A park full of academic buffoons existing on the public dime.

H/T: Vasara Hammer

Park Philosophy week:

Park Philosophy-week introductory speakers represent, without exception, the benchmark in their field of research. These include, inter alia, Professors Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Kari Enqvist and Jussi Kotkavirta. Their introduction, topics include the importance of the Middle East to European culture, human relationship micro- and macrocosm as well as shame confession pathology. In addition, […] as well as a very timely crisis of capitalism from the perspective of Marxist theory by Researcher Paula Rauhala.

Park Philosophy where the dust flys off from Socrates plaster image

Philosophy may sound like to some a lofty view, and the furthest away from those in everyday life. However, Ikaalisten park philosophy event aims to provide tools for understanding the world by bringing the discussions on the summertime grass and ion the tavern twilight of the village.

[…]

Some think that Western and Islamic cultures are fundamentally different and on a collision course. Hämeen-Anttila, sees things differently. The Mediterranean region, the knowledge and skills have changed and criss-crossed for thousands of years.

Cultural contrasts is a sham

– Usually, a specific active cultural center radiates around the impact. Then it will decline; it will replace another. That is what happens,, Hämeen-Anttila says in an interactive summary.

For example, the Greeks built once their own their science and art on an earlier Mesopotamian and Egyptian knowledge foundation. The Islamic cultures, in turn, continued the Greek heritage and moved a lot of it to other Europeans, for example, via Spain.

– I find it hard to see the confrontation between the Western and Islamic cultures. I can see it between the states and of some extremist groups, Häme-Anttila says.

He reminds the German and French mutual history: two world wars and also those of the parents conflicts. Conflict has been more than enough, but hardly the root cause can be found in cultural differences.

Arab science was more advanced than the up to around Western European countries maybe 1100-1200 century. Then the torch gradually shifted to the Europeans’ hand. Today, we look at how we deal with the Americans and Chinese, and who else yet it is to come.

YLE

NOTE: Hämeen-Antilla’s verbal vaporings are a complete whitewash of history.

As Fjordman observes:

”Fear and uncertainty afflicted all too many Islamic natural philosophers. As Grant states, “Without the separation of church and state, and the developments that proceeded as a consequence, the West would not have produced a deeply rooted natural philosophy that was disseminated through Europe by virtue of an extensive network of universities, which laid the foundation for the great scientific advances made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, advances that have continued to the present day.”

Jihad continues to this day in the Balkans, a region which was for centuries under brutal Turkish rule. According to writer Ruth King, “When Serbia became independent of Byzantine rule in the 12th century, its economic, cultural, social and religious institutions were among the most advanced in Europe. Serbia functioned as a bridge between Greco-Byzantine civilization and the developing Western Renaissance. The center of the Serbian Orthodox Church was in Kosovo where churches, monasteries and monastic communities were established. A form of census in 1330, the ‘Decani Charter,’ detailed the list of chartered villages and households, of which only two percent were Albanian. The Ottomans invaded Serbia in 1389 and consolidated their rule in 1459, propelling major parts of the Balkan peninsula and adjacent southeast Europe into a Koran-dictated Dark Ages.”

Also note the professor’s reluctance to admit that Spain was taken at the point of the sword, and that any of the Greek heritage Islam came into possession of, was maintained by the subjugated under the auspices of the new rulers. Islam never truly capitalized on the newly acquired wealth of knowledge, because it conflicted with islamic norms.