Ideas - How Latin translation made Western philosophers famous

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

From Greek to Arabic and then to Latin, translators in 8th-century Baghdad eventually brought to Europe the works of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and others who became central pillars of Western thought. IDEAS explores what is known as the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement.

Ten years ago, I asked my partner Kelsey if she would marry me. I did that, despite the fact that every living member of my family who had ever been married had also gotten divorced. Forever is a Long Time is a five-part series in which I talk to those relatives about why they got divorced and why they got married. You can listen to it now on CBC's Personally. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. In the year 762, the Caliph Al-Mansur commissioned the construction of the city of Baghdad. They really wanted to establish themselves as something different than what came before. They settled on the location of Baghdad because Baghdad is at the heart of so

many ancient civilizations and empires. Al-Mansur ruled over the Abbasid Caliphate, a region with a storied past that included modern-day West and Central Asia, Iran and Iraq. The Syrians, the Babylonians, ancient Sumer, the Abbasids were very much aware of all of this history and were very much trying to position themselves in that long lineage. And out of that long lineage came a movement that would transform Western and world culture forever. Its formal name is the Greco-Arabic Translation Movement, which saw countless translations done over centuries of ancient Greek texts into Arabic, philosophy, mathematics, medicine,

astronomy, and more. There was certainly those who were very much enamored of Greek science. And so El-Kindi, the first Arabic philosopher, actually will argue in one of his texts on first philosophy philosophy or what we would call metaphysics, he simply says, look, here's a case in which these people have done some really good work. Why shouldn't we build on it? Not only did the movement build on an intellectual tradition, it gave birth to a new one by sharing manuscripts across languages and borders and bridging the Islamic

world with Europe. Here was a culture that began the traditions in the West of scholarly inquiry that was entirely open and free in the sense that everything could circulate. So take me back to mid-eighth century Baghdad. What is it like? Ideas producer Naheed Mustafa takes us inside the Greco-Arabic translation movement, and we begin at the beginnings of the city of Baghdad. It seems to be the place to be. Yeah, in some ways, I guess first thing to say is this is a freshly

minted city in some regards. It's the newly established capital, very quickly though becomes a cosmopolitan center. So my name is Sarah Ann Knutson. I'm an assistant professor of teaching in the Department of History at UBC. And one of the things I work on is the research and teaching of the Bas'ad Caliphate. This is a place that was incredibly diverse, had people walking around the streets of different ethnicities, speaking various languages, different religious identities. And this definitely seems to be a place where these people could interact freely. There was a lot of opportunities for intellectual debate. There were materials being circulated in Baghdad from all over

the world. So in many ways, a true cosmopolitan city in that sense. What was the creative force? What was the creative energy like? What were, what was this a sort of a hustle and bustle of all kinds of creative generation or was this primarily focused on scholarly work? No, I think there's a lot of creative generation as you say taking place in Baghdad. There's a lot of creative generation, as you say, taking place in Baghdad. There's a lot of craft working happening. I'm trained as an archaeologist, so one of the things I'm really interested in looking at is the production of various materials. So, Abbasid ceramics, for example, take on new forms, particularly as Abbasid- of society is coming into contact with ceramics from China.

So there's changes around the ways in which materials like ceramics appear visually. So the boss had start adopting that kind of visual style for their own pottery. And so we'll see examples of pottery in which they're mimicking the white ceramic, and then they're overlaying it with blue lettering in Arabic, right? So we know that the vase or the ceramic is coming, is being produced in the caliphate, but it's nevertheless speaking to a visual style that originated in China. AMT – What do you think it was about the culture of this time that allowed it to become this creative force in terms of translation and knowledge production? You've talked about the sort of the ceramics part of it. But why translation? Why that particular thing? BF – Yeah. There's no one simple or singular answer to this question. Historians have been asking themselves this for a very long time, and I think there's a number of factors to consider.

