We now come to a further mutation of human intelligence, which occurred a few centuries after the introduction of monotheism into the Jewish sphere. We move on to Greece, where the mythical Phoenician king Cadmus imported the alphabet into a culture where there was no ideographic writing but only an oral culture, myth. Within a…
Brief history of techno-cognitive revolutions
In ancient Greece there is no archaic hieroglyphic writing with which alphabetic writing is likely to be confused, or to conflict; thus no prohibition of imagery is motivated, such as that imposed by the “jealous” and invisible God of the Hebrews. The imagery of Greek myths and art will thus not be prohibited or removed,…
Returning to Greece, in the work “The Invention of Mythology,” Marcel Detienne describes the exclusion strategy of archaic and tribal culture based on orality by the new written knowledge: “the truth of the effective discourse of ‘useful’ history is a written truth. But it is also a new memory, purified from the falsifications of hear-say,…
Aeschylus writes, in “Prometheus Chained,” “for them, I invented numbers, the first among all sciences, but I also taught humans how to combine letters, memory of all things, mother of all arts.” In the history of civilization, numbering systems preceded writing, particularly for practical and accounting needs. However, in Western culture it is Greece that…
Judaism and Greekity, united by the same writing technology, thus take the first and fundamental steps of Western culture. Pictographic and ideographic forms of writing existed, and still exist, before and outside the history of the West. However, these techniques were complex and elitist, their use restricted to a few scribes and priests in the…
Other codes fundamental to the history of civilization, such as coins, also derive their inspiration from the alphabet, understood in a physical and mathematical sense. Sociologist Karl Polanyi considers currency a semantic system “similar in a general sense to language, writing, or weights and measures.” Tradition has it that the coin was first minted by…
After the crisis of the ancient world and the medieval era, a profound cognitive revolution in Western culture occurred in the Renaissance, and particularly in the world of the visual arts. Linear perspective is a system for representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface devised in Florence in the 15th century. It is based on…
Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise “De pictura” describes for the first time the perspective method, which allows painters to create on a flat surface a three-dimensional space governed by precise mathematical laws. The procedure is basically the one still used in all art schools around the world. By following a precise procedure, starting with…
The construction of the perspective method of graphically representing three-dimensional reality is the triggering moment of the parable of Renaissance art, emblematic of the convergence of art and science. Florentine painting of the Renaissance is one of the highest episodes in the history of universal art, and it includes a series of masters of absolute…
It is around 1450, the invention of movable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg, marks the beginning of a profound intellectual revolution. Adapting an existing technology used, for example, to print images on textiles, Gutenberg introduced movable type printing for the reproduction of alphabetic text. The book, a rare and precious commodity reserved for a few…
Italiano