So how do you tell that fall is arriving in California? Sunset arrives earlier. Real explanation from a friend who is a California native. In any case, in my few spare minutes I’ve been reading Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane. Probably would not recommend for a novice, and to be honest the author is a little prolix. But it’s a nice complement to more general works such as When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty, where the ‘eastern interlude’ received some attention, but probably far less than warranted in relation to how significant it is to world history. One aspect of of Lost Enlightenment which a general audience would benefit from is that it emphasizes just how important and disproportionate Iranian speaking intellectuals from Turan were during Islam’s Golden Age in terms of reach and influence. Many of the thinkers that one might assume are Arab because they wrote in Arabic turn out to be ethnically Iranian, and from the further reaches out of the Iranian world, beyond Persia proper.
I do feel a little guilty that I’ve not finished off Matthew Stewart’s Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. The problem is that I’m in broad agreement and in overall familiarity with the ideas and theses presented within Stewart’s work. Historical perspective matters, and it was Jay Winik’s The Great Upheaval which brought home to me just how metaphysically radical the Founders were in their time. I had read The Godless Constitution years before, and it seems clear that the relative thinness of religious character in the founding documents of early American republic was no inadvertent lacunae. But Winik’s treatment brought home just how strange it was for a polity to arise without any imprimatur of religious sanctity. Stewart’s work is timely, insofar as the ideas of charlatans such as David Barton have received wide attention, but aside from the threads of connection with the ancients such as Lucretius it isn’t fundamentally a new story. It has long been known, as far back as the accusations against Thomas Jefferson of being an infidel.
Finally, I now have Armand Leroi’s The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. I’m excited to read this, because since Mutants I have felt that Armand is a writer of science on the same level as Richard Dawkins. It turns out that we’re interested in the same things, and I actually am highly sympathetic with the subheading of his latest book, but the fact is that Armand just writes well. I can recommend this book without even reading it, and I’m looking forward to reading it in a few settings next week, when I’m going to try and take some time off from the inter-webs and my various adult professional obligations.
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