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Question, are Tom Holland's assertations in Dominion about Christianity (and some of its antecedents) being the root point for our conceptions of basically everything positive in the world regarding perceptions of human rights taken seriously by historians? I've read confusing things about this elsewhere, or r/askhistorians there's a lot of critique of Holland but it seems a bit astonishing to suggest that the other philosophical trends across human history are essentially brutish in comparison to Christianity and what it influenced.
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Jan 24, 2024 03:06
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Idk about that book specifically, but Tom Holland has made some extremely heterodox assertions in previous books
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Jan 24, 2024 03:15
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The idea of universal human rights (not Christians' rights, not eg Englishmens' rights) is an Enlightenment idea the Church is quite specifically unhappy about.
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Jan 24, 2024 14:40
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khwarezm posted:Question, are Tom Holland's assertations in Dominion about Christianity (and some of its antecedents) being the root point for our conceptions of basically everything positive in the world regarding perceptions of human rights taken seriously by historians? I've read confusing things about this elsewhere, or r/askhistorians there's a lot of critique of Holland but it seems a bit astonishing to suggest that the other philosophical trends across human history are essentially brutish in comparison to Christianity and what it influenced. Haven't read it but his book about the rise of Islam was complete balls so this assertion is probably balls as well.
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Jan 24, 2024 14:55
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khwarezm posted:Question, are Tom Holland's assertations in Dominion about Christianity (and some of its antecedents) being the root point for our conceptions of basically everything positive in the world regarding perceptions of human rights taken seriously by historians? I've read confusing things about this elsewhere, or r/askhistorians there's a lot of critique of Holland but it seems a bit astonishing to suggest that the other philosophical trends across human history are essentially brutish in comparison to Christianity and what it influenced. Are some Christian concepts that are influential in the history of western jurisprudence and philosophy, out of which some of the framework for the modern concept of human rights emerged, important for that framework as initially implemented? Yes. Are those the only concepts that are important? No. Were they the most important factor? Who knows? How could you determine that? Are those concepts necessary for the current human rights framework to emerge? Again who really knows but it seems unlikely. How could you even determine such a thing? That claim looks like the classical pop history approach of taking something very complex and contingent and trying to come up with a simple, universal, "just so" story to explain why this complex and contingent thing was actually simple and inevitable. Most such claims are rubbish.
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Jan 24, 2024 15:24
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Tom Holland should stick to "What if Lord Byron was a for-real Dracula." That was his artistic peak and as I recall, it was very good.
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Jan 24, 2024 15:28
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feedmegin posted:The idea of universal human rights (not Christians' rights, not eg Englishmens' rights) is an Enlightenment idea the Church is quite specifically unhappy about. Which church? I usually think people mean the Catholic Church when they say "the Church" capital-C and the Catholics are pretty into universal human rights, but also they would absolutely not give a poo poo about Englishmens' rights in specific since the English do not have any particularly privileged position in Catholicism, so is this an Anglican-Catholic difference?
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Jan 24, 2024 15:55
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Tulip posted:Which church? I usually think people mean the Catholic Church when they say "the Church" capital-C and the Catholics are pretty into universal human rights, but also they would absolutely not give a poo poo about Englishmens' rights in specific since the English do not have any particularly privileged position in Catholicism, so is this an Anglican-Catholic difference? Imo, most religions have strong universalist (in the human rights kind of way) tendencies
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Jan 24, 2024 16:16
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Halloween Jack posted:Tom Holland should stick to "What if Lord Byron was a for-real Dracula." That was his artistic peak and as I recall, it was very good. I missed a lot of the MCU twists apparently.
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Jan 25, 2024 13:23
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Jan 25, 2024 15:42
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drat do I want to read a book about Lord Byron being Dracula or one about Lord Byron getting messed with by ghosts....
