The Interests of the Republic of Letters in the Middle East, 1550–1700

Science in Context 12 (3):435-468 (1999)
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Abstract

The ArgumentThe “raison d'être” of this paper is my dissatisfaction with current portrayals of the place and the fate of the so-called rational sciences in Muslim societies. I approach this issue from the perspectives of West European visitors to the Ottoman and Safavid Empires during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I show that these travelers encountered educated people capable of understanding and answering their visitors' scholarly questions in non-trivial ways. The travels and the ensuing encounters suggest that early modern Muslim societies and their institutions, their ways of producing knowledge, the types of their knowledge, and their material resources contributed important elements to various early modern West European approaches to gaining knowledge about nature, history, and politics.

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References found in this work

Cultures of Natural History.N. Jardine, J. A. Secord & E. C. Spary - 1997 - Journal of the History of Biology 30 (2):306-309.
Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy.Alix Cooper - 1996 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 18 (1):135.
Despot and despotism: Vicissitudes of a political term.R. Koebner - 1951 - Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (3/4):275-302.

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