Trivium & Quadrivium reading

 The first quote I came across is "Aristotle advanced a similar plan in which the elementary training consisted of reading, writing, gymnastics, and music; and the advanced studies included arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, with the emphasis on the natural sciences." It was interesting to me since they consider gymnastics and music before arithmetic and natural sciences as elementary. I am not sure whether that necessarily indicate that those are easier topics to study, but basic arithmetic at least to me is quite a lot easier than music which has lots of structure along with hand-eye coordination. 

Another interesting note was "[Martianus Capella] rejected medicine and architecture as
purely technical subjects, pursued only for practical and not speculative ends and so unworthy of free men". I think this is quite the opposite of what we have today, where medicine is considered one of the most impactful jobs one can take and every year lots and lots of undergraduate students try to get into medicine. The mention of free men in the article throughout seems to suggest that people are free only if they studied enough liberal arts, and that seems to be a big status indicator. Today it seems reverted; the money-making jobs are often technical/practical in nature, while the liberal arts and other so-called pure subjects tend to get less attention and resources. Perhaps we place vastly different standards on what is a free man or not (and I believe man is just human in their writing, although some argues such use is promoting gender inequality)

One last note I have is "Considering specifically the field of mathematics, it is known that Church
councils from the time of Charlemagne demanded that the clergy have a knowledge of music and be able to compute the date of Easter. To fulfill these two apparently simple requirements, a knowledge
of three subjects of the quadrivium was involved: music, arithmetic, and astronomy". This quote prompted me to look at how the date of Easter was computed, and to my surprise it isn't a trivial task. One would need to find the full moon date and compute based on that. I think this is quite a good example of how we are so used to information that is readily available and we would simply trust that someone is working on it, and perhaps the same cannot be expected in the past. 



Comments

  1. Ian, this is a great discussion of social organization and knowledge. It makes me think about how the industrial revolution and capitalism have effected education.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Assignment 3 Draft Proposal

Assignment 3: Artwork on Math History