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Something unusual has happened to Ramon Llull (Raimundus Lullus,
1232-1316), the franciscan thinker from Majorca. He has
been at the same time derided and hailed as a philosopher. He has been
instrumental in creating our foundational insights as computer
scientists and logicians, yet he occupies a very minor place in the
histories of Philosophy, Mathematics or Logic. He was one of the
first philosophers to claim a logical basis for religious belief yet he
has been considered a source of alchemy, cabbalistics and mysticism.
He is considered a conceited eccentric fool and -just read Martin
Gardner's 1958 piece- a maze of confused thinking, but such
indictment hardly squares with the undeniable fact that he had
foresights which anticipated developments 700 years in the future.
So, what is the truth? and what is the man?
That Llull is really a marginal sidepiece in the history of Western
Philosophy 15 clear -as it was to him. And, because he resented
it, he innovated, and tried to convince the Parisian intellectuals
that his innovative ideas had merit -to no avail. He was not
understood at his first Sorbonne appearance in 1289. His
combinatorics were definitely not the method to use for logical analysis
(causal chaining was). When he came back in 1309-11 with a
more accessible system he was greeted with a flurry of sympathy rather
than real acceptation. Some found in him a firm advocate of basing
faith solely on logic, and all understanding on reason (against the
revelationists and the mystically-inclined). But after his death the
sympathy faded out, a victim of the Inquisition and the
dominican-franciscan l4th-century struggle. In an ironic twist,
Llull, who had always put logic before faith, and had done this by
propounding innovative ideas, became a thinker derided by the first
science pioneers (Bacon or Descartes, who had a lot to thank him
for), while he became the hero of alchemists, cabbalists and general
mystics (thanks to being attributed authorship of esoteric
apocrypha). The usual charge today (for Gardner, as it was for
Descartes), that his thinking was actually confused, is not the
whole reason for the misrepresentation of Llull's thought: confusion
between religious faith, ethical motives, apologetics and natural
explanations was the rule rather than the exception in medieval
philosophy. As for his own equivocations, it is a well-known fact
that all innovators muddle through their own discoveries -the full
reach of which they do not usually grasp- and even extrapolate wildly
from them. Llull's peculiar innovations, strange as they seemed at
the time, sound familiar to the modern ear. Here we list some of the
more typically Lullian.
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