My PhD Genealogy

Post by kragen » Wed, Oct 26, 2022, 1:51 AM UTC

telotortium wrote: post #24

kragen wrote: post #8

I spent some time in 02016 digging through different sorts of academic lineages. It turns out, for example, that you can also trace Leibniz back to Copernicus: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/academic-lineage.html Thrun's page seems to have an error about Leibniz: "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1966, 1967, 1976" It would be nice to be able to trace figures like al-Tusi back to Plato and Imhotep, to know if there really…

I feel that the possibility of tracing academic lineage back to antiquity in the West is very dim, for the same reason that tracing descent from antiquity[0] in Europe has proven impossible - too few records survived. Even in the Catholic Church, the longest unbroken chain (i.e., for which records survive) of apostolic succession (i.e., which bishop consecrated each bishop) goes only back to the 1400s with Guillaume…

A thing I was thinking was that, though almost surely the line was broken in the West, it might not have been broken altogether. We know, for example, that the Pauliṣa Siddhānta in India contains Hellenistic astronomy; and we know that as far back as Classical Athens, Greek philosophers reported visiting India and studying with "gymnosophists", an ascetic tradition (called Digambara in Sanskrit) which either survives there today or has been coincidentally reinvented in the same subcontinent at least a thousand years ago. Surely it is conceivable that, during the period when Rome was laying waste to the Hellenistic world, some philosophers might have fled to India and trained their successors there?

But it does seem very unlikely that we could trace it, given how little written material survives from that period in India.

Re: My PhD Genealogy

Re: My PhD Genealogy