I think the first one that sometimes gets overlooked but is a really important factor is the rise of book culture. And this happens largely because, I'm going to mention China again, because of the spread of paper making technology that arrives from China over Central Asia and into the Caliphate. So very quickly, we see the rise of Arabic literacy, the increased production of books, which was made cheaper by using paper. And because of it, they have access to this paper making technology. So Abbasid culture, in short, really quickly becomes a book culture. And I think that sort of helps support the translation movement. There's also very clear social importance placed on education and knowledge. So there was this idea in the Bas'id

Caliphate that knowledge was something that did not belong just to the elites. So you see people from all walks of life, all social classes, being able to receive an education. I'm thinking of one scholar, Al-Jahid, who describes that he describes what we would think of today as secondary education. He's describing the education of his youth and he describes that, you know, he received an education next to, alongside the butcher's son. So this really was a cultural context where people of all walks of life could receive an education. So intellectual activity comes to be seen as very important and something that a wide range of people could be involved in. I think also the Abbasids very early on,

very quickly see the social practicalities and applications that Greco-Roman knowledge has. But the fact that they saw the applications of even what we might think of as theoretical knowledge, that they saw how that knowledge could be applied in very practical ways to this early empire, I think really promoted what we see today as the translation movement. There's also a system of patronage that quickly develops, a system of funding intellectual activity. So the Abbasid court, which is centered around the caliph, had a very strong interest in scholarship. And there was a certain willingness among patrons to dedicate money and resources to fund translators and scholars engaging in

this work. It tells you something about the educational context of the Bas'ad Empire that many of the caliphs themselves were also amateur scholars in their own right. So they had an interest in the sciences that they supported. But beyond that, they were also very much aware that the public had a very positive impression of the idea that their ruler would be funding the sciences and the translations. So there's an element of social prestige that comes in from patronizing intellectual work. And then I think another important factor is then the creation of institutions to support translation work.

So the really famous one during the Abbasid period was an institution called the Beit al-Hikmah, which gets translated as the House of Wisdom. And for being so famous, we actually don't know very much about the Beit al-Hikmah and how it actually functioned practically. The institution has been described as a royal archive, as a library, but whatever it was, it was described as the center of the translation movement. But anyways, this kind of institution is not alone. There are many libraries that appear throughout the Basa caliphate, not just in Baghdad. And these libraries are often modeled

on pre-Islamic libraries and institutions of learning. I'm thinking the Library of Alexandra for one example. And then there's one additional institution that I think is worth mentioning here, which is salon culture. So this was an institution, the modulus in Arabic, but it gets translated as salon, very much the product of the court of the caliph. These salons were places that the caliphs often themselves presided over. But again, as we're developing this culture of social prestige around patronage and so on, very soon other members of the social elite also come to hold their own salons, and they seem to be competing with each other to hold these gatherings. So these salons could include

and did include, again, multi-ethnic, multi-religious people of many different identities coming together, Christians, Muslims, Jews, probably even Zoroastrians. And even that just speaks to the academic freedom of the time that people of various backgrounds were able to more or less freely express themselves in these kinds of intellectual spaces. And these salons are also places where aspiring scholars and translators could come to and almost use it as somewhat of a networking opportunity. They would use it as a way to find potential patrons who would be willing to sponsor their

intellectual work. Some patrons were willing to offer scholars and translators room and board and they would otherwise use it to to find more permanent employment options So whether that was as bureaucrats and the Abbasid administration Scholars at the court that kind of thing You teach about this time period you you look at a variety of different things about this time period What is your, I don't want to say favorite thing about it, but what is the thing that sticks out to you the most in all of the learning that you've done that you sort of point to

to say, look at this time period, like this was an amazing time to be alive? Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, this is such a good question. I guess this will tell you something about my own values as a teacher and researcher. I'm someone who's really interested in thinking about the cultural heritage of the past. So I am a proponent of the idea

that the past never stays in the past. It continues to be relevant in so many ways in the present. And I think what I often will tell my students in this, when we're working through this period, is to resist the tendency to always compare this region, this time and place to developments in Europe. I think there are very real political reasons to avoid doing that as has often been done in the past. So you often see scholars who work on the translation movement talk about the very real ways in which the Basids made such a tangible impact on the intellectual activities that get taken up in medieval Europe. But I think what's also really important to point out is that the works of key Abbasid scholars, I'm thinking

