Apart from doubts many of us have about the 'secular rationalism' of the
enlightenment (has Wagar ever heard of Gandhi, greens, cultural feminists,
etc), does anyone here remember the old Engels line about how rationality
began with the Greeks, Romans, and then (italics here) was developed by
Islamic civilization, before returning to Europe to (my own thoughts here)
fuel the most destructive military expansion in human history?
On Mon, 28 Oct 1996 wwagar@binghamton.edu wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, 28 Oct 1996 wally@cats.ucsc.edu wrote:
>
> >
> > While we're at it, let's abolish anthropocentrism, primatocentrism
> > mammalocentrism, biocentrism, and perhaps galaxocentrism. How about
> > cosmocentrism?
> >
> > w
> >
>
> Hey, good point! And all us historians had better get busy and
> stop writing Eurocentric histories of the French Revolution, the
> Industrial Revolution, and the Great War of 1914. It's also Eurocentric
> to blame Hitler for World War II. If you think Europe is the source of
> most of the evil and misery in the modern world, I suppose that makes you
> Eurocentric, too. Sure. This is the kind of idiocy that white liberal
> guilt and mindless multiculturalism inflict on academe. The world
> capitalist SYSTEM originated in Europe. So did the secular rationalism of
> the Enlightenment. Denying this makes about as much sense as denying that
> in the 8th to 12th centuries CE T'ang and Sung China (perhaps together
> with Abbasid Islam in the first half of that period) was the greatest
> center of world civilization.
>
> W. Warren Wagar
> Binghamton University
>
>