Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers • Hacker News Board

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#21

Post by Rexxar » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 10:34 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #6

nickysielicki wrote: post #5

We don't study philosophy simply based on who is first, we study texts because they are thorough and influential on future philosophical and political development. We know this because future scholars directly cite them. Before all the aforementioned authors, it's all but certain that many of these thoughts were had by unknown people without the ability to archive them in depth. The Bible alone is evidence of this; f…

This isn't as cheap as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200064 but it's still a shallow dismissal of a straw view of the article. What's interesting here is not that these guys did or didn't have historical influence—obviously they didn't, end of story. It's that their ideas were surprisingly similar to later, more famous thinkers in a place few would have expected. That easily clears the bar for interest on Ha…

For some definitions of 'philosopher', the impact of the person on a group is an essential part of the definition. The first sentence on the french wikipédia for philosopher (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophe) is "Un philosophe est une personne dont les écrits ou la parole sont reconnus par des écoles, groupes, religions, ou académies" => "A philosopher is a person whose writings or words are recognized by schools, groups, religions, or academies"

With this definition in mind, it's logical that the concept of "precursor" or "unknow philosopher/thinker" seems just absurd to some people.

I don't necessarily agree with this definition but we can't really blame nickysielicki for this very frequent point of view.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#22

Post by dang » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 10:44 PM UTC

Buttes14 wrote: post #18

I like how mods had to change the title cuz HN readers aren't even familiar with famous Western philosophers.

It's the opposite. I changed the title to take out the celebrity names because in our experience those tend to trigger poorer discussion.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#23

Post by dang » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 10:45 PM UTC

jrs95 wrote: post #16

angersock wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it's just an interesting historical fact? Does everything have to be jammed into the culturewar narrative?

I highly doubt that, it was an explicitly political and racial article. It could basically be summarized like: Yacob is the real creator of enlightenment ideas, and he’s morally pure unlike those evil racist white guys who just said a less good version of what he did.

Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? This kind of argument is always predictable: people trading the same grievances and counter-grievances over and over.

The culture wars and all that crap are beyond tedious, it's all off topic here, and the vast majority of HN users have zero interest in it. People shouldn't have to wade through sludge every time anything distantly related shows up. If you don't find this article interesting, that's fine, but please don't trash the thread for those who do.

Alan Kay famously said that a new point of view is worth 80 IQ points. An ideology is worth -80.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#24

Post by anigbrowl » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 10:49 PM UTC

jrs95 wrote: post #16

angersock wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it's just an interesting historical fact? Does everything have to be jammed into the culturewar narrative?

I highly doubt that, it was an explicitly political and racial article. It could basically be summarized like: Yacob is the real creator of enlightenment ideas, and he’s morally pure unlike those evil racist white guys who just said a less good version of what he did.

It could be, but that would be an inaccurate and tendentious. I have the impression you didn't even read it all the way through.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#25

Post by eveningcoffee » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 10:50 PM UTC

It is interesting that similar ideas tend to pop up around the same time.

Based on this, Yacob was more secular, rational and humane than European thinkers at the same time and would feel himself most likely comfortably in the modern world.

I think it is always important to know if something was worked on independently in multiple places. I believe that this demonstrates that this something was bound to happen.

I would not call Amo as an African philosopher though, as he was raised and educated in Europe. Perhaps an African-European philosopher if you insist to stress on his origin. I think that he was and was perceived as much European as his other contemporaries.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#26

Post by anigbrowl » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #5

We don't study philosophy simply based on who is first, we study texts because they are thorough and influential on future philosophical and political development. We know this because future scholars directly cite them. Before all the aforementioned authors, it's all but certain that many of these thoughts were had by unknown people without the ability to archive them in depth. The Bible alone is evidence of this; f…

Presumably as this philosopher becomes better known and some readers find his arguments more coherent or inspiring than those of his peers, he will become more widely cited in future. Your argument seems to rest on intellectual popularity as the metric of success, as if the work of all philosophers had been equally accessible to all students of the discipline.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#27

Post by stareatgoats » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 10:54 PM UTC

Someone who does any study of the history of ideas will run into the still ubiquitous and somewhat self-aggrandizing paradigm in the discipline. In coarse outline: that rational thinking is something which started with the Greeks and was carried like a torch through various high-watermarks in western history, and in essence is one of the things that distinguishes (and elevates) the west from the rest of the world.