of people like Al-Buruni, Ibn Sina, and so on, their work often transcends medieval Europe. So it's not that the Abbasids are doing all this work, but then it's overshadowed by the Renaissance. Some of the things that these Abbasid scholars were able to do wasn't able to be replicated or so-called surpassed in that sense until much later in the 18th and 19th centuries. We can't think about the Abbasid period and the translation movement as this great intellectual moment that then gets surpassed immediately by the Renaissance. I don't really think about it that way. I think that the things that happened during the translation movement, the incredible contributions to humanity that these translators and scholars were able to give us still today,

they have much, much longer lasting effects. My name is John McGinnis. I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. I specialize in medieval Arabic and Islamic philosophy and history of science with a focus on Ibn Sina or in the Latin tradition, Avicenna. One of the things that when I read about the time period, when I read about the philosophy, everybody was a polymath. Everyone was a physician, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, you know, butcher, baker,

candlestick maker. Can you talk a little bit about that? You know, what is it about this time where everybody's a polymath? Well, I mean, there's many facets to that particular question. I mean, one is that today if somebody, you know, claimed to know everything about everything, we would call them an idiot. I would say it's you can't simply know everything about everything. This was at a time, at least in the Greek, Arabic, Latin, Hebrew world of the Middle Ages, it was possible for somebody

to sort of know all the sciences and know them very well. And so in some cases, the reason why in answer to your question everyone's a polymath. Not everyone was a polymath, but the ones that really shined and would go on in their legacy would be with us today were those folks. So it's in some sense it's very selective about which people we think of when we see this. But at the same time I don't want to downplay the role that even, and I'm not bragging about myself here, but as I went to try to understand, say Ibn Sina or Avicenna's own philosophy, I found myself only able to do that by starting to know about Aristotelian and medieval logic, Arabic grammar, learning more about astronomy. We can have wonderful talks about astronomy.

I'm probably the best Galenic physician around. It's outdated, but I mean, it was all part and parcel of actually trying to understand – at the time, I was just trying to understand, it had been seen as theory of time as part of his natural philosophy or physics. And yet, I got drawn into just subject after subject in order to understand it. And part of that is this particular man, Ibn Sina. He has a worldview that just is intended to incorporate this. And he is truly a genius.

He tells us that, say, by the age of 16 or something, he had mastered medicine. And he goes, that's one of the easy sciences. I was able to do that in a little under two years. And you think he's just bragging, but he actually, his work on medicine was used even in Europe until the, you know, 1800s is like the text still used by traditional medicine in parts of the Middle East and further east. So I mean, the question's fascinating. How did thinkers, writers, translators during this time between the eighth and twelfth centuries, how did they think about their own relationship to the Greeks, to Greek philosophy

and work? Was it merely, oh, here's something interesting that somebody was saying, and so let's think about it, or was it a kind of way to also take up the work of a great civilization and thereby also become great? Excellent question. It also has different answers depending on whom we're speaking, of whom we're speaking. So, I mean, there were certainly those who were very much enamored of Greek science, and they're continuing that tradition. They are consciously aware of continuing that tradition.

And so, El-Kindiy the first Arabic philosopher actually Will argue in one of his texts on first philosophy or what we would call metaphysics He simply says look here's a case in which these people have done some really good work Why shouldn't we build on it? They've been rushed The the Latin of arrow ease now all the way over in Spain in this case, he's going to make a similar point. He's actually going to point to the Quran and say he was both a philosopher and a lawyer, and so he was wearing his lawyer's hat at this moment. He says, look, the Quran asks us to explore our world, to understand God, not just blindly,

but because of the signs that God has presented. He goes, how do we do this? Will we use reasoning? And he ends up maybe equivocating on an Arabic term, kiosk, that the lawyers were using. But he just says, look, this particular notion, it's done best by these Greeks, and let's use this sort of, at least the the logical systems as well as some of the scientific systems to build and in most cases there are going to be some who say

look so we've been rushed I mentioned we'll say Aristotle said it I believe that that settles it there's there's not really much more to do other than to explain what Aristotle said but most thinkers thought if we can see farther than those before us, it's only because we're on the shoulders of giants type attitude. And this is certainly one of them in Sina who was absolutely a wonderful thinker. So I guess getting back to your question, there's at least one group usually identified in Arabic as the philosopher. It comes from the Greek word philosophia.

