Medieval Civilizations in the 21st Century

Any? XXI century society with very poor cultural and scientific level is doomed to medieval obscurantism. In medieval obscurantism philosophy was subject to theology, reason to faith, science to revelation and state to the church”

Galileo Galilei (February 15, 1564 – January 8, 1642), was an Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher and mathematician who played an important role in the scientific revolution in the Renaissance. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest scientists of all time. His achievements include the improvement of the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy” and the “father of modern physics” and “the father of modern science” 1

If we go back in time to the seventeenth century, we will remember the controversial phrase launched by Galileo Galilei after abjuring the heliocentric vision of the world before the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition: “Eppur si muove or E pur si muove” (and yet it moves) 2. The Holy Inquisition condemned Galileo to death if he did not retract that the Earth did not revolve around the Sun but the other way around but He did not retract, he did not stop thinking about this wise phrase that humanity must remember again and not forget. During the Middle Ages there was a very dark period characterized by medieval obscurantism.

Galileo, who was not free at that time, spoke in a defiant tone before the tribunal of the Cardinals of the Inquisition, a phrase that contradicted his abjuration. Galileo practically challenged not only the authorities of that time guided by a deep faith but Ptolemy, heir to the geocentric conception of the universe given by Aristotle in the truths of science with a vision of the cosmos in which the Earth was the center around from which the rest of celestial bodies rotated.

Ptolemy held a geocentric model of the universe, his fundamental contribution was his model of the universe: he believed that the Earth was motionless and occupied the center of the Universe, and that the Sun, Moon, planets and stars revolved around it. Galileo however held the heliocentric theory, astronomical model that holds that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun. Heliocentrism, was proposed in antiquity by the Greek Aristarchus of Samos (310 – 210 BC), who was based on measurements simple of the distance between the Earth and the Sun and by Copernicus in second instance (1473 – 1543 AD).

With Aristotle, Greek philosophy reaches its culmination and the foundations of philosophical realism are laid. For Aristotle, science 3 is the knowledge of the cause of a thing and philosophy is the science of the first causes and principles. He picks up from Plato his idea about philosophy as the knowledge of the essences of things, of what is immutable, universal and eternal but, unlike his teacher, he considers that essences can not be separated from things (in the world of Ideas), but they must be in the same things.

Thus, in contrast to Platonic idealism, Aristotle laid the gnoseological foundations of realism by revaluing sensible experience as a starting point for knowledge and science, combining it with a firm trust in the universalizing power of reason. Aristotle arrives at the concepts, ideas or “universals” by means of the observation of the real world and the abstractive function of the human mind: the work of the intelligence consists in abstracting from the singular objects that the senses present us, the notes or qualities individual to reach the common element that is precisely the essence or nature of each entity. This is the epistemological foundation of philosophical realism. While Galileo’s application of mathematics to experimental physics was groundbreaking, some of his mathematical methods were the normal ones of the time, including dozens of examples of a square-rooted inverse-ratio method of Fibonacci and Archimedes. The analysis and proofs were based largely on Eudoxus’ theory of proportion, as stated in the fifth book of Euclid’s Elements. This theory had become available only a century earlier, thanks to precise translations by Tartaglia and others; but at the end of Galileo’s life, which was being replaced by the algebraic methods of Descartes. In a frequency of Fibonacci numbers 4 each number is the sum of the two numbers that precede it. The wonderful thing about this type of sequence is that it can be found in the design that nature uses to create life forms, time and space with amazing perfection. Ancient Greeks achieved perfect forms and great beauty, using what is called the Golden Ratio or “Golden Ratio” PHI, obtained from said sequences.

The design of the universe has abundant evidence of this wonderful and surprising pattern. Regardless of whether we are talking about the spirals we observe in galaxies like those we find in plants there is a pattern in most things that is recognizable and fascinating.

These patterns are mathematical. They have captured the imagination of philosophers, artists and scientists of all ages and ages. Great architects, artists, musicians have incorporated these mathematical patterns into their works because they recognize that the use of these patterns generally gives their work a more pleasing effect to the eye, to the ear and give it a beauty and balance in harmony with the world natural.

In times of medieval obscurantism any thought that was not in accord with the church and went out of its statutes was cruelly punished (with tortures imposed by the Inquisition). So all those people who dared to see beyond and expose their scientific ideas, were branded as blasphemy, heresy, or witchcraft. For this reason they preferred to keep all new or “forbidden” knowledge hidden from the church and from conservative society. The knowledge is related to the illumination of the minds, then, in relating this, there was no light or knowledge about life at that time more than religious thoughts, that’s why it was a dark age.

Our culture that has been called “Western” is experiencing an orientation in the dominant paradigm 5 of a given historical epoch in a given sociocultural context (the ways of feeling, saying, acting and thinking of a given historical epoch in a given sociocultural context or “Spirit of the epoch”, “profile of the epoch” or “zeitgeist” using the terminology of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) or “episteme of the epoch” (using the terminology of Michel Foucault) of neo-medieval cut, which had already been announced several decades ago by authors such as Umberto Eco. 6

The current historical cycle is approaching little by little, but inexorably, to its end, and we are clearly entering a period of transition, of a “New Middle Ages”, which would end up always with the “myth of progress”, inherited from the Enlightenment, positivism, liberalism and Marxism. Unlike the past, this New Middle Ages has the appearances and powers of technology.

?“Unlike the past, this New Middle Ages has the appearances and powers of technology”

References:

1. Galileo Galilei. Wikipedia

2. IT / USERS Edition 90. “And what happened to the lord of the neutrinos?” Fernando Jiménez Motte

3. Aristotle. Wikipedia

4. IT / USERS Edition 108. Innovation based on Fibonacci. Fernando Jiménez Motte

5. Darkness in the medieval age and literature. Eugenia Truelsen

6. The new average age of the 21st century. Based on the work of María Dolores F. Fígares. Professor and journalist of the University of Granada, Spain.

7. Gnoseology, also called theory of knowledge, is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature, origin and scope of knowledge.

Fernando Jiménez Motte PhD (c) EE, MSEE, BSEE

CEO of NEUROMORPHIC TECHNOLOGIES NT Robotics, Control Systems, Artificial Intelligence AI

https://fernandojimenezmotte.com/

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