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Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
41–50 of 55 posts
Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
What actually happens are attempts to diminish a minority group by taking away or ignoring their historical achievements. You've really got this backwards. Here is a very long Reddit thread in the same vein: https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/7o6yau/in_which_...
If we're going to cite reddit threads, here is the /r/philosophy take on this very article: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/7jl826/the_afri... Basically exactly what I thought, it's claptrap using a lot of bad philosophy and bad history to push an afro-centrist narrative for the Enlightenment. If the shoe was on the other foot, and this was a case of an African invention being attributed elsewhere, I wou…
Your original post is basically "Yacob did some stuff but other people did those things too so it doesn't count" and I don't really understand that viewpoint. Why isn't it just a good thing that Ethiopia had a part to play in the development of civilization as well? Why is this a problem? Why do you feel the need to write a "rebuttal" to the idea that there were philosophers in Ethiopia as well? What do you feel is "afro-centrist" about pointing out the fact that Africans participate as well?
EDIT: That /r/philosophy thread you linked is trash, and if those posts are indicative of the sort of problem you had with the article (that it's somehow trying to downplay the importance of European thinkers and is somehow pushing an "Afrocentric" narrative) then I'm convinced you're just wrong. Whatever.
Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 circums…
> 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.
Wow, seriously? You know, I was reading this a few weeks ago when it first popped up, and I thought to myself, this smells a bit like an Afrocentrism hoax like 'Aristotle stole Greek philosophy from Africans in the Library of Alexandria who invented it all before him' - I've never seen it mentioned despite the considerable interest it should have, the sources are all ascribed to some very rare book you're told you have no chance of getting your hands on, the claimed views sound impossibly modern/anachronistic with no extremely weird claims thrown in (if you look at forward thinkers like Bentham or Lucretius, despite some extremely prescient arguments like defenses of sodomy, they still have some bizarre beliefs, they don't sound like a NYC liberal)... But I thought it would be rude to be skeptical because it's not like I know much about Ethiopian Christian philosophy so maybe they really did have a Greek tradition which could produce such a philosopher.
And now you tell me that not only is there no provenance of the original texts more recent than the 1800s, they've actually been debunked as European forgeries, and OP just happened to not see fit to mention these minor little details?!
EDIT: I see this comes up in the comments as well, and his arguments are mostly bluster: 'no one could have forged a genius book like this! Look at all the Enlightenment in there [but obviously it'd be easy for an Italian centuries later to write such a book...] There are peer-reviewed books on this topic! Peer-reviewed!'
Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I didn’t just now so I may not be remembering it in full, but this was the impression I got when I read it before.
Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
#45Someone 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…
It’s one thing to acknowledge that our own history is more important to us.
It’s another thing to acknowledge that we can not fully be truth seekers / scholars when we let our preferences adulterate the search of truth
Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Agree it is only natural to be more preoccupied with a perceived 'own' history. But (quite commonly I would argue) we tend to use widespread but shallow perceptions of such a history to push an agenda, which may or may not be justified. For example, did you know that our current concept of democracy was seen as abhorrent by the ancient Athenians? They preferred 'sortition', or representation by lottery in order to av…
The problem with corruption is the attempt to prevent it, instead of managing it. Sell a % of power but not at a fixed price- sell it in a hidden auction, call that one taxes, he who invests the most cash into it has the most of the fixed power percentage. Remove lobbyism to end corruption in the classic sence - and voila, democracy 2.0.
"If we must have crime, we may as well organize it."
Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
#47>In short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from 1630 to 1632. All of the highest ideals of the European enlightenment had been conceived by dozens of people all throughout human history. I fail to see what makes Yacob special in this regard. For example: >He believed in the supremacy of reason So did Aristotle. S…
> 'Most successful' here meaning it ended in ethnic cleansing, frequent atrocity (
True
It's worth pointing out that apart from 'minor issues' such as genociding whites and mixed-race Haitians [2], after the slave rebellion, the former blacks slaves pretty swiftly reinstituted slavery [1]! Dessalines adopted the economic organisation of serfdom. He proclaimed that every citizen would belong to one of two categories, laborer or soldier. Furthermore, he proclaimed the mastery of the state over the individual and consequently ordered that all laborers would be bound to a plantation. To avoid the appearance of slavery, however, Dessalines abolished the ultimate symbol of slavery, the whip. Likewise, the working day was shortened by a third. Dessalines' chief motivator nonetheless was production and to this aim he granted much freedom to the plantations' overseers. Barred from using the whip, many instead turned to lianes, which were thick vines abundant throughout the island, to 'persuade' the 'laborers' to keep working. Dessalines effectively sent the Haitian people back into slavery.
The new ruling class turned out to be the "Affranchi" [1, 3] typically french educated mixed-race Haitians.
The Haitian slave rebellion teaches us a large number of lessons about humanity, most not very palatable.
It's really interesting to note that (as far as I'm aware) no slave rebellion in history did actually seek to abolish slavery. The slaves wanted only to flip who's a slave and how's a slave holder. I conjecture that the real reason for slavery as a mode of labour organisation becoming obsolete is technical progress: slavery became less efficient than industrialised capitalism.
Haiti has been a basket-case ever since. Compare with countries like South-Korea, West Germany, Mainland China and many others which rose from utter basket cases to prosperity in a decade.
[1] Wikipedia, Haitian Revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
[2] Wikipedia, 1804 Haiti massacre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre
[3] Wikipedia, Affranchi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affranchi
Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
#48Someone 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…
> we tend to believe that ideas spread via diffusion, maybe that is not so at all.
That was also what Karl Jaspers claimed in The Origin and Goal of History with regard to earlier intellectual breakthroughs in the first millennium BCE that mark the beginning of most of the world's major religions. He thought the parallel developments in Greece, Palestine, India and China (as well as Persia, though that is now disputed) could not be explained by diffusion, but rather as a single spiritual event that played out independently in multiple locations. He called this event the Achsenzeit (originally translated as "axial period", now more commonly rendered as "axial age").
Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
#49If you read the comments you’ll see that there’s no evidence of Yacob’s existence prior to the 1800s and Italian scholars came to the conclusion in the early 20th century the whole thing was a forgery. It might be real but it would be unwise to base any serious efforts on this without at the least carbon dating of an original manuscript.
Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
#50This is a great read. I've not studied philosophy so I won't go there, but I did really enjoy learning about these two men and their place in the history of thinkers.