“Knowledge is power.”
The earliest documented occurrence of the phrase "Knowledge is power" is from Imam Ali (599-661 CE), as recorded in the tenth-century book Nahj Al-Balagha (originally in Arabic). He said:
Knowledge is power and it can command obedience. A man of knowledge during his lifetime can make people obey and follow him and he is praised and venerated after his death. Remember that knowledge is a ruler and wealth is its subject.
— Imam Ali, Nahj Al-Balagha, Saying 146
techne is a bringing-forth
Reminds me of poesis and physis.
what it is
The basis of this entire course. Technology is ever changing and ever present.
cosmic electrolysis
He definitely has a way with words.
unlock enough free human energies to rid the world of tyrants
Fuller for president.
what seems to me to be an overwhelming confrontation of ourexperience by a comprehensive intellect magnificently greater than our own or the sum of all human intellects which has everywhere and everywhen anticipatorilyconceived of the complex generalized, fundamental principles which all together interact as universe
head explodes
One must learn to believe one's mind-fed by the cool eyes that read the instruments-rather thanone's body.
That has got to be a hard lesson to learn. Even today, with better technology.
by sheer chaos ofunbelief in God
Doesn't seem particularly religious. God seems to mean order or functionality. So I guess proper working machinery has a type of godliness.
Man seems unique in this progressive degree of conscious participation in evolution.
Conscious participation? Do we really have a choice?
three-wheeledDymaxion automobile
Dymaxion house
geodesic dome
As the exploited workers are forced together in greater numbers by technologies of the industrial system, they also are made aware, throughtechnologies of educational and mass communication systems, of their exploitation, of the injustice of their circumstances, and of their raw power to revolt against the masters.
A catch 22
Those crafts required some persons to be free from the constant tilling of the land and led to the growth of towns in which guilds of free craftsmen could work their arts and in which trade could flourish.
Reminds me of slavery in America. The South lagged behind trying to hold on to slavery, an inhumane, outdated, and inefficient mode of economic and societal growth.
This is because, for Marx, the new forces of production carry within them the potential to expose the contradictions, the internal weaknesses, of the earlier relations of production.
Definitely agree. The old methods have flaws that are exposed when new technology emerges.
Technology, once born, outgrows its social cradle and shatters the relations of production that called it forth.
Reminds me of the results of new technology and methods; it's initially praised until it begins killing entire industries.
These needs and our methods of meeting them are in human terms the economic realities.
Sounds like Adam Smith.
We are preeminently the tool-using animal.
If other species could study us, would they refer to us as the "tool using animal?" I find this perspective of humans to be quite fitting
Man and nature are two things, and man is master
Hmmm I feel that this sentiment has been refuted in a previous article.
rejoicing over, n e w i n v e n t i o n s u n k n o w n t o t h e a n c i e n t s
We definitely show gratitude to technology our predecessors never had the opportunity of experiencing.
technological advance is God's will
I wonder how modern Christians feel about this sentiment.
Byzantium organs habitually graced secular ceremonies
Byzantine really was ahead of the curve.
but considers many of them "[[unnecessary and, indeed, dangerous and destructive]]"; medicaments and skills of healing are cancelled by "[[many kinds of poison, many weapons, many machines]]."
Some of these attitudes are still present today.
It is a religiously motivated codification of all the skills available for the embellishment of a church, from the enameling of chalices and the painting of shrines to the making of organ pipes and the casting of great bells for the tower.
Useful arts for the exaltation of God.
This combination of education with practicalwork would seemtheoretically, by joining head and hand, to provide communities in the monasteries where technological innovation would thrive.
Yet, that combination wouldn't last in the long term as we see in present day.
actio and intentio
action and intention
exegesis
critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of scripture
the monastic illu mina tor showed th e hand of God—now the master craftsman—holding scales, a carpenter's square, and a pair of compasses.
Thinking of God as the ultimate engineer puts a great twist on Christian beliefs...
