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The Map of Critical Thinking and Modern Science
Jamie noticed an interesting map of
critical thinking and science done in a sort of subway style. You can track Newton and Einstein and Tesla and so on. It's actually pretty interesting to navigate.
True, but that in large part is because where you put the period at the end of this map has a massive influence on where you begin, especially philosophically. That isn't to suggest that there were not some parallels elsewhere in the world, but due to the great leaps the West made over the East from 16th century on up until the dawn of the 21st, those parallels became dead ends.
China was ahead of the West for a very long time. Right up into and even during the early part of the colonial age China was pretty far ahead of the West in terms of technology and culture. If China had maintained that path we might be in exactly the same place we are today in terms of technology, but instead of being able to trace back philosophical lines from Europe, to Roman, to Greece, you might trace it back from Japan, to Korea, to China with a set of Eastern philosophers to match. Hell, if you were to simply draw the map in the 1500s of where the major technologies trace their schools of thought from you would have two maps, on Eastern and one Western, and the Eastern one would be further ahead.
This isn't even to suggest that the West made its advancements in a vacuum. Lots of technology and thought crossed both ways across Eurasia, but when an idea travels a few thousand miles in the ancient world and suffers a dozen translations you pretty much lose all traceability. Hell, just jumping from an Islamic Empire to a Christian Empire is a pretty sure way to ensure that traceability is lost. It isn't like a Christian scholar in 1,200 AD influenced by an Islamic Arab scholar is going to cite his inspiration. The only reason why we remember those ancient Greek scholars at all is because the empires that came after worship the empires that came before, and were happy to cite them as influences.
Starting the map in the 1500s and working up to today means it is going to be a Western map because that was the period of time when the West dominated world thinking. Draw this map from 2000 BC to 1500 AD, or from 600 AD to 1200 AD, or from many other two points and you would see totally different maps. Hell, I bet the map from 2000 AD to 2500 AD is going to be a wild one with lines crossing all over the world like never before.