Pirates me hearties, pirates!

[--Pete]

Hi,

Not so much that Islamic culture has a special affinity, as no culture (not even and perhaps even especially the Greeks themselves) have kept the culture of golden age Greece from antiquity to present.

I said "trace back to Socrates", not "is that of Socrates". I realize that there is a small gap of two and a half millenia. Then again, to ancient Egypt, that was but a little time.

If you're drawing the lineage chain back, the Islamic world is on it, the closer to the Mediterranean the better.

Superficially, yes. I can buy (and have bought) a copy of Sun Tzu's The Art Of War in America. Doesn't mean that America's culture was greatly influenced by classical Chinese thinking. Did the Arab literati know of the Greek philosophers? Yes. Did it have much influence on their own philosophers? From what I'd read, no. But I assumed you had something specific to show otherwise.

But it's silly to pretend that, say, Britain, or the US, derives their culture directly from the Greeks.

Again, I reiterate: "trace back to Socrates". Christianity, greatly mutated by Paul to make it palatable to the Greeks, became the ruling influence in Western Europe from at least 313 CE (Edict of Milan) to the present. Augustine who introduced (or perhaps just reinforced) classical thought into Catholicism. His follower in thought, Thomas Aquinas, was said to have 'baptized' Aristotle. And, indeed, it was the Catholic Church's insistence on the correctness of classical beliefs which led (and still leads) it into conflict with science. So much for the theological side. The secular side follows equally, from Des Cartes, perhaps the first secular Christian philosopher on down to the present.

If anything, it's closer the other way around.

Provocative, if vague. True, the 'laws' of physics are symmetrical in time (whoops, sorry entry of peas, I overlooked you), but I hardly can think you mean it literally. If you meant it in the "God made man in his image, and since then man has returned the favor" sense, well, first, it's been done. And, second, it isn't really appropriate, since much of what the Greeks thought and taught has survived. The Greeks are history. It isn't like archeology, where modern ideas are often overlaid onto ancient artifacts.

But I suspect I've shot wide of the mark. So do elaborate, please. B)

--Pete