ethics and theology, and continued to do so in to the renaissance; scholastic education is only truly dead at around the time someone like Blaise Pascal is writing in the early 17th century. There are two primary sources, the Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics, which were probably designed to be understood as a unity. Their relationship can be described like this: ‘The Ethics sets out the form of the good life as it may be realized by the best men in a good state, while the Politics exhibits the constitutive principles of the good state itself.’ As that quotation suggests, Aristotle believed in building a system up from first principles. Here are some of the first principles of his political project. i. Distributive Justice In the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle famously gives a definition of justice that is preserved today, and defines his political theory: ‘equals to equals, and unequals to unequals’(V.iii). This is sometimes called his concept of ‘distributive justice’. What Aristotle meant by this was that justice consists in an idea of equality, where people are treated in proportion to their conduct and characteristics. For example, we accept as axiomatically just that a man who invests 10 pounds of silver receives ten times the return on his investment as a man who invests one pound of silver. Equality and Justice, for Aristotle, function in this way. ii. Self-Sufficient Happiness, the Highest Good Aristotle also defines the purpose of the good life and the good state: eudaimonia, which literally means having a good spirit but is usually translated as happiness or human flourishing. Aristotle’s definition of happiness is not typical. Everything, Aristotle claims, has a purpose (telos): the end of ‘every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good’, and if everything we do aims for something good which ‘we want for its own sake’ and ‘if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else’, then there must be an ultimate good we are aiming for. Aristotle calls this happiness. In other words, happiness is the good in which all other goods consist. To give an example: I don’t eat because I want to eat, I eat because of hunger; I don’t satisfy my hunger merely to sate it, but to permit myself to to be nourished undertake activity, like work; I don’t work just to work, but for money and to fulfill a part of my nature etc. etc. and I can go up this causative chain until I find that it’s all structured towards one ultimate goal of contented self-fulfillment, that is subservient to no other purpose, or is ‘self-sufficient’. To put it another way, it is an unimproveablly good state of affairs. This teleological attitude extends to the Politics, where, in the prolegomenon, he described politics as 'the highest master science' that aims for the 'highest good'. Since every skill and activity aims at a certain good, and since, according to Aristotle, there cannot be an infinite progression of goods, since this would make human activity without fulfilment, the highest skill must aim at the highest good. His highest activity must be politics, since politics affects the way in which all other arts and sciences are practised, and to what degree. (Ethics I.i-ii) Moreover, the virtuous life of the individual involves participation in the life of the community if it is to be completely happy, rendering the happiness of the individual contingent on the welfare of the polity and visa versa. iii. The Necessity for Citizen Participation in the Polity There are several reasons that Aristotle believes that citizens should participate in the life of the polity, including in government. The principal three are: Firstly, Aristotle argues that political association is natural: 'man is by nature a political animal [zoon politikon]' (Politics, I.ii). Basic forms of association are necessary to satisfy basic needs: family, the need for reproduction; the village, the need for safe housing, goods and food. As the complexity and magnitude of the association increases, so does its potential for satisfying higher goods, like culture, as a natural extension. This is a stark contrast with Augustine’s attitude seen in the previous post – Augustine sees dominion of men over men as an unnatural punishment for original sin. Secondly, as we have seen, the highest activity of man is politics, since it directs all other aspects of the community. If the fully happy life is unimprovable, it follows that that life must involve civic participation as one of its activities. Thirdly, it is vital to Aristotle’s preferred constitutional arrangements – mixed constitutions or aristocracies – that there be some diffusion of political power. iv. Who gets to be a Citizen – and why Distributive Justice Matters to Politics What Aristotle believed with regards to equality ultimately sets up a set of political relationships, whereby the principle of distributive justice determines which group of people should be given political rights in accordance with their capacity and characteristics. By dint of nature, women, children and natural slaves are all taken to be incompetent to possess political rights. Women are taken to possess the 'deliberative element to the fullest degree...the slave is wholly lacking…the female has it but lacks authority; the child has it but is incomplete'. (Politics, I xiii) Later, when Aristotle considers different forms of constitutions, he finds a despotic form of rule appropriate only for natural slaves, since some