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Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

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Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#51

Post by atypicaluser »

tree_of_item wrote: post #42
j9461701 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

> Why isn't it just a good thing that Ethiopia had a part to play in the development of civilization as well?

Did Ethiopia have a part to play in the development of Western thought? Given his own final question, that seems to be the supposition of the author of the article - '... one might wonder: will Yacob and Amo also one day be elevated to the position they deserve among the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment?' But Herbjørnsrud (the author) gives no evidence that either Yacob or Ano influenced European thinking any more than Locke's et al.'s contemporaries. (Quick - before looking them up in the Wikipedia - who was Christian Wolff? Francis Hutcheson? Nicolas Malebranche?) What evidence Herbjørnsrud presents indicates Yacob died in obscurity, unknown to Europeans, and Ano was at best '... one of the most prominent Wolffians.' [See Christian Wolff above.] Yet the author wants to immediately set these two among the luminaries (e.g. Kant) of European thinking.

Is Herbjørnsrud trying to push an Afrocentric narrative? He discusses only two African thinkers in his article, so it's easy to see why the OP might conclude this, but setting that aside, it seems Herbjørnsrud at minimum wants to promote certain Progressive principles, e.g. 'Neither was Amo alone in bringing /diversity/ or /cosmopolitanism/ to the University of Halle in the 1720s and ’30s.' [Emphasis mine.] While this is neither good nor bad, ignoring the undercurrent of Herbjørnsrud's article does nobody favors. (Of course, he wrote, _Global Knowledge: Renaissance for a New Enlightenment_, so what should we expect of Herbjørnsrud?)

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#52

Post by jrs95 »

dang wrote: post #23
jrs95 wrote: post #16

Earlier 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.

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 f…

I apologize, I didn’t intend to pull the thread off topic. Clearly I was interpreting the article differently than most people were. I had only responded so strongly because it initially struck me as being ideological content.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#53

Post by dang »

jrs95 wrote: post #52
dang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I apologize, I didn’t intend to pull the thread off topic. Clearly I was interpreting the article differently than most people were. I had only responded so strongly because it initially struck me as being ideological content.

Thanks for such a neutral reply. I appreciate it, especially since my comment was on the harsh side.

The article struck other people that way too, and I can see why. But this is precisely where HN commenters need to exercise a little self-discipline. If a comment is picking up on the obvious, hottest, most generic point that someone could make about the article, that's a different game than HN is supposed to be for. That's the hot public argument game. We're trying for something quite different here—call it the obscure curiosity game. We're looking for non-obvious insights, something unpredictable. The other game is more or less always the same, and is driven by very different emotions than curiosity. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that it doesn't belong here. It's off topic and it destroys what's on topic.

This is most important when an article has enough material to support either kind of discussion, which I'd say was definitely the case here.

I'd love to get better at explaining this, because I feel like if we could put it into just the right words, most HN users would see that it's in their interests to play the intended game and resist playing the unintended one.

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#54

Post by wahern »

barry-cotter wrote: post #49

If 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.

I suspect you're overstating the conclusion that it was a forgery. I cannot see enough context to determine the source, but FWIW,

  ... The first argument is that Giusto d'Urbino himself
  clearly indicated that the manuscripts are not of his own.
  And I do not see any reason why a European thinker of such
  caliber produces such a refined philosophical work and at
  the end ascribes it to some 'Ethiopian Philosopher' that
  never existed. I could not possibly think of any not to
  believe Giusto d'Urbino himself who tells us clearly that
  he bought the manuscripts.

  ...

  The second argument is linguistic in nature. Here we should
  note that Giusto d'Urbino, though he did manage to learn
  Ge'ez, was in no position to write such a manuscript. Still
  some accept the fact that Giusto d'Urbino could have
  dictated his ideas to an Ethiopian scribe who could have
  captured his ideas in refined Ge'ez. Yes, even the argument
  does not hold true. You see there is a manuscript--Les
  Soirees de Carthage de Francois Bourgade. Both Giusto
  d'Urbino and his Ethiopian Scribe write this manuscript.
  The first part is written by Giusto d'Urbino himself and
  the second part by his clerk. A thorough study of these
  writings by a prominent instructor of Ge'ez literature at
  Addis Ababa University, Alemayehu Moges, has clearly
  indicated that, primarily, Giusto d'Urbino's writing in
  Ge'ez is full of mistakes. The scribe's writing was found
  to be free of errors but the type of languages used by
  Giusto d'Urbino scribe and the language of Zara Yacob were
  completely different. This clearly shows that neither
  Giusto d'Urbino nor his scribe could have possibly been
  the author of the manuscript that I strongly insist to be
  of Zara Yacob.
Excerpt of quotation from Teodros Kiros, "Zara Yacob: Rationality of the Human Heart", pp148-149 (https://books.google.com/books?id=z4-HgXftrcYC&lpg=PA148&ots...)

Re: Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers

#55

Post by wahern »

wahern wrote: post #54
barry-cotter wrote: post #49

If 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.

I suspect you're overstating the conclusion that it was a forgery. I cannot see enough context to determine the source, but FWIW, ... The first argument is that Giusto d'Urbino himself clearly indicated that the manuscripts are not of his own. And I do not see any reason why a European thinker of such caliber produces such a refined philosophical work and at the end ascribes it to some 'Ethiopian Philosopher' that ne…

Here's a book review which seems to summarize the controversy: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01284505/document (The review author advocates forgery.)
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