I mean, so it's the philosophers, literally. And they simply recognize that there is something here of value and we can build on it. Sometimes it's just developing what's there, sometimes it's going beyond. But the idea is we have this really good base. Other folks frequently identified with the Mutakala moon, these are going to be advocates of a more indigenous philosophical system, one that relies on the Quran, on Arabic grammar, on Islamic legal reasoning, they see this Greek learning is in fact a threat to their way of understanding things.

And there are some wonderful debates and discussions that came on early. I've mentioned logic, I think, before. Logic is where all philosophy begins. One of the earliest debates that goes on is, do we really need logic? It turns out that Greek logic is, at its very basis, is a type of categorical logic. That is to say, we're interested in how different groups of things relate to one another, but those categories frequently paralleled the grammatical categories of the Greek language. Turns out that the Greek language requires what's called a copula.

Usually it's our verb is, so humans are animals. And so are is this copula that links these two. You don't need that in Arabic, and it turns out that there are different grammatical categories that are used in Arabic. And so one of the debates is exactly how universal is this Aristotelian logic? And there's this wonderful debate between a grammarian who's very philosophically sophisticated, Sarafi, and an early, in this case not a Muslim logician, but a Christian Arabic speaking logician, Abu Bishamata. And the debate was basically transcribed, and so we actually have a pretty close approximation

of it. Now, having said that, who transcribed it? It was the grammarians, so obviously, probably was presented in such a way. But what the grammarian did at just an excellent job of showing is that without knowing how the target language works, in this case, Arabic, you could make all sorts of category mistakes regardless of your

category. So what's more important is not this universal logic done in categories, but rather the target language itself. And this very much impressed a number of philosophers who actually realized, oh, you know, maybe, you know, being part of a linguistic community is, you know, and those conventions are, need to be incorporated into our overall philosophy. And so you see this. But then later, El Khazali, who was a, certainly, he was one of the theologians, one of the great theologians, but he was one of the first within this Islamic legal and theological schools to say, you know what, actually, there's a lot we can learn from this Aristotelian logic as well.

Maybe we don't need to be afraid of it. And so he wrote a whole text in which he incorporates and shows how Islamic legal reasoning can be enhanced greatly by the introduction of Greek science. I always like to call it logic for lawyers, Arabic style. So I have perhaps gotten away from your question, but the question is like, what sorts of interactions are going on and how were they viewing the Greek world? Well, we see both sides of it, but at the end of the day,

what ends up happening is it becomes this amalgam and it's no longer Greek and foreign philosophy. It becomes Islamic and Arabic thought. It becomes incorporated into something much bigger than the sum of its parts. something much bigger than the sum of its parts. In Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nama Ayed. Is it never too late for divorce?

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Is there a moment you can point to where the translation movement begins? The translation movement itself actually probably has three sections, sort of an early one where there's some works of logic starting maybe in the late 700s that begin getting translated, but it was really with the coming into power of the Abbasid Khalifat around 800 and then under Mansur around 850 what ends up happening is you get this I mean it starts out as an interest in warning Greek logic and part of this was motivated by missionary interactions

between Muslims and Christians, most of the Christians having been trained. They were Syriac Christians having been trained in Aristotelian logic. And the plain and simple fact was that their ability to debate was superior on a lot of these issues where there had been just sort of like the Quran says, the Quran says, well, if you don't accept that basis, and then they were giving these sort of logical arguments. And so there was this recognition that if we're going to have this debate, if it's going to be fruitful one way or the other, we all have to be talking the same language. So at the very least, our folks need to know How these folks are talking and so I had mentioned so Aristotle for apologetics

Aristotle for apologetics. Yep, and this was was if you're going to have this sort of dialogue And yes, it's the sort of dialogue. I know you're going to hell You know, I'm going to hell but we're gonna debate this anyways, and it's okay It's we can still debate. And so the first things that get translated are logic is they're part of this, this, I love this aerosol for apologetics. That's exactly what it was. Then it's like, okay, sometimes we're beginning to now talk about the different worldviews that informed these Christians that were coming out of the Greek world, and so