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Jan 25, 2024 15:45
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There’s this bit in Count of Monte Cristo where they’re trying to impress Byron’s former mistress at the opera and they ask her about the Count, and she’s like “oh yeah that guy’s clearly a vampire, you better not mess with him. Trust me, I used to date Byron and he knew all about that”
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Jan 25, 2024 15:57
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The first vampire in fiction was Lord Ruthven from the 1819 short story The Vampyre. Written by Dr. John Polidori, Byron's physician, travel companion, and alleged side bitch. The story concerns a British nobleman called Ruthven who goes around Europe loving everything that moves and alienating his friends. Ruthven eventually ends up in Greece where it turns out he's a Dracula. The character is probably based on Byron who was not actually a Dracula but is probably the main reason almost all later vampires are suave noblemen and not horrible walking corpses of starving Balkan peasants like folkloric vampires. Based on a ghost story told by Byron that time he, Polidori, Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin, and her boyfriend were stuck inside during the Year Without a Summer.
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Jan 25, 2024 15:58
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The same summer Swiss lake story time lead to Frankenstein
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Jan 25, 2024 16:10
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There's a pretty good novel about lots of these concepts, tying together vampires and romantic poetry. Plus it's got Polidori and Byron as main characters. The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/417656.The_Stress_of_Her_Regard
embee fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Jan 25, 2024 |
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Jan 25, 2024 17:05
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Ok I know that "everyone knew the world was round when Columbus set sail" but did everyone know that? I know it was believed by Greek philosophers as early as the 5th BC, but what did your average bronze age peasant think? Or is it even something they thought about?
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Jan 25, 2024 18:56
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Average peasants probably didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. There's plenty of art that includes depictions of the Earth as a sphere, it wasn't an obscure fact if you wanted to know. There is an interesting question about other parts of the world though. A lot of writing from China is quite explicit about the world being flat and I have never seen concrete evidence of Chinese belief in a round Earth until the 1600s. It seems crazy to me they wouldn't have known, it's not that hard to figure out, but I've never seen anything suggesting a round Earth belief earlier. Would be curious if anyone here has. I don't read classical Chinese so can't go dig through primary sources myself. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Jan 25, 2024 |
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Jan 25, 2024 19:07
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 It's not called a discus cruciger, people!
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Jan 25, 2024 19:11
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We do have the ancient near eastern flat world with the sky as a big dome with water above it. That's in the Bible. Enochic books even have angels whose job is to open up a door to let the water out when it rains and stuff like that. So you have those bronze age people with a different model.
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Jan 25, 2024 19:17
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This could be accounted for if these groups lived in the Second Age, before the Numenorians chose to defy Eru Iluvatar and seek out the lands of the undying to the west.
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Jan 25, 2024 19:20
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zoux posted:This could be accounted for if these groups lived in the Second Age, before the Numenorians chose to defy Eru Iluvatar and seek out the lands of the undying to the west. I think the thing that makes the curvature of the Earth obvious is if you have ships coming and going, because you can reliably see the masts/sails before the rest of the ships, and the logical explanation is a curve in the surface of the Earth. If you're living somewhere fairly landlocked and flat it might be a less likely observation?
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Jan 25, 2024 19:22
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Grand Fromage posted:Average peasants probably didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. There's plenty of art that includes depictions of the Earth as a sphere, it wasn't an obscure fact if you wanted to know. I always found the persistence of the flat-earth model in China interesting myself. I wonder if it wasn't a matter of dogmatic attachment to the idea of a flat earth per se, so much as a parochial lack of interest in the geography of non-Chinese parts of the world.
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Jan 25, 2024 19:33
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Silver2195 posted:I always found the persistence of the flat-earth model in China interesting myself. I wonder if it wasn't a matter of dogmatic attachment to the idea of a flat earth per se, so much as a parochial lack of interest in the geography of non-Chinese parts of the world. There's actually a Chinese book where they do more or less the same stick shadow measurement experiment that was used to measure the size of the Earth by uh, Greek guy whose name I forget, and since the Earth being a flat square was the prior assumption they decided what was actually being measured was the distance to the sun rather than the curvature of the Earth. Reminds me of the insane orbits people came up with to try to make geocentrism work. The centrality of ship travel in the Mediterranean world and it being mostly irrelevant to China has always been my assumption too.