individuals are taken to lack a deliberative faculty and therefore require a natural master to direct them. Paternal and marital rule is taken as separate and defensible on the grounds of the female lack of authority, constituted according to nature. In both cases the relationship is ordained for “common advantage” and such arrangements are “correct and just without qualification.” (Politics, III.vi) Realistically this also removes ill-educated free males from the ranks of citizens, as well as those without the financial resources to have sufficient leisure to pursue things other than their profession. v. The Oscar for Best Constitution Goes to... Aristotle developed a system of analysing constitutions which became the dominant paradigm of the middle ages and the renaissance. In Aristotle, constitutions are of three principle types – rule by the one, the few and the many (Politics III.vii). These constitutional types can be pursued correctly or incorrectly, leading to there being six possible constitutional permutations: kingship and tyranny; aristocracy and oligarchy; and polity and democracy. In his third book, when Aristotle discusses the explicit link between these constitutions and distributive justice, he goes on to dispute the relative virtue of each system. As above, Aristotle describes the way in which each system reflects a certain view of distributive justice, and thereby also each constitution's conception of the purpose of political association. For Aristotle, democratic constitutions seek a broader expansion of liberty, whereas oligarchic constitutions pursue fiscal and material interests. Kingship, on the other hand, is held to be illogical because the virtue of a single person extremely rarely exceeds the virtue of a group. None of these ends is the telos of the city, which instead is taken to be 'the good life' – a life which permits the pursuit of noble actions (Politics III.ix). Just rule is therefore inherently aristocratic because political rights are assigned to those who pursue the virtuous and good life – but aristocratic in the true sense, where it means ‘rule by the best’, rather than something to be contrasted with meritocracy. If, the “good life is the end of the city-state”, if political arrangements are best where they are ordained for common advantage, if justice consists of giving to each his due and if some are created with a greater deliberative faculty than others, then the most just constitution is necessarily aristocratic. These ‘best’ individuals would share in government, since Aristotle's definition of citizenship is a capacity to hold office, sharing their best judgements so as to produce the best decisions. The people must be included so as to prevent their anger, and because the wisdom of the masses is in some respects still valid: 'combined with the better class they are useful to the state'. Aristotle ultimately accepts that his ideal is an unlikely balance to be struck and accepts that monarchy or a 'mixed constitution' is a more likely and pragmatic form of government for most states, since a 'mixed constitution' combines elements of all constitutions and provides political stability by involving almost all of the classes, slaves excepted, in political society; aristocratic government, while good, is a high wire act to pull off and hold on to. II. Aristotle’s Transmission to Medieval Europe i. Format of his work Aristotle originally wrote in dialogues in the manner of Plato, and these were, like Plato’s, studied across the Greco-Roman world. They are more or less entirely lost to us. A likely reason for this loss is the increased availability in the Roman era of many of the works we have today. The Ethics and the Politics both were not, it is supposed, written by Aristotle, and are likely lecture notes made by a student of his speeches in the Lyceum, or else works written under his supervision. Resultantly, they’re a condensed and more direct form – it is a lot easier to discern what Aristotle thinks and why he thinks it than it is for Plato. It also renders his work occasionally dry. These lecture notes were lost in almost their entirety in medieval Europe after the fall of the Roman empire, as were Greek and Latin literacy to a large degree until the Carolingian renaissance from the late 700’s to the early 800’s. Not only was a lot of work destroyed by violence and neglect, but also simply by lack of active efforts at retransmission – his work would have originally existed largely on Papyrus, which needs to be replaced periodically by an industry of copyists. This is one thing the new monasteries founded by the Carolingians recreates. ii. Retransmission from the Muslim World Though lost to Europeans, these works were, however, preserved in the Islamic world, where scholars had conscientiously built upon Greek learning for centuries, particularly in Persia, Spain and Iraq. The most famous Islamic thinkers who responded to and built on Aristotle were ‘rationalist’ theologians like Al-Kindi (801 – 873), Avicenna (Ibn-Sīnā , 980– 1037), Al-Biruni (973 – 1048) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126 – 1198). Then came Ash’arites, who overthrew their school – most famously Al Ghazali (1058 – 1111) who rejected Greek philosophy. Cultural interaction with the Islamic states became much more serious and substantial in the 11th and 12th centuries, principally because of the Spanish Reconquista and the Crusades, as well as the Norman conquest of Sicily. Although we don’t tend to think of war as