they started translating some works in natural philosophy or what would be called physics now. But around 850 or so, there's this decided effort by Mansur, this Abbasid Hailev to literally understand and translate pretty much the entirety of the Greek intellectual tradition. Now it's not just philosophy, not just science, but it's mathematics, astronomy, history, works on usually not literature, but certainly the histories, certainly all the philosophy. And then he put a lot of money into this. I don't want to overplay this, there's something called the Beit El-Khikmah, the house of wisdom,

but it was at least someplace where learning, research, collection of information, and now not just from the Greeks, but also from the Persians as well, that there's this wisdom tradition. And so we can begin dating this sort of gradual move for theological purposes to this sort of concerted effort. And so you would get, I mean, the big names are Hunayn Ibn Ishaq, his son Ishaq Ibn Hunayn, a cousin, Hubaish, and then a person who worked with them, Issa Ibn Yahya. It's just a handful of, you know, half a dozen. And then there were some others, but this small group of literally probably not more than 10 or 12 ended up doing just this enormous amount of, hundreds of books by this one group the Hunane group hundreds, I mean the Sun is socket at least up

100 himself alone on translating Galen and It turns out in this relatively short period so you got this first stage of just sort of dabbling in translations for apologetic reasons to this sort of full-blown interest in which almost the entire, in about a hundred years, so you know, the span of two generations, a father and a son, this entire body of Greek knowledge, again, from history to science to philosophy to mathematics, gets translated into Arabic, as I said, right around 850 to 900. And then the second stage, or the final stage, the third stage, is usually taking these texts,

finding better additions of the Greek or things like this, correcting them. They become school texts and stuff. But we can really almost localize it in this period between 850 and 900. And we can identify those individuals that were sort of like instrumental in this translation movement happening. Going to tell a story. So when I was living in Cairo, I wanted to get a copy of Aristotle's physics. I was working on natural philosophy and the

Aristotelian tradition. And so I thought I should just get a Arabic copy of the physics. So I just went into a normal bookstore, I don't know, like a regular bookstore. And I said, I want a copy of Aristotle's physics. Oh yes, we do. And they take me over and there's these two volumes. I opened them up and it's, it's not given a name. This is this translator from, you know, the late eight hundreds. And so my first assumption was that, okay, well, maybe this is more of a specialty book. This seems, he goes, oh no, no, that's just the only translation we, you know, my first assumption was that, okay, maybe this is more of a specialty book.

This seems, oh no, no, that's just the only translation we, I know of or that's out there. It was done so well that it still remains the standard translation, at least in Cairo in 1995. And so is it because people weren't interested? Aristotle was always still of some interest. It just turns out this translation was extremely well done. And just going back to some of the linguistic things, these translators made decisions about how Greek terms were understood. And some of those decisions literally changed the direction of scientific and philosophical inquiry.

So by the time Ipinsina comes on the scene, this process of translating and commentating and engaging has been going on for about a hundred years? Why don't we put it about 150. If we started at about 850, and as I said, it's a little bit later, he was born, there's some controversy about this, but I think probably around 973. And so by this point, most of the texts were in translation. There were improved texts that were coming around. We do know, for instance, that there had been, that Ebensina initially had a very early, one of these very literal translations of Aristotle's physics. A new translation came around, probably this Ishaq one that I had mentioned.

But by that time, we're tailing off on that third period of the translation movement. So maybe one generation before they were doing some sort of corrections. But by the time he's there, he really does have access to almost this full body of Greek thought in good Arabic translations. And so how does he become such a central figure? Short answer is he's just damn in front of us. So I mentioned these two traditions at one point. There's this philosophy tradition, this very positive tradition towards Greek learning.

Evencena is certainly its greatest exponent. There was also this other tradition that was more critical of Greek science. Evencena, more than just anyone before, what he wants to do is come up with a genuine synthesis of these ideas, all of these ideas. He wants to provide a framework that even though he himself probably wasn't a mystic, Erfan, this divine, you know, mystic knowledge, was part of the system, something that at least needed to be explained. And so he doesn't back off of anything trying to offer an explanation and do so not in the type of way that might be piecemeal.

