Adelard of Bath Quotes on Knowledge
Adelard of Bath (c. 1080 – c. 1152), the English philosopher and translator whose travels to Sicily, Antioch, and the Mediterranean Latin-Arabic frontier made him one of the principal early-twelfth-century transmitters of Greek and Arabic learning to the Latin West, defended in the Natural Questions (Quaestiones Naturales) the explicit subordination of received authority to investigative reason. The famous response to his nephew — that he himself had been taught by reason while the schools of his day were taught by an authoritative bridle — supplies one of the earliest Latin programmatic statements of the case for experimentally and rationally tested knowledge against the mere appeal to traditional teachers.
Quotes
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Attributed to Adelard of Bath:
“I have learned from my Arabic masters to put reason first; from my Latin teachers, authority.”
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Attributed to Adelard of Bath:
“Nature is to be questioned, not merely accepted.”
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Attributed to Adelard of Bath:
“If reason cannot teach the cause, the appeal to authority is vain.”
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Attributed to Adelard of Bath:
“The world is a single causal order open to honest inquiry.”
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Attributed to Adelard of Bath:
“Travel makes the mind a citizen of the world.”
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“Adelard of Bath, Dodi Ve-Nechdi , ed. and trans. H. Gollancz, Oxford University Press, London, 1920, pp. 98–99. Adapted by the author.”
From my Arab teachers I have learnt one thing, to have reason as my guide, while you are dazzled by the show of authority and led by a halter. For what is authority to be called, but a halter? As the brute beasts, indeed, are led by the halter, and have no idea by what they are led or why, but only follow the rope that holds them, so also the authority of writers leads not a few of you into danger -
“From my Arab teachers I have learnt one thing, to have reason as my guide, while you are dazzled by the show of authority and led by a halter. For what is authority to be called, but a halter? As the brute beasts, indeed, are led by the halter, and have no idea by what they are led or why, but only follow the rope that holds them, so also the authority of writers leads not a few of you into danger”
quoted in Euclid and Jesus, How and why the church changed mathematics and Christianity across two religious wars C. K. Raju