Logic and the scientific method
An eclipse of the moon. You can see the curved shadow of the Earth. Logic tells you the earth is round. Making predictions Once people have seen that something happens [...]
An eclipse of the moon. You can see the curved shadow of the Earth. Logic tells you the earth is round. Making predictions Once people have seen that something happens [...]
The Egyptian god Bes Gods are part of people's desire to know how the world works. It's one of the ways that people explain how the world works. People say [...]
A Roman man making a speech (Florence, about 50 BC) Thanks to VROMA for the image Romans meet Greek philosophy Roman men didn't begin studying philosophy until about 200 BC. At that time, [...]
Pope Gregory the Great writing, from the 900s AD. Ivory, probably from Kenya. (Now in Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum) A theologian (thee-oh-LOW-gin) is a person who studies religion. The word comes from [...]
The rabbi Maimonides, in a later medieval painting What does "rabbi" mean? Rabbi means "great one" in Hebrew, or "respected one". It's a Hebrew word related to the Arabic word rabb, [...]
Jews in the Islamic Empire: The synagogue where Maimonides worked in Cairo, Egypt (1100s AD) Did Jewish people help the Arab conquest? The Arabs first began to attack the Roman Empire in the 630s AD. [...]
Weighing the souls of the dead Philosophy means the love of wisdom. But what does that mean? It's hard to separate philosophy from religion. And it's also hard to draw a [...]
The first view of the pilgrimage: Chartres on the horizon Who went on pilgrimages? In the Middle Ages, many people - both men and women - went on short or long [...]
A book in Thomas Aquinas' handwriting For many years before Thomas Aquinas was born, men like Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd in the Abbasid Empire had been reading the Quran, and reading Aristotle, and trying to find ways to [...]
Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the background Like Ibn Rushd and Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas was a great thinke who tried to figure out the relationship between science and religion. But unlike Ibn Rushd [...]