So here's a philosophical problem, let me work on that. Here's a philosophical problem, let me work on that. No, he wants to see a whole system. And in this respect, he's following in the footsteps of an earlier thinker, al-Farabi. Al-Farabi was part of this group called the Baghdad Parapetetics, a group that included Abul Bashar Mata, Yahya Menadi, al-Farabi, a number of others. Most of these others were problem solvers. Al-Farabi actually has two texts where he lays out in schematic form, an outline, a system that tries to incorporate all of Aristotle, Neoplatonism,

kind of work in the Ptolemy in astronomy. Also sympathetic to issues that are showing up in, He also is sympathetic to issues that are showing up in, that are rising out of Kalam, that is to say Islamic speculative theology, the Quran. He's not a particularly religious thinker, but on the other hand, he's sympathetic to it. And so he, in a very outline or schematic way, he presents a worldview. So unified theory of everything. Pretty much unified theory of everything. And what Ibn Sina does is systematically fill in

the details on this one, where there's hand waving and gestures, all of a sudden there is detailed argumentation. Now don't get me wrong, there are definitely places where Ibn Sina is doing his own thing. But he's working within this Farabian framework, introducing some novel ideas that will just fundamentally change the way that theology or metaphysics gets thought of, not only in the Islamic world, but in the Latin world. I mean, one of the single most important influence on say somebody like Thomas Aquinas, who sort of is the official theologian of the Catholic Church, for instance, is Ibn

Sina, certainly early on a distinction between essence and existence. This is now that's something new that even seen and will introduce into this for Rabian framework. But again, it takes questions like, for instance, Aristotle did not have a theory of creation. Ibn Sina will introduce a theory of creation, eternal creation, mind you, that at every single moment, every, you know, infinitely in the past, infinitely in the future, things are dependent upon God.

But he's doing this in part because, look, I'm a good Muslim, says Ibn Sina. Part of what I have to believe is that God creates ex nihilo from nothing. And how do I do that with a guy like Aristotle who says, oh, no, no, matter and form have always existed. And you have somebody who might explain why they're moving but didn't create them. And Ibn Sina can't, as a good Muslim, no, that's got to be wrong. But then he incorporates ways to make errors. And I'm going back to how he, when does comic, he will put these into the mouth of Aristotle,

things that are so unaristotelian that you can, it sounds believable. So Thomas Aquinas reads this and all of a sudden, oh, this is the way to understand Aristotle. It is amazing to the point that to this day, say in parts of Iran, it's been seen as read as living philosophy, not as this dead artifact. And his vision so fundamentally changed the way that the intellectual circles moved after him. The people now were not going back to Aristotle. They were not going back to the Neo-Platonists. They were going straight to Ibn Sina.

And so if now what Felsoffa or philosophy became was, was Imanzina, just because this world vision that gets everything from why you behave the way you do to why the planets behave the way the planets do to medicine, health, the most deepest questions in metaphysics and theology you can ask. And it's not just like, here's a problem, here's a problem, here's a problem. It's integrated. And I had actually mentioned that when I was trying to understand one topic on time, I found myself being pulled into this whole system because it naturally lends itself to it.

LESLIE KENDRICK When we study Aristotle in school or, you know, when philosophers talk, We study Aristotle in school or, you know, when philosophers talk. How close is the Aristotle that we study today to the Aristotle, the actual Aristotle, or how much of it is actually a version of Aristotle that we've received through this entire process that you've been talking about? It's, in some cases, it's absolutely impossible to say what the historical Aristotle's position is. I mean, historians of philosophy will spend a great deal, but even today, there's ongoing debates about what was the historical Aristotle. When I teach my Aristotle class, there's one question or one issue that comes up.

It involves the intellect and how one understands universal knowledge. And as part of that, Aristotle in a very, very short two paragraph, half a page introduces this notion of what is called an active or an agent intellect. I'm not going to try to tell you what it is. I'm just going to say two relatively short paragraphs. He does this. When it comes to me having to interpret this, what I do is I present about a dozen historical interpretations that almost from the very beginning, so Greek interpretations, Arabic

interpretations, Latin interpretations, and they are wildly different. And so, you know, it's like, what does the historical Aristotle say? That's a hard question for even us to deal with. When you look at this long relationship, I mean, it starts right from, you know, the Greeks and then it moves forward in time and it moves through geography as well. How do you think about that very long durée of these ideas? When you think about it, what do you, you know, what occurs to you? What do you reflect on?