It may seem ludicrous to claim that the distillation of alcohol, the trebuchet, the functional button, the suction pump, the wire-drawing mill, and the myriad other medieval inventions are ultimately gesla Christi[[achievements of Christianity]]
I'm not sure that it's necessarily ludicrous.
especially of the anti-technological impulses in Zen
Thinking of religion in relation to technology is so interesting. Zen focuses on living simply, which counters the multiple devices I have in front of me at this moment. I wonder what other connections religions like Buddhism and Sikhism have with technology. Can they exist together? What has the impact been on different religions?
"Not all the arts," he said, "have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them. Every day one could discover a new art . . . indeed they are being found all the time
I agree with this sentiment. We always find new and innovative methods of creating things. Who knows what we haven't discovered.
Be fore 1 31 3 so me on e in ven te d the sa ndg la ss
"The origin of the hourglass is unclear. Its predecessor the clepsydra, or water clock, is known to have existed in Babylon and Egypt as early as the 16th century BCE. There are no records of the hourglass existing in Europe prior to the Early Middle Ages, such as invention by the Ancient Greeks; the first supported evidences appears from the 8th century AD, crafted by a Frankish monk named Liutprand who served at the cathedral in Chartres, France. "
About 1260, the Franciscan Roger Bacon, pondering transportation, confidently prophesied an age of automobiles, submarines, and airplanes
It's amazing how these ideas showed up so early, but the technology and science didn't exist to allow them to come into fruition. Roger Bacon was a great thinker of his time and though China is credited with the creation of gunpowder, he was the first European to document its formula. His work Opus Majus included mathematics, optics, alchemy, and astronomy.
By 1492, however, Europe had developed an agricultural base, an industrial capacity, a superiority in arms, and a skill in voyaging the ocean which enabled it to explore, conquer, loot, and colonize the rest of the globe during the next four centuries and more
This is when Columbus set voyage to the Americas.
Beginning obscurely as earlyas the sixth century, within three hundred years the northern peasantry created a novel agricultural system that, in proportion to expenditure of human labor, was probably the most productive in the world.
Agricultural technologies during this time (roughly 6th to 9th century) included the heavy plough, horse collar, horseshoes, and three field system (a type of crop rotation).
"The three field system let farmers plant more crops and therefore increase production. Under this system, the arable land of an estate or village was divided into three large fields: one was planted in the autumn with winter wheat or rye; the second field was planted with other crops such as peas, lentils, or beans; and the third was left fallow (unplanted). Cereal crops deplete the ground of nitrogen, but legumes can fix nitrogen and so fertilize the soil. The fallow fields were soon overgrown with weeds and used for grazing farm animals. Their excrement fertilized that field's soil to regain its nutrients. Crop assignments were rotated every year, so each field segment would be planted for two out of every three years"
Leonardo Fibonacci
"The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where a number is found by adding up the two numbers before it. Starting with 0 and 1, the sequence goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so forth. The Fibonacci numbers are Nature's numbering system. They appear everywhere in Nature, from the leaf arrangement in plants, to the pattern of the florets of a flower, the bracts of a pine cone, or the scales of a pineapple."
A ninth century mini-Renaissance produced educational advances, including adoption of a legible script and restoration of a good Latin, but with little or no scientific content
"The Carolingian Renaissance was the first of three medieval renaissances, a period of cultural activity in the Carolingian Empire. It occurred from the late eighth century to the ninth century, which took inspiration from the Christian Roman Empire of the fourth century. During this period, there was an increase of literature, writing, the arts, architecture, jurisprudence, liturgical reforms, and scriptural studies."
The term Dark Agessuggests a darkening relative to Greek and Roman antiquity and in many ways is misleading.
In regards to the Dark Ages, "The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" with earlier and later periods of "light". The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the light of classical antiquity. The phrase "Dark Age" itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; this became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment."
Like the Romans, the Arabs absorbed the technological knowledge of the peoples they conquered and disseminated this knowledge over their empires, innovating, but not generating a technological revolution of their own.
Did Arabs not particularly care about technology as civilizations that thrived? What made them and other civilizations lag behind? The Romans definitely screeched to a halt after some point as did the Greeks. Wonder what happened....
al-Biruni (973–1048 A.D., probably born in Uzbekistan).
