Al-Masudi

Historiador, geógrafo y viajero, autor de más de veinte obras que también versan sobre teología, ciencia natural y vida social. 

House taken over

 

House taken over

We live in contradictory times of change, in societies under siege in which we must be attentive to the signs of memory, in a house taken over in which we wonder why we should act morally and what ethics we should live with. Questions that refer us to dissimilar characters, questions that question our beliefs, that force us to review the relationships between nature and morality, the harassment and cruelty of our time, our relationships with authority and the shaken forms of respect.

We live in cultures of war and symbolic violence, cultures of psychological abuse in everyday life, experimenting the beginnings of new worlds but without clear leaderships, cultures of neglect and decline of the public man under the crisis of the enlightement model, cultures of the threatened word in a fluctuating space where a new sentimental education is urgently needed.

These are times of exception turned into norm, enormous unrest, anomie and social disintegration, bodies of crime and loss of community.

These cultural changes present enormous political challenges: the very meaning of humanity is at stake.

In Argentina, we are in the world of Martín Fierro and Facundo, products of a failed social experiment resulting in inefficiency and impunity, in the justice of the famous, in frauds and transgressions, in the society of ignorance, besieged by uncertainties, insecurities and vulnerabilities, mistrust and victimization, fragmentation and uprooting, and what Borges called “our poor individualism”: an urgent reconstruction of coexistence, our home and us is needed.

It is difficult to stay on course in an age that has turned its back on its critical culture as a guiding compass in a world devoid of meaning, and it has adopted instead a prosthetics culture in which medicine often makes us sick, school often brutalizes us, and communications usually make us deaf and dumb.

Our entire way of life has been profoundly affected by technological and communication advances. And so new ways of thinking and feeling appear in a culture of instantaneousness, sensation, impact, urgency. And no one seems to be in control of so many transgressions. What Bauman calls “Unsicherheit”: uncertainty, insecurity and vulnerability, is also “precariousness”: the feeling of instability associated with the disappearance of fixed points in which to place trust.

We have gained freedom at the cost of security, new identity alternatives are emerging and there is no place where one can say with a minimum of certainty that one is at home, safe and sound.

More than two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant made a prophecy about the world to come and predicted a “perfect unification of the human species through common citizenship”: in the end we would all have to learn to be good neighbors for the simple fact that we would have nowhere else to go. The “solidarity of destinies” would not depend on our will.

And yet, many times we see evil and hear evil, and sometimes we say evil, but we do nothing, or not enough, to stop it, restrict it or frustrate it, overcome by the horrible sensation of a world that is controlled by no one and that cannot even be controlled.

We are all for peace, social justice, education, knowledge, and yet we continue to live in environments of incomprehension and war. But those who pride themselves on their tolerance and do not practice proselytism, are they not in a position of inferiority compared to the fanatic who imposes conversion by force? Montesquieu had evoked this paradox in his Persian Letters, apropos of the tyranny suffered by women:

"The dominion we have over them is a true tyranny; they have allowed us to claim it only because they have more gentleness than we do, and, consequently, more humanity and reason. These advantages, which should, without doubt, have given them superiority if we had been reasonable, made them lose it, because we are not."

The more humanity and reason we have, the less we want to tyrannize others; but then it is easier for them to tyrannize us. We are always forced to face the same aporia that Montesquieu bequeathed to us without showing us the way out of it: superiority becomes inferiority, the best leads to the worst.

It is in this context that it becomes necessary, once again, to examine ourselves. Socrates told us that the unexamined life is not worth living. And in his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein reminded us of the need for this search, since “the aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden by their simplicity and familiarity.”

A person who wishes to live a moral life, in addition to having the desire or interest to act well, recognizes above all that restlessness and uncertainty about his/her knowledge, and

especially about his/her own moral knowledge. The moral life involves the recognition that one's own current beliefs might be wrong. It is not a question of having what we call "integrity." "Integrity" consists of a life lived with a desire to act according to one's deeply held moral judgments. But one's judgments can be wrong, and one can act wrongly "with integrity." Living a moral life, by contrast, requires acting with a kind of modesty about one's moral judgments: acting while acknowledging one's own moral fallibility is a necessary condition for developing a good moral personality.

But such uneasiness and uncertainty cannot immobilize us, since living a moral life is about acting well: the pursuit of that life occurs in the sphere of action, as opposed to contemplation, devotion, or other kinds of activity: a moral life is not well achieved in isolation from society.

