Stats for nerds
2recommend
9mentions
2people
2019–2024years
56% recommend44% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity […]
You can also argue for a Flat Earth, but all your arguments given would be bad: given that slavery existed before Christianity arrived on the scene, and early Christians (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa) argued against it, that would contain a bunch of bad arguments as well. The history of Western thought as outlined in (e.g.) Siedentop's Inventing the Individual shows how Christianity moved the needle from slaves to serfs to individual freedom:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18740986-inventing-the-i...
This can further be expounded on in Brundage's The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession illustrating how everyone—pauper to Pope—was afforded a fair shake at justice (due process in law) going back to (at least) the Middle Ages:
* https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo562094...
See also Whitman's The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial for an interesting run-down on that topic:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2187985.The_Origins_of_R...
> The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others.
And how many orphanages did the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans have? (Versus leaving children outside to die from exposure.) Or hospitals:
> The declaration of Christianity as an accepted religion in the Roman Empire drove an expansion of the provision of care. Following First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE construction of a hospital in every cathedral town was begun. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil of Caesarea in modern-day Turkey towards the end of the 4th century. By the beginning of the 5th century, the hospital had already become ubiquitous throughout the Christian east in the Byzantine world,[3] this being a dramatic shift from the pre-Christian era of the Roman Empire where no civilian hospitals existed.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hospitals#Roman_Emp...
The current-day 'Western values' are Christian values. The most recent instance of non-Christian values being practiced in the West would probably be Nazism, and before that Nietzsche's observation that you either accept a supernatural entity and have (e.g.) Christian values, or you have nihilism and morals are arbitrary (in After Virtue, MacIntyre outlines why any one system (by Kierkegaard, Marx, Kant, Hume, etc) is just as arbitrary as any other (agreeing with Nietzsche in the binary choice that is available)).
- See The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession by Brundage, which has some early chapters on the Roman time period:
* https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo562094...
- The Middle ("Medieval") Ages had a lot going on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God%27s_Philosophers
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2071784.God_s_Clockmaker
The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science by Seb Faulk was recently (2020) published and won a few awards (lots of interview on YouTube):
* https://twitter.com/Seb_Falk
Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution and The Rise of Early Modern Science by Toby Huff:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Huff
If you're doing philosophy and science, you may be curious about law: see The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession by Brundage:
- The medieval origins of the legal profession: canonists, civilians, and courts by Brundage
The origins of reasonable doubt: theological roots of the criminal trial by Whitman
- Another interesting observation there was much more of a Church-State separation in Christianity compared to many other belief systems:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar
Certainly the (Catholic) Church had a lot of temporal power, especially in the Papal States, but sovereignty was a bigger thing than in Imperial China or Muslim conquests or caliphs.
Huff also cites the legal framework (amongst other factors): the independence of the judiciary (even from the Church, even though clergy sometimes acted as judges) and a focus on a documented due process acted as checks on runaway power.
The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession by Brundage is also an interesting read:
* https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo56...
It even covers Roman law, and how it managed to be salvaged (to an extent) and be used as a base for European law, especially starting in the 1200s.
- > So basically, corporations are legal persons because of Capitalism.
See The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession by Brundage, which has a few chapters on law during the Roman period, as well as chapters on the creation of universities, along with mentions of things like guilds and town charters, which were collective groupings of people treated as a single entity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Brundage
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University#Definition
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_University_in...
Going back to Ancient Rome for non-commercial purposes:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associations_in_ancient_Rome
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