I'm a philosopher. I'm also a historian. And as a historian, I am very, very interested in maybe trying to the extent one can to figure out what historical figures might have thought, how those ideas transferred, how the culture, the geography, and by the way, the geography sometimes very much does affect certainly political climates and everything else. And so as a historian, I'm happy to look at these things as these intellectual artifacts that I want to uncover what was going on that led up to them and led to them still being of enough interest that I can teach class on them. But I'm also a philosopher.

And as a philosopher, I want to evaluate these arguments. In some cases, are these still good arguments or is this just interesting antiquated science that we need not take all that seriously? And indeed, when I started working on natural philosophy, what would become the history of physics in some sort of way, people are like, well, why are you working on that text, those texts? Because this is just old bad science. That's not what philosophy does. And then I'm like, well, actually, here's what they have to say about time. And they're, oh, that's philosophically interesting. I mean, today, philosophically, it's still philosophically interesting. He

goes, oh, but that's just, you know, a one-off. That was it. Like, have you ever read these texts? No, of course I haven't read. Why wouldn't anyone read them? And I'm like, well, then until we've actually read them, we don't know whether it's all bad philosophy or, and I just happened to, you know, luckily happen on the one instance of a philosophically interesting idea, or are there more? And my own experience is that very frequently I'll put on my I will put on my historians had I will talk about the history but sometimes you step back and you're like this is an interesting idea so I don't know if that answers your question or it says something about me but you asked me about what do you feel like I feel like

I've got a the biggest sandbox or playground in the entire world sometimes when I'm dealing with this guy and I'm just going to play with it. So I just get excited and have fun. John Wolinski My name is John Wolinski and I'm an emeritus professor at Stanford University and I have created a project called the Public Knowledge Project that's very committed to open access to research and scholarship. After a number of years of working and really struggling to encourage people to consider open access to research to be very important, I asked myself, well, why exactly would I think that people deserve a right to know, a right to knowledge and research?

Where does that come from? Well, and what is it based? And so I started working back historically. And in fact, my original target was just to go back to John Locke who talks about, that's not about intellectual property, but certainly property. And my fascination with his contributions in that area into democracy left me still with that notion of where did this concept come from. And the medieval period proved to be fascinatingly rich in terms of the sharing. There was no, as it were, publishing economy. There were just manuscripts that circulated and certainly the monasteries and nunneries

and cloisters were not operating on that kind of economic basis that we think of today in terms of research and scholarship and publishing. And so, I was fascinated by that sense that here was a culture that began the traditions in the West of scholarly inquiry that was entirely open and free in the sense that everything could circulate, certainly in a narrow group in terms of monks and nuns, but still it had that openness. And then I happened upon this translation movement upon the notion of where did these ideas, where did this culture that was so important, the philosophers and the scientists,

how did that come into being and particularly around the formation of the universities? Why is it that the 12th century was such a turning point for the West? what was introduced or what brought about that kind of change. And that's really, for me, was an eye-opener because as a student of scholarly publishing and the sharing of scholarship, the interactions with Islam and the Islamic culture had not been a part of the picture of my own education. And so, the translation movement was a very powerful turning point And so the translation movement was a very powerful turning point in thinking about the circulation and the openness and the importance of sharing scholarship and research. In the 12th century and 13th century, all of a sudden, we get this, what I think of as a kind of manuscript tourism, that is scholars from the West, really from the North, if you

think about it technically, from throughout Europe, began from the North if you think about it technically from throughout Europe began to look for manuscripts at the contact zones with Islamic culture. That is in the Iberian Peninsula, in Sicily, Constantinople was another spot, Antioch and other places where Christian and Islamic cultures were beginning not always on a peaceful basis, but there was a contact zone. And there was a realization in the West that Islam had the goods as it were. They not only had all of the works of Plato and Aristotle, which had been completely missing from the Middle Ages in terms of Europe, but they had commentaries. They had developed this thinking, and it had evolved and they had contributed, the Islamic scholars had. And so that aspect of a great translation movement that had still continued in terms

of Islam's interest in other cultures, but that was particularly concentrated in the move from Arabic to Latin. And I think of it as, I don't want to be too dramatic, it's not a tsunami. Each text took a long time to translate and there was a lot of consultation and there would be Arabic scholars and Christian scholars and Jewish scholars and combinations of those working on the manuscripts in order to bring the richness of learning that Islam had assembled into Latin and thus into the West. So part of my interest in this, let me give you an example from the educational perspective,