Now, it so happens that we cannot know what is good for us if we do not know human nature. Socrates called this life “unexamined” and said that it was “not worth living.” But is it enough to know the good? Knowing the good was doing good for Plato. Many modern thinkers do not agree with this statement, since even with a true knowledge of human nature there is no certainty that we will act according to this knowledge and do good. We have learned a lot about the non-rational forces in the human personality that fight reason – instincts, emotions, passions, impulses – and against which reason always appears behind. Ovid already said: “We know and approve the best path, but we follow the worst.”

On the other hand, and to the horror of many who believed that traditional Athenian morals, laws and democracy expressed absolute truths, the sophists argued that all moral and political principles were relative to the group that believed in them. And that the laws of the cities were not natural and unchangeable but merely the product of custom or convention. That is why some argued that one is not obliged to obey the law. Already in Book I of The Republic, Thrasymachus the sophist says that power makes right, and that laws only serve to protect the interests of the powerful. Many people today are close to the sophists in their beliefs, they think that laws only protect the rich, that they are not based on justice and that they do not have to be obeyed: they are moral relativists who deny that morality is valid except for the group that believes in it.

So we must ask ourselves: Is there, as Plato believed, a single, absolutely true, immutable and eternal concept of justice, of virtue? And in that case, would this knowledge justify an authoritarian government by an elite of knowledge and virtue with absolute power? Yes, for Plato. This was Plato's solution to the moral and intellectual decadence of his time. But since the sophists we have been answering Plato that no, there are no absolutely true and eternal forms of justice, of human nature, of society, of good. And that, on the other hand, there is no guarantee that rulers will not be corrupted by absolute power, that no one looks after the caretakers.

Even when, like Plato, we live in an age of loss of meaning and commitment, standards of truth and morality that are collapsing, and corruption in political life. But despite this “no” to Plato, there is a hope that we share with him and his allegory: the hope of ascending to a truth and values that​, although not immutable and eternal, are the best we can know as guides to the good life. To do so, the first step is to recognize ordinary illusions for what they are, the shadows on the wall of our cave. The question should really be then: What is the basis of moral and social obligation? Why do we have to follow the law or be moral if we do not feel like it? Or, more simply, why should we be good?

Living an ethical life would not then be a matter of strict observance of a set of rules that say what we should or should not do. Living ethically would entail reflecting in a particular way on how one lives. A good life is open in every sense of the term except the sense made dominant by a consumer society which promotes acquisition as the standard of what is good, while at the same time we are told that living ethically is hard work and we perceive this to be in conflict with our personal interests: those who made fortunes ignore ethics, those who lost career opportunities because of ethical scruples are supposed to sacrifice their interests to obey the dictates of ethics. If we do what suits us, on the contrary, we may be afraid of being caught and punished but we also know that can do well when we look at the television images of those lacking in ethical content succeeding.

This is a conception of ethics as something external to us, and it is found in many of the most influential ways of thinking in our cultures. So cynicism about ethical idealism is an understandable reaction to much of modern history and the tragic way in which ideals were shattered by many political leaders. The encouragement of naked self-interest has eroded our sense of belonging to a community. If Aristotle was right that we become virtuous by practicing virtue, we need societies in which people are encouraged to act virtuously. But in cities rife with material self-interest, spaces that are mere aggregations of mutually hostile individuals, on the verge of Hobbes's war of all against all, with newspapers featuring news of world poverty and gourmet food on the same page, the seeds of mutual trust struggle to survive.

It turns out that what is distinctive about capitalism is the idea of ​​acquisition as an end in itself, as an ethically sanctioned way of life, and alternative ideals to these have been buried under centuries of teachings that tied the good life to wealth and acquisition.

The cynical view tells us that it is just like that, that self-interest underlies all ethical action. But many of us act ethically in circumstances that do not explain this. At the same time, ethics cannot be reduced to a simple set of rules. Life is too varied for any finite set of rules to be taken as the absolute source of moral wisdom.

We all have the right to think for ourselves about ethics. And the moral rules we are still taught are often not the ones we need to teach. There is much talk today about the decline of ethics. It is also often said that ethics are all very well in theory but not in practice. But we cannot be content with an ethics that is not useful in everyday life. If someone proposes an ethics so noble that living under it would be a disaster for everyone, then it is not noble at all.

