Tamrin
Member
Nosce te ipsum
Posts: 3,586
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Post by Tamrin on Apr 6, 2012 22:32:27 GMT
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Post by contango on Jun 14, 2012 8:31:58 GMT
My favourite on the 7 liberal arts and sciences is....
Trivium Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic
Quadrivium Arithmetic = number Geometry = number in space Music = number in time Astronomy = number in space and time
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Post by dioncapra on Oct 26, 2012 11:43:07 GMT
My favourite on the 7 liberal arts and sciences is.... Trivium Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic Quadrivium Arithmetic = number Geometry = number in space Music = number in time Astronomy = number in space and time On the Quadrivium: Pythagoreans: Numbers absolute (arithmetic) Numbers applied (music) Magnitudes at rest (geometry) Magnitudes in motion (astronomy) You might enjoy this: www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit3/unit3.html (and not just the part on the Py-Man) Note reference to The History of Philosophy, by Thomas Stanley. A couple of years ago, the section on Pythagoras was republished, preface by Manly P. Hall, Introduction by Henry L. Drake, and edited by James Wasserman. Well worth a read, imo. Proverbs 9:1 Wisdom hath builded her house, She has hewn out her seven pillars:
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Post by boreades on Oct 29, 2012 22:30:16 GMT
In Praise of The Seven Liberal Arts
From ancient to modern times, people have been commanded to study the Seven Liberal Arts. But what are they? In the Western world, our perception of the history of the Liberal Arts is very much focused on the Greek version, not least because they were the first to write it down!
But before forming their own schools, Aristotle and Plato studied in Egypt, where these arts were taught as part of an ancient oral tradition, that in turn has roots within oral teachings and traditions in Sumeria and India.
The Greek seven liberal arts comprised two groups of studies: the trivium and the quadrivium. Stud-ies in the trivium involved grammar, dialectic (logic), and rhetoric; and studies in the quadrivium involved arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.
The Quadrivium was first formulated and taught by Pythagoras as the Tetraktys around 500BC, in a community where all were equal, even materially and morally, and where women had equal status to men. It was the first European schooling structure that honed education down to seven essential subjects, later known as the seven liberal arts. Plato continued this; when he returned to Athens in 387BC, he purchased a site on the outskirts of the city that would become the school of this science. The site was close to the barrow of a Bronze Age hero called Akademos. The school took its name from this obscure relic, and became the Akademeia. Plato's academy was open to anyone with the leisure and inclination to frequent its premises. It con-tinued the example of Pythagoras and also admitted women. This was highly unusual for other Greek schools, but they were not teaching the Seven Liberal Arts, which were taught in Plato’s Academy for a thousand years from 500BC until about 450AD.
Crucially in the West, these were not lost but came back to mainstream consciousness as part of Renaissance thought in the 15th and 16th centuries, with Architecture being worthy of study by adult gentle-folk. In pursuit of the Renaissance ideal, the “Universal Man”, people once again sought to learn all the arts central to human knowledge, including mathematics and astronomy.
These Renaissances ideals of the Universal Man, and the Great Architect of the Universe, formed a central theme in the Constitutions of the Freemasons, written by James Anderson in 1723, just six years after the formation of the first Grand Lodge of England in 1717.
Vestiges of them are found in most school curriculums today, in masonic ritual, and personal development courses. The seven arts were and are taught in parallel, but when conjoined, they form a set of steps to a greater understanding and heightened intuition into the beauty and meaning of the universe and world around us.
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