is Averroes was a 12th century Islamic scholar and did a lot of work on Aristotle in particular. And he took on, in fact, he gained the reputation as the commentator. That is, people would refer to him much as we might refer to Sting or Edge or these one name kind of stars. He was the commentator. And his approach was to provide a summary of a work of Aristotle, then to paraphrase it in a way that made it easier to understand, and then finally, what he called the long commentary, which would be all of his thinking and others' thinking that he would bring to it. And that's a very strong pedagogical approach. It's a very good way to begin to create an educational setting for Aristotle. And part of my argument then is that the sheer weight of these translations with the commentaries

created a breakpoint for the monasteries and a beginning for the universities. That is that the educational institution of the Middle Ages, the monastery, was overloaded by this new influx of learning and that created the need for a new institution, a different approach, a focus on teaching rather than prayer. Can you say something about the philosophy underlying these ideas of knowledge sharing? You know, it seems as though there's a kind of buy-in to this idea that knowledge is a kind of common good or is something that is meant to be shared and built upon?

Yes. I mean, this is the whole principle of my work as a teacher and as a scholar, is that it's that exchange that you want to give and it enriches both parties, that the best teaching is learning twice. And that aspect is very much a part of this. And I would say that, I mean, to kind of characterize it, the monk who's been spending their life in a monastery, rising at dawn and saying vespers at midnight and just carrying on this kind of habitual life, all of a sudden is engaged in a very new kind of life by visiting a place like Toledo where a great deal of translation is going on. They wake and rise in the morning for something new

in terms of their engagement. And they see their responsibility. I mean, I think there are repeated cases in Islamic learning where the translation is the first step and then it's the commentary. And the commentary itself evolves into a much more exciting, different and new kind of thinking. So, the philosophy, if you like, is a celebration of philosophy. That is, the thinking of things through, the trying to understand. And again, it's within very strong religious beliefs, whether they're Muslim or Christian, but it was to say we are not just looking into the face of God, we are in fact engaged in a conversation about and potentially with God in terms of how the world operates and exists.

When you look at this, you know, this period of history and you reflect on it as an educator, as someone who's interested in learning and teaching. How do you think about this time period in terms of the work that you do? What does it offer you on a kind of personal and scholarly level? Yeah, so the important thing for me in terms of this theory of the contribution to the development of the universities, for example, is this idea of why we want to open learning in a way that can change society, that can improve

society. I don't think anyone would question, as soon as I say that, I think actually there are people who are questioning it today as we speak, the value and contribution of universities over the center. They're one of the oldest institutions, certainly the church is older, but the universities in terms of that particular focus and contribution. So I think of it as a lesson to be learned and certainly I can be selective in what I champion in it in terms of focusing on the exchange. And the other aspect is the global element

that we still bear a legacy of imperialism, of a center and periphery kind of metaphor in which we think about the north as being a center that distributed knowledge and learning to the rest of the world, to the periphery as it were. So we're still overcoming 20th century was just a collapse of imperialism on some levels and we're still as it were addressing that. So I think there is a purposeful political aspect which we need to consider in opening

learning so that it is the openness can mean simply having access, but we need to understand the global dimensions of that opening. And this historical perspective gives you a sense that it was once much more globally enriched than we think of today and that we should be taking as a target for a larger growth and development. The period that we're talking about in the 12th and 13th century was very much an Islamic and Christian engagement with Jewish and other elements involved. But I think generally what we're looking at today is a similar aspect of change, a similar approach in the digital era compared to the manuscript period where knowledge is circulating

on a new basis and a much more globally inclusive one. And that to me is a very exciting element as an educator, as a human being. Music You've been listening to ideas about the Greco-Arabic Translation Movement. Thank you to our guests. So my name is Sarah Ann Knutson. I'm an assistant professor of teaching in the Department of History at UBC. My name is John McGuinness. I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.

My name is John Molinski and I'm an emeritus professor at Stanford University. This episode was produced by Naheed Mustafa. The web producer is Lisa Ayuso, technical producer Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.