"His book on Indian culture is by far the most important of his encyclopaedic works. Its expressive title, Taḥqīq mā li-l-hind min maqūlah maqbūlah fī al-ʿaql aw mardhūlah (“Verifying All That the Indians Recount, the Reasonable and the Unreasonable”), says it all; it includes all the lore that al-Bīrūnī could gather about India and its science, religion, literature, and customs."
Avicenna (980–1037 A.D.)
"It is believed that Muslim writer Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, or possibly his son, had introduced Aristotelian logic to the Islamic world more than two centuries before Avicenna."
From its beginnings, Islam encouraged the study of the sky and the earth to find proofs of one's faith
I don't know much about Islam, but this premise is very interesting.
Technology has a low status in the high culture of modern societies but it was actually there at the origin of that culture and, if we believe the Greeks, contains the key to the understanding of being as a whole.
I agree. When we study the history of the human race, we examine their technology to understand how they evolved. We determine why some cultures and civilizations thrived while others failed.
We humans are not the masters of nature but work with its potentials to bring a meaningful world to fruition.
This sums up the article very well. Nature allows us certain flexibility, but can never be mastered. We are limited by what nature allows us to manipulate.
The word techne in ancient Greece signifies the knowledge or the discipline associated with a form of poiêsis.
We should bring this term back. "I am well versed in the techne of business" sounds a lot more exciting.
humanity is a laboring sort of animal constantly at work transforming nature.
I've always been aware of the fact that we are animals, but this excerpt made this reality even more profound. Just as nonhuman organisms shape their environments, we do the same, but in a radically different way. What makes our environment so much different than "nature"? All of our buildings and infrastructures are manipulations of elements that occur naturally. Our cities and suburbs are in fact our "nature" or "natural environment" just as the forests and woods are to animals.
also measures the marginalization of women.
Women are continuously marginalized in the technology world today.
Similarly, some scholars argue that in the early medieval era European women worked in many trades, but that in early modern times women were gradually displaced by men
Culinary arts is a prime example of this today. Women were supposed to be the cooks of the household, but men dominate chef positions and most of the culinary world.
"the mechanic arts"
This definition sounds more fitting.
the technologist, like the artist, must work with unanalyzable complexities.
Art and technology both create stunning results from virtually nothing.
Stonehenge suggests the truth of Walter Benjamin's observation that "technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relations between nature and man.
Stonehenge is one of the most astonishing feats man has accomplished. The effort and use of tools shows how far humans will go execute a vision.
Most travelers have done something that looked equally silly to the natives, for we are all unfamiliar with some local technologies.
This is apparent across generations as well. When older generations come across current technology, they are confused about how it works.
Tools require the ability to recollect what one has done and to see actions as a sequence in time
Nonverbal gestures were created simultaneously with tools.
My definition of technology does not depend on fixing precisely when humans began to use tools, although it is pertinent that they did so thousands of years before anyone developed tools for writing.
The need for tools over communication is fascinating. The basic instinct of using tools for survival was more important than writing. I suppose seeing others use and make tools substituted the need for writing down how to make them.
The tool often exists before the problem to be solved.
I automatically thought of smart phones; with the creation of the iPhone, we've created an invention that didn't fulfill a need, but is now considered essential to human existence.
That is why animals are atechnical; they are content with the simple act of living.
What a privilege to be content with the simple act of living; however, animals tend to have shorter lifespans, making it easier to simply "exist".
Deadly tools also facilitated murder and warfare
Tools and murder/warfare have a correlation. The initial intentions for the creation of tools is seemingly innocent, but someone always finds a way to manipulate the usage. For example, the discovery of atom splitting lead to the creation of the atom bomb.
Benjamin Franklin and many others thought that tool use separated humans from all other creatures
I agree with this notion. The evolution of human beings has been exponentially greater and quicker than almost any other creature because of tools.
The danger is not machines becoming humans, but humansbecoming machines
I'm not sure what this means. This reminds me of the uncanny valley.
Elon Musk is VASTLY overhyped.