O Mapa do Conhecimento

Adorei a viagem proporcionada pelo livro "The Map of Knowledge" de Violet Moller. A obra pode não ser perfeita, podem existir problemas e erros, mas tendo em conta o que se pretendia, uma visão geral sobre a travessia do conhecimento durante a Idade Média, e não uma discussão sobre a veracidade histórica ou importância dos conceitos e teorias, a obra é muito conseguida. A sua leitura oferece-nos um enquadramento do registo e movimento do conhecimento ao longo de mais de 1000 anos, ajudando a compreender melhor certos lugares, os seus rituais e os seus personagens. Para além disso, no final, emerge algo ainda mais importante, o modo particular como se cria ciência, as suas necessidades e condições para o florescimento.

A abordagem seguida por Violet Moller é metodologicamente simples mas bastante eficaz. Escolheu 3 autores e obras, criadas na Grécia, e seguiu o seu caminho, no espaço e tempo. O foco é ligeiramente distinto do que podemos encontrar em muitas outras histórias do conhecimento, porque Moller dedica muito mais da sua atenção aos suportes dos textos e em particular ao esforço de manutenção e tradução dos mesmos ao longo de séculos e por entre múltiplas culturas. Pode parecer algo de somenos, e no entanto, sem comunicação de conhecimento não existira Ciência. Por outro lado, Moller fugiu aos nomes mais populares — Platão ou Aristoteles — optando pelas ciências exatas, tendo escolhido, como foco:

Matemática — Euclides — Os Elementos 

Astronomia — Ptolomeu — Almagesto

Medicina — Galeno — Curriculo de medicina de Alexandria

Moller defende a obra destes 3 autores como estando na base do surgimento do pensamento científico, tanto nos métodos como na comunicação do mesmo.

“All three of these remarkable men defined the structure and content of their individual subjects. They created the framework within which future scholars would work for hundreds of years. Many of the theories of Ptolemy and Galen have since been disproved and replaced, but their influence and legacy is incontrovertible. Galen’s theory of the humours still survives in traditional Tibetan medicine and also in modern complementary medicine. Ptolemy’s survey of the fixed stars endured, as did his “idea that the physical world is dependable and can be understood with mathematics.

(...)

In contrast, Euclid’s Elements has stood the test of time, almost in its entirety. It was still being taught in classrooms in the twentieth century, and the geometrical theories it contains remain as true and relevant today as they were in the fourth century BC. The same applies to Euclid’s demonstrative method, which uses a concise technical vocabulary, suppositions and proofs (diagrams), and which has remained a template for scientific writing ever since.

(...)

Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy pioneered the practice of science based on observation, experimentation, accuracy, intellectual rigour and clear communication—the cornerstones of what is now known as “scientific method.”

Tendo definido os autores e obras, Moller partiu atrás das suas ideias, tentando perceber como chegaram até nós, nomeadamente durante a época medieval, na qual muito do conhecimento foi destruído em sucessivas tentativas de "genocídio cultural". Assim, cada capítulo do livro centra-se numa cidade, permitindo que o livro se vá desenrolando cronologicamente: Alexandria, Bagdade, Córdoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo, e Veneza.

“back to Alexandria to see when and how the texts were written. From here, they were dispersed across the Eastern Mediterranean to Syria and Constantinople, where they remained until the ninth century, when scholars from the new city of Baghdad, capital of the vast Muslim Empire, began seeking them out to translate them into Arabic and use the ideas contained in them as the foundation for their own scientific discoveries. Baghdad was the first true centre of learning since antiquity, and over time it inspired cities across the Arab world to build libraries and fund science. The most important of these was Córdoba, in southern Spain, ruled over by the Umayyad dynasty, under whose patronage the works of Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen were studied and where their ideas were questioned and improved upon by generations of scholars. From Córdoba, they were taken to other cities in Spain and, when the Christians began to reconquer the peninsula, Toledo became an important centre of translation and the place where they entered the Latin, Christian world."

"Recolha de tratados médicos", obra de Al Razi (854–925), criada a partir dos trabalhos de Galeno. Tradução criada na Escola de Toledo.

"This was the major route the texts took, but there were other places in the Middle Ages where ancient Greek, Arabic and Western culture collided. Salerno, in Southern Italy, was a place where medical texts (in Arabic, but derived from Galen) were taken from North Africa and translated into Latin, and, as a result, Salerno became the centre of European medical studies for centuries, playing a vital role in the dissemination of medicine. Then, in Palermo, Ptolemy and Euclid take centre stage from Galen, as scholars translated copies of The Elements and The Almagest directly from Greek to Latin, bypassing the Arabic versions in the hope of achieving greater accuracy. The three divergent strands came together in Venice, where manuscripts began to arrive in the last half of the fifteenth century, ready to be printed for the first time.”

No final da viagem com Moller, e no meio das múltiplas conclusões e comentários que faz, destaquei este comentário, que funciona, para mim, como pináculo de todo o seu trabalho, pela importância do que revela estar na base daquilo que chamamos Ciência:

“Each of the cities we have visited in this book had its own particular topography and character, but they all shared the conditions that allowed scholarship to flourish: political stability, a regular supply of funding and of texts, a pool of talented, interested individuals and, most striking of all, an atmosphere of tolerance and inclusivity towards different nationalities and religions. This collaboration is one of the most important factors in the development of science. Without it, there would be no translation, no movement of knowledge across cultural boundaries and no opportunity to fuse ideas from one tradition with those from another.”

Outros textos sobre o tema:

"História da Filosofia Ocidental" (1945)

“The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, And The Struggle For The Soul Of Western Civilization” (2013)

“O Infinito num Junco. A invenção do livro na Antiguidade e o nascer da sede de leitura” (2019)

“The Frontiers of Knowledge. What We Know About Science, History And The Mind" (2021)

"As Faces Esquecidas de Palmira" (2021)