
Now that so many people seem willing to forget the history of science to back to medieval beliefs about "Creation" life is good review of some of those scholars who made the world move forward, and history as they were giving face to face with the Bible until they learned to brush it aside. One of them was Joseph Justus Scaliger Scaliger and José Justo, as it is called in some English books, French scholar some even compare to Aristotle and some of whose ideas, as we shall see, made life easier for scientists and even today used. Joseph Justus Scaliger
was the son of another great scholar of his time, Julius Caesar Scaliger , who worked as a clerk during his childhood, learning the way Latin and how to work those scholars years. He studied Greek at the University of Paris though, as the classes had a very high level, end up learning as an autodidact, as well as after the Hebrew and Arabic. Between 1563 and 1570 he traveled to Italy and Britain as a companion to another young man of noble family. During those trips became a Protestant. Then he studied law at Valence and had to flee to Switzerland for the persecution they lived Huguenots in France, teaching philosophy at Geneva for a while. He returned to France in 1574 and went on to publish annotated editions of the classics, inquiring after the story, which introduced the critical method that would not end succeeding until long after his death. Scaliger thought ancient history was not just that of the Romans and Greeks, but also the Egyptians, Persians and Babylonians, and could not continue teaching the history of the Hebrews as a fact beyond all others.
of his interest in chronology and astronomy did the work of emendation Tempore Opus (1583), which devised a chronological system that still is useful to astronomers, called Julian day (for his father Julius Caesar Scaliger). Until then the various calendars used made it very difficult to calculate the days from a particular very important information when observing the stars. Scaliger sought a starting point on a day to match the lunar cycles, solar and used in Rome for the collection of taxes. This calculated point of departure on 24 January 4183 BC on the Julian calendar. So today for example would be the Julian day 2454870 (do not have much merit, there are sites on the Internet that calculated for any date). Subsequently adapted his account in Greenwich and few further adjustments work.
In 1593 he moved to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where he spent the rest of his life. There could devote full time the study of mathematics, philosophy, history, and virtually all knowledge of his time. During his later years continued to publish editions of the classics, and in 1606 was published what would become his masterpiece, the Thesaurus Temporum in which, among other things, recovered through a Byzantine short list of Egyptian kings of Manetho. Based on it, Scaliger calculated the beginning of the first Egyptian dynasty in the year 5285 BC. Unfortunately for him, and based on the Bible and then others would like James Ussher, Scaliger had previously given a date for the creation the world in the year 3949 BC, so he had to invent a mythical period or "proleptic" curiously elapsed time before the Creation ("time before time was created?) to avoid colliding with the Holy Scriptures .
obviously not convinced that too much of his time other scholars, some of which interpreted that the Egyptians had invented a mythical past to believe that his people were older than the Jew, who "obviously" was the most senior in the Bible. Other dates Manetho reduced to coincide with the Scriptures. The controversy lasted for several centuries and even one of the greatest thinkers in history, Isaac Newton , said at the time that the list of Manetho was wrong because it went against the Bible.
Despite his efforts to reconcile what they drew from their readings with the "official timeline" based on the Bible, some people must have thought that his teachings were too dangerous for religion, and the last years of his life were spent in the middle of attacks by their enemies, led by the Jesuits who were dedicated to publish all kinds of lies about him, dying in January 1609.
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