The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment
The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment
English | 2023 | ISBN: 0197675557 | 309 Pages | EPUB | 40 MB
English | 2023 | ISBN: 0197675557 | 309 Pages | EPUB | 40 MB
In The Genius of their Age, S. Frederick Starr follows up his acclaimed Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age with a portrait of the Arab enlightenment and its key figures–Abu-Ali al-Husayn ibn-'Abdallah Ibn-Sina and Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni. A thousand years ago, these two intellectual giants–known as Ibn Sina and Biruni for short–achieved stunning breakthroughs in fields as diverse as medicine, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, geography, and physics. Biruni measured the earth more precisely than anyone else down to the sixteenth century, pondered a heliocentric universe, and hypothesized the existence of North and South America as inhabited continents. Ibn Sina's writing on philosophy and metaphysics enriched the writings of countless European thinkers, including St. Thomas Aquinas, while Sina's grand synthesis of medical knowledge became the standard for the next six hundred years in Europe, the Middle East, and India. They both also commented extensively on the works of ancient Greeks and earlier Muslim thinkers, whose works they aspired to synthesize–and to transcend.