Granted, some tips of the hat have been granted the ancient philosophies of India, China and the Muslim world, but these are mainly noted as they have contributed to the forward march of western ideas. The linked article could be largely interpreted to be in the same vein: i.e. great because it coincides with a major western thought tradition.

Still, interesting to learn that Ethiopia had a scholarly tradition of which we have heard very little. Also interesting that enlightenment ideas seem to have surfaced at approximately the same time, in totally separate places. I dare say we tend to believe that ideas spread via diffusion, maybe that is not so at all.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#28

Post by bhritchie » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 10:58 PM UTC

mlinksva wrote: post #12

bhritchie wrote: post #10

It's been a few years since I updated it, but I probably still have the only blog dedicated to Ethiopian philosophy: https://ethiopianphilosophy.wordpress.com/

Thanks! I was just looking at it from a link in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zera_Yacob_(philosopher) Do you know whether Yacob's writings have been continuously studied in Ethiopia or "lost" and then found, and how? I guess the latter since your "very brief introduction" includes "As Claude Sumner has said, Zera Yacob’s treatise is “an absolutely original work,” and if philosophy in Ethiopia starts with Zera Yacob…

As far as I can recall, the texts did not get any recognition within Ethiopia until the last century or so. A manuscript of the texts was originally found (in a monastery, I believe) and translated by an Italian scholar in the 19th century, and there were several translations and scholarly works discussions published over the next few decades. Then in the 20s and 30s a couple of scholars argued on textual and circumstantial grounds that this Italian scholar had in fact forged the original manuscripts himself. Basically everyone was convinced and lost interest at that point. Claude Sumner and some Ethiopian scholars have more recently taken up the whole issues again and argued that the texts are authentic, but they remain very obscure.

I probably should have talked about this a bit in my introduction, but none of that stuff is in English and I guess I found Sumner's discussion compelling. But really I'm not qualified to judge, and the forgery theory would certainly account for the sudden emergence.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#29

Post by anigbrowl » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 10:58 PM UTC

ryanx435 wrote: post #3

The palm pilot was years ahead of the iPhone, but it doesn't matter. Apple is who brought us into the age of mobile devices with the iPhone. These guys may have had the same ideas before everyone else, but it doesn't matter. Their effect was minimal and the enlightenment didn't catch on in Ethiopia.

That's a strange argument. Apple had also had an earlier failure of mobile computing with the Newton, which was beaten in the market by the Palm Pilot. Palm did well for a few years, then ran into limitations of its own. Apple made a breakthrough with the iPhone, but nowadays lower-cost products built around Android arguably dominate the market. Of course, it depends on whether you measure success by unit sales, profit, device performance, or app store depth.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#30

Post by UweSchmidt » Sun, Jan 21, 2018, 11:38 PM UTC

stareatgoats wrote: post #27

Someone who does any study of the history of ideas will run into the still ubiquitous and somewhat self-aggrandizing paradigm in the discipline. In coarse outline: that rational thinking is something which started with the Greeks and was carried like a torch through various high-watermarks in western history, and in essence is one of the things that distinguishes (and elevates) the west from the rest of the world. Gr…

Of course our own history is more important to us than others' (which are extensively studied in the west as well), and cherry picking and narrative writing is also an ethical statement: We point to the values of ancient Greek democracy as our own democracy is in danger. We refer to the thinkers in our past as scientific thinking is questioned today.

Especially when dealing with Greeks (and Romans), it is amazing how much of what is going on today was established and founded back then (e.g. German law is based on Roman law, therefore a law professor might look for clues in Roman values, not in Chinese values).