Living ethically involves thinking about things beyond self-interest, imagining ourselves in the situation of others affected by our actions. Since Kant we have believed in fulfilling obligations because it is a moral law: that is the moral conscience with which the modern West has grown up. When we talk about morality today we still talk about that, against our desiring beings. Moral value in the Kantian sense is a kind of glue that society uses to fill the holes in its ethical fabric. If those holes were not there we would not need it, but that utopia is impossible (so we are told). In this way, if someone does not have the inclination to do good, he or she will do it out of duty to do so. One can have prejudices, but if duty tells me not to have them, I will take care not to have them. That is how Kantian morality works and we can understand why a society would promote it. But... why should one do what one must do? That very question is already considered immoral. And that happens because we have closed the bridge between morality and self-interest. That is why the Kantian vision can lead to moral fanaticism. Let us remember that Eichmann said that he lived according to Kant's moral precepts: for him it was about fulfilling one's duty.

Many of us use the term ethics instead of morality to separate ourselves from this. And from the idea that ethics and natural inclinations have to clash. Kant's insistence was important at the time as a reaction to a traditional religious vision of rewards and punishments. Some thought that a morality without God was an impossibility. Dostoevsky supposed that without God everything was possible. For Kierkegaard life in that case would only be despair. Here we must remember the reflections of the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, who denied that any statement can have meaning unless there is some way to verify that truth. Since ethical judgments cannot be verified, they would be nothing more than expressions of our subjective feelings. Those who support an objectivity of ethics have been on the defensive ever since. If there is no plan, there would be no meaning.

The question then arises: Is it possible to study ethics in a secular way and find philosophical grounds for how we ought to live? In modern times, Hume has been the source of the most fundamental opposition to the Kantian tradition. Hume assumed that every reason for doing something had to connect with some desire or emotion we have, if it was to have any effect on our behavior. So the answer to the question What should I do? is What do you really want to do? And Hume expected that the answer in that case would almost always be that one would want to do what was right or correct, not out of obligation but because of the naturally sociable and sympathetic desires that we have as human beings, in contrast to Hobbes' pessimism and his vision of human nature in which man is wolf to man.

Let us pause to consider the consequences of this vision of Hobbes, which will provide a philosophical foundation for neoliberalism: when violence becomes a form of identification, a culture of violence arises. And when we speak of a culture of violence, we are referring to a cult of violence in terms of images and representations on which group and collective identities are built. Identities of violence are all those whose explanation is articulated on the recourse to conflict as the only source and constant. The comic book superhero already revealed the state of exception that Agamben speaks of and a culture of violence where the boundaries between what is lawful and what is unlawful are not clear, a culture that attracts individuals and institutions with low moral standards and with economic and political interests in war scenarios.

Our everyday verbal world is largely built on this audiovisual discourse through which power circulates, where regimes of truth are built and through which violence is redeemed in a framework of family and home entertainment. The police genre, in particular, is one of the strongest for constructing representations of that which threatens us, plotting the meaning of everyday life. It provides us with topics of conversation at home about what threatens the home.

Ultimately, we find ourselves again with a recurrence of two models: the conflictual model (the social as overcoming a basic conflict) versus the cooperative model (the social as “sophisticated continuity of cooperative interactions”), with its emphasis on empathy as the driving force of individual action. In this second model we would find “the extension of one’s own desire to the desire of the other, that is to say: the desire of the desire of the other.” Under this model, and in agreement with Maturana’s approach, any practice of denial of the other is an antisocial practice.

At the same time, it is important to distinguish this from the sympathy with the victims that distances us from our complicity with their victimization (and modernity is the space in which we express our sympathy with these victims in the newspapers), as it is also important to remember how literature teaches us sympathy with the other and increases our capacity for compassion. That is why Pierre Bourdieu has emphasized the role of both literature and art in criticism and public debate.

The matrix that brings others closer to reading what is happening has to do with death, the great signifier, and violent relationships would be in the matrix of the informational complex. That is why war is a great journalistic business. As prisoners of war, we would not know where a reality described by large newspapers that may be financed by arms dealers begins and ends. Alongside narco-capitalism grows a computerized communicational narco-economy.

Isolated, restless and dissatisfied, we live with terrible anxiety. Yet we are free not to believe in authority and, more importantly, to declare that we do not believe. The dominant images of authority invite such rejections, they lack the element of protection, and protection – the love that sustains others – is a basic human need. Compassion, trust, security, are qualities that it would be absurd to associate with many authority figures in the modern world. And yet we are free to accuse our authorities of lacking these qualities. And we imagine that if the person in control were someone else, our unhappiness would end and we would feel respected... All we do is dream of other people, not of different ways of life. We give in to the need to find security and close the door to other possibilities.

