Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The fundamental ideas of the common philosophy of Leucippus and Democritus were due to the former, but as regards the working out it is hardly possible to disentangle them, nor is it, for our purposes, important to make the attempt. Leucippus, if not Democritus, was led to atomism in the attempt to mediate between monism and pluralism, as represent
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
The ancient cosmogonies that shaped foundational myths, from the Babylonian Enuma Elish to Hesiod’s Theogony, mentioned in chapter 1, tell of a world in which the order is established by a great god, Marduk or Zeus, who takes power. Following a long period of battles and confusion, a deity triumphs and establishes an order that is at once cosmic, s
... See moreCarlo Rovelli • Anaximander: And the Birth of Science
For example, drought was long the favored explanation of earlier scholars for the movement of the Sea Peoples out of the regions of the Western Mediterranean and into the lands to the east. They postulated that a drought in northern Europe had pressured the population to migrate down into the Mediterranean region, where they displaced the inhabitan
... See moreEric H. Cline • 1177 B.C.
hand, a synthetic theory that incorporates both of these (and some other) processes may provide us with a viable hypothesis that can be tested with data.
Peter Turchin, Sergey A. Nefedov • Secular Cycles
For the geometer Pythagoras (c. 530 BC), living at Croton in Sicily, the key lay in number and harmony – and the dynamic balance of contraries, based on the opposition of odd and even. For Heraclitus (c. 540–475 BC) the true constant was change itself, in a macrocosm composed of fire and water; for Democritus (c. 460 BC), the essence was a flux of
... See moreRoy Porter • The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (The Norton History of Science)
Second, we need to admit that there is currently no scholarly consensus as to the cause or causes of the collapse of these multiple interconnected societies just over three thousand years ago; culprits recently blamed by scholars include “attacks by foreign enemies, social uprising, natural catastrophes, systems collapse, and changes in warfare.”
Eric H. Cline • 1177 B.C.
It now seems that such a disastrous drought may have affected northern Italy in the Bronze Age. There are indications that the Terramare culture, which had flourished in the Po delta/plain in northern Italy since the seventeenth century BC, suddenly collapsed around 1200 BC. Kristian Kristiansen, a highly regarded scholar of Bronze Age Europe, note
... See moreEric H. Cline • 1177 B.C.