a form of cultural exchange, wars between cultures often facilitate it – particularly where there is conquest and an adjustment to new cultures, as there was in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This led to the translation of Islamic texts in to Latin over the course of the next several centuries. Aristotle’s was the first to be reproduced from Greek philosophy, with Latin translations of the following works appearing at approximately the following times: Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations – trans. Boethius, early 5th century. Posterior Analytics, De anima, Physics – James of Venice, c.1125-1150. Metaphysics – Michael Scot, 1220’s. Nicomachean Ethics – Robert Grosseteste, 1247. Politics – William of Moerbeke, 1260 (consequently, not available in time for Aquinas’s Summa). Plato’s work was not to be reproduced in Latin until the 1400’s, by Marsilio Ficino, with the exception of the Timaeus, translated by Chalcidius in c. 400. Plato did, however, retain a powerful underlying influence over medieval philosophy indirectly, through the neoplatonism of St. Augustine, as well as that of a number of commentators on Aristotle, including Averroes; Plotinus was also highly popular in the Islamic world, while unavailable in the west. And, of course, Platonism is an element of Aristotle’s work. We’ll come to how this effects medieval thought in coming posts. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Oct 6, 2016 |
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Oct 6, 2016 02:07
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And here I thought that Aristotle's works were just a giant list of animals, a summary of physics as they best knew it at the time, teaching Alexander the great, and getting snubbed by Plato for being a nerd.
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Oct 6, 2016 04:32
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Man, these are great posts and perfectly timed since i just finished rereading The Name of the Rose and my curiosity was piqued about this very subject.
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Oct 6, 2016 05:24
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a kitten posted:Man, these are great posts and perfectly timed since i just finished rereading The Name of the Rose and my curiosity was piqued about this very subject. If you want to know something about the intellectual dimensions of that question, ask. The depiction of the argument concerning the property of christ is certainly very accurate: this was indeed a defining question for Franciscans and more radical heretic strands, which resulted in some extreme theological flexibility on the part of the church to keep the Franciscans in.
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Oct 6, 2016 06:31
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SimonCat posted:I imagine the law exists to prevent Brian Blessed from entering parliament and threatening them while wearing armor. Came for this. Leaving satisfied 
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Oct 7, 2016 20:19
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Did a True absolute monarchy exist outside of fairy tales?
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Oct 11, 2016 16:07
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Haven't had the chance to go through this whole thread, so if you already answered this let me know. How do you think the typical battle played out? The theory I've heard the most is that it was essentially a spear-to-shield shoving match where people would try to trip up or get a critical stab on the other side to break the line, but I wanted to get your thoughts. Edit: To clarify, I mean how it would play out assuming everything is the same (tactics, quality of soldiers and equipment, environment and terrain, etc). VVVVV Edit 2: It's really more of a psychology of war question. I basically wanted to know what he thinks generally happened when the two main bodies of an army meet and how a battle generally played out. While it's true the technology and way wars are fought have changed since WWII, people have broadly have the same mentality and go through similar motions when placed in similar situations over the generations. MizPiz fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Oct 13, 2016 |
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Oct 12, 2016 19:39
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"The typical battle" What decade, where, and who is involved? I mean WW2 was less than a century ago and battles happen pretty differently now.
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Oct 12, 2016 22:31
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Well maybe Franco's guys called themselves Falangist for a reason...
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Oct 13, 2016 00:59
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Baron Porkface posted:Did a True absolute monarchy exist outside of fairy tales? What's a fairly tale absolute monarchy look like? Seems like either France or Russia is bound to check that box at some point.
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Oct 13, 2016 03:35
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Baron Porkface posted:Did a True absolute monarchy exist outside of fairy tales? Helps if you set your bar for what a 'true' one would be.
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Oct 13, 2016 04:13
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