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Jan 25, 2024 19:43
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erastothenes of cyrene. also made his namesake numerical sieve, which is a great example of a mathematics thing that literally took 2 millennia to be useful
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Jan 25, 2024 19:44
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Grand Fromage posted:The centrality of ship travel in the Mediterranean world and it being mostly irrelevant to China has always been my assumption too. Granted it's not central, but weren't the eastern seas chock full of trade vessels? That's mostly based some vague descriptions of Ming dynasty China mind you, but given the gigantic riparian fleets involved in warfare I'd expect that to be a thing in earlier periods too.
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Jan 25, 2024 19:54
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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confucian intellectual ideology also shits on merchants, like many other landowning aristo ideologies
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Jan 25, 2024 20:03
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What about the moon, was that broadly recognized as a sphere or a disc
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Jan 25, 2024 20:09
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PittTheElder posted:Granted it's not central, but weren't the eastern seas chock full of trade vessels? That's mostly based some vague descriptions of Ming dynasty China mind you, but given the gigantic riparian fleets involved in warfare I'd expect that to be a thing in earlier periods too. Why would you listen to a merchant from some irrelevant coastal backwater? They didn't even take the exams.
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Jan 25, 2024 20:39
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You'd have to be gob smashing stupid to not realize the phases of the moon are sunlight projected on a spherical object
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Jan 25, 2024 20:39
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Arglebargle III posted:You'd have to be gob smashing stupid to not realize the phases of the moon are sunlight projected on a spherical object People thought a dragon was eating the sun during eclipses
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Jan 25, 2024 20:41
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zoux posted:People thought a dragon was eating the sun during eclipses
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Jan 25, 2024 20:44
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There's people alive today who went through compulsory schooling, have jobs, and walk around with a supercomputer in their pockets who think giants are real but trees aren't.
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Jan 25, 2024 20:47
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zoux posted:People thought a dragon was eating the sun during eclipses Stupid dragons, why do you keep trying to eat the sun only to burn to death 4 minutes later??
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Jan 25, 2024 20:55
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FreudianSlippers posted:There's people alive today who went through compulsory schooling, have jobs, and walk around with a supercomputer in their pockets who think giants are real but trees aren't. Have you ever seen a tree? Didn't think so.
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Jan 25, 2024 20:59
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zoux posted:What about the moon, was that broadly recognized as a sphere or a disc Pliny seems to assume that all the stars (including the planets and moon) are spheres, as he explicitly says is the case with the earth. He says the moon is lit by reflected light from the sun and correctly argues that full moon can only occur when the moon and sun are on opposite sides of the earth. He claims Posidonius calculated the moon is 2,000,040 stadia from earth, which I don’t know how he calculated it but it’s actually not that bad a guess—comes out to around 230,000 (modern) miles, the correct answer is like 239,000. More unfortunately, he also argues that the spots on the moon are bits of earth it sucks up while drinking the oceans, and that the moon must be bigger than the earth, because otherwise it wouldn’t be possible for the moon to fully eclipse the sun. Source is Natural History Book 2, the whole book is about astronomy and contains many more baffling moon facts!
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Jan 25, 2024 21:17
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It doesn't take a genius to notice that full moons only occur at night
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Jan 25, 2024 22:32
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I'm actually curious now how they calculated that distance. Every method I can think of would require an accurate clock (and not just a sundial)
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Jan 25, 2024 22:35
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FreudianSlippers posted:There's people alive today who went through compulsory schooling, have jobs, and walk around with a supercomputer in their pockets who think giants are real but trees aren't. Trees aren't real except for the giant trees whose stumps became mountains
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Jan 25, 2024 22:38
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cheetah7071 posted:I'm actually curious now how they calculated that distance. Every method I can think of would require an accurate clock (and not just a sundial) From a quick Google, it appears the theory is that Posidonius may literally have been the antikythera mechanism guy.
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Jan 25, 2024 22:52
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PittTheElder posted:Stupid dragons, why do you keep trying to eat the sun only to burn to death 4 minutes later?? Look, no-one ever said that Ap/ep is smart.
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Jan 25, 2024 23:01
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