The Wisdom of Ramon Llull: Mysticism, Method, and the Art of Finding Truth - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

A thirteenth-century courtier abandoned everything to build a machine for discovering truth — and changed the history of Western thought.

The Wisdom of Ramon Llull: Mysticism, Method, and the Art of Finding Truth tells the extraordinary story of one of the medieval world's most original and restless minds. Born on the island of Majorca shortly after its conquest by Christian forces, Ramon Llull spent his youth as a courtier and troubadour poet before a series of visions transformed him into a philosopher, missionary, and inventor of a combinatorial system of reasoning that anticipated developments in formal logic and computer science by centuries.

Drawing on the intellectual traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism that converged in medieval Majorca, Llull constructed a method he called the Art — a system of revolving wheels, symbolic alphabets, and geometric figures designed to generate truths about any subject from a set of fundamental principles. He spent four decades promoting this system across Europe and North Africa, composing nearly three hundred works in Catalan, Latin, and Arabic, founding a missionary language school, petitioning popes and kings, and twice risking his life in Muslim North Africa to test his method of rational persuasion.

The Wisdom of Ramon Llull: Mysticism, Method, and the Art of Finding Truth examines every dimension of this remarkable career:

• The multicultural world of medieval Majorca and its influence on Llull's vision of interfaith dialogue
• The structure and operation of the Art, from its divine dignities to its revolving combinatorial figures
• Llull's major literary works, including the pioneering novel Blanquerna and the Sufi-influenced Llibre d'amic e amat
• His dangerous missionary journeys to Tunis and Bougie and his tireless campaigns at the papal court
• The posthumous controversy over Llull's orthodoxy and the centuries-long fight for his vindication
• The transmission of Lullian ideas through Giordano Bruno and Gottfried Leibniz to modern logic and computation

Written for readers who seek intellectual substance without academic jargon, this volume offers a vivid and historically grounded portrait of a thinker whose ambition was matched only by his courage. Llull believed that reason and love were not opposed forces but complementary paths to the same truth — and he spent his life proving it, at whatever cost.

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