We live in times that Heidegger described as times of Unheimlichkeit, uneasiness but also of “not feeling at home”, meaninglessness, we might add. Sartre claimed that the meaninglessness of existence made the individual free. Since the world is meaningless, there are no reasons to choose one way of life or another. There is no meaning, welcome freedom. But while Heidegger believed that the individual was merely part of his environment, part of the One, Sartre arrived at the opposite conclusion: each individual is an autonomous being.

Admitting the meaninglessness of one's own existence and the responsibility for one's own actions is what Sartre called authenticity. Without a meaning that explains existence, everything we are results from what we do, and for this accumulation only one would be responsible. This concern of the existentialists for the self led Heidegger to reject the entire existentialist movement (among other things), since he saw in existentialism another version of Descartes' philosophy. For Heidegger, the history of humanity was one of unbridled egoism and we needed a relationship of greater humility with Being: notions such as the self, the soul, the individual, gave rise for him to an egoistic way of thinking:

“One kind of being, the human being, believes that all being exists for it.”

Instead of recognizing our place in the world, our position as a being among other beings, we have turned the world into something that exists by and for “the thinking thing.” Heidegger argued that all these abuses of nature arose from the technological attitude that we bring to the world. It is easy to appreciate the dangerousness and relativity of our concepts when we apply Heidegger's notions to our interaction with other cultures: even more so when the West has been racist enough not to consider those cultures as “thinking things.” If I exist as the thinking thing, then everything exists for my use, including other peoples. The technological attitude allows us to exploit those who are not like us. And, paradoxically, Heidegger himself participated in one of the most tragic stories of the twentieth century in this sense.

In this conception the world exists to be used, for the thinking things that have the power to exploit it. Due to the preponderance of the technological attitude, the origin of many atrocities in the world can be traced back to the philosophical belief, supposedly innocent, that we are individuals who give reference to the world, that we are a version of the “thinking thing.” By seeing ourselves in this way, we lose respect for all other beings in the world, we lose our ability to recognize Being.

For Heidegger, any way of seeing the world focused exclusively on one kind of being excludes the possibility of seeing the world in a multitude of ways. Only by realizing that humanity is one being among many and only a part of a more comprehensive Being can we begin to live in harmony with the rest of the world. This brings us back to the notion of care as an alternative to the technological attitude, an attitude that recognizes the connections between things as parts of Being, that understands that all beings in the world are interconnected and humanity corresponds to only one of those beings.

How do we achieve this other relationship with the world? One of the social practices that allows us to discern our relationship with Being while showing us how to live in accordance with it is language, but not everyday language or that of rational logic but the fundamental words that are an extended memory of Being. All our language becomes the living memory of the beings that come into existence. For Heidegger we are the special being that can ask questions about Being and, by having that capacity, we become caretakers or guardians of it. “Language is the home of being,” the place where being reveals itself to those who abandon it and towards which, from the very beginning, “we are on our way,” even though it has been gradually forgotten behind reasoning, calculation, logic.

Towards the end of his life, Heidegger wrote about what it means for a human being to live oriented towards Being. He called this existence “dwelling”. When one dwells on earth, one lives a poetic life as a companion of Being. A being then understood as a trace: a being consumed and weakened... and therefore worthy of attention. The notion of weakness can be associated with ethics in a different way, it can be part of ethics itself. This weakness describes the essence of the human situation in the world of technology. Limitation, weakness as ethics, can be the form that responsibility takes. Socrates, Saint Francis of Assisi, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi... It is necessary to found a new culture enriched by the experience of centuries and that is a synthesis of different civilizations. And the education of the heart must be established without delay. But it is not only a question of weakness but also of leadership. Gandhi also said: “I do not insist that my house be blocked on all sides, and that my windows be closed. I want the current of the cultures of all countries to flow freely through my home, but I refuse to be carried away by that current.”

Leaders like Gandhi are not those who command, they are those who lead, the inventors of what can be done, they enable people to participate in a common cause and to see themselves as part of a shared identity. Sometimes the mere presence of a leader is enough to change the way people see the possibilities for themselves and their community. What is possible is a human invention. We can only do what is possible. However, when we act, we also change we change what was previously possible. And no one can control the consequences of their own thoughts, actions and exchanges, or those of others.

We live a damaged life, Adorno said. Something is rotten, Shakespeare supposed. And so we often await the catastrophe that we ourselves are and over which we believe we have no power. We have accepted that industry takes over culture, we have handed it over to the realm of administration. Critical judgment and competence are forbidden as a presumption of those who believe themselves superior to others. The ancient “truth” that continuous mistreatment and the breaking of all resistance is the condition of life in this society is hammered into all brains. Commercialized culture teaches and inculcates the necessary condition to tolerate a ruthless life.

We live the experience of an existential crisis in which it is urgent to recover the emotional as a fundamental realm of ​​the human. Because in the network of conversations that constitutes the culture to which we belong in the West, and that now seems to be expanding across all areas of the earth, emotions have been devalued in favor of reason.

For this reason, I dare to maintain that the current political challenges come above all from the cultural changes underway and from our emotional education. The practical ways of living together, the representations and images we make of ourselves, and the feelings we have about this social coexistence are changing. As Bauman pointed out, the increase in individual freedom tends to coincide with the increase in collective impotence. As a result of these cultural transformations, we find it difficult to give intelligibility and meaning to our way of life. Today we are forced to reformulate what it means to live together under the new conditions. And it is part of politics to define the "common sense" that integrates the plurality of interests and opinions. The question here then is: Can we build a "common house" for the diversity of actors, values ​​and habits that constitute us?

Culture cuts across all dimensions of a society's social capital such as trust, civic behavior, and the degree of association. Culture encompasses values, perceptions, images, forms of expression and communication, and many other aspects that define the identity of people and nations. The interrelations between culture and development are of all kinds, and it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to them.

The predominant values ​​in an educational system, in the mass media, and other influential areas of value formation, can stimulate or obstruct the formation of social capital, which in turn has first-order effects on development. Values ​​play a critical role in determining whether networks, norms, and trust will advance, values ​​that have their roots in culture and are strengthened or hindered by it such as the degree of solidarity, altruism, respect, tolerance, all essential for sustained development.

The problem is that we have stopped questioning ourselves about these values ​​as well. No society that forgets the art of asking questions or allows that art to fall into disuse can find answers to the problems that plague it, at least before it is too late and the answers, even the right ones, have become irrelevant.

We tend to take pride in things we should perhaps be ashamed of, as in not caring about any coherent vision of a good society and in having traded the effort to pursue the public good for the freedom to pursue individual satisfaction. But if we stop to think about why this pursuit of happiness almost never produces the expected results, and why the bitter taste of insecurity makes happiness less sweet than we had supposed, we realize that we will not get very far without bringing back from exile ideas like the public good, the good society, equity, justice, ideas that make no sense unless they are cultivated collectively.

The syndrome of abundance and the weak work ethics associated with it, the easy way out and speculation, the predominance of micro-solidarity and its relation to incivility, the weakness of the concept of nation and the inability to articulate and cooperate are of greater importance here. These cultural aspects were coined over years and decades and leave a mark that is not easy to erase. It is necessary that the political forces that aim at collective well-being have a very clear idea of ​​their importance because political work in these aspects must be, in a fundamental sense, a systematic and continuous educational action. Therefore, a political party not only needs to be an expression of society but also needs to exert an action on it that helps it to overcome its limitations. The task of social change that is proposed here needs political forces to act not only as agents of institutional change but also as agents of cultural change, as educators.

But in general, political forces have preferred to give up the task of speaking about the underlying problems, either to avoid what they consider a political cost or simply out of ignorance. The consequence is that they have been functional in reinforcing inappropriate behaviors and beliefs. The necessary political forces must explain clearly that we are not a society “condemned to success” by the forces of the beyond; that there are no significant achievements without significant efforts, that consumer culture is not the main source of well-being, that speculation must be punished, that crime cannot be encouraged.

Two other elements are important for a cultural renewal. First, the active presence of intellectuals and the educational system, which is central and must be strengthened to cooperate in this crucial task. On the other hand, it is necessary to develop a different behaviour in the media, abandoning the predominantly superficial and sensationalist approach that leaves no room for addressing the central problems of society with any degree of depth. In addition, it is necessary to have more and better training for journalists and journalistic managers to better deal with the issues they deal with and those they do not deal with. The confluence between political forces, the academic world and the media is an indispensable gathering of energy to bring about profound changes in the problematic conceptions and attitudes that predominate in society.

The cultural transformations have weakened the image of the We that allows for the formation of bonds of trust and social cooperation. But, in addition, they have highlighted the difficulty of politics in giving shared meanings to the changes in progress. On the one hand, the experiences we have of social coexistence have changed. On the other hand, the representations we usually make of society have changed. In the past, we imagined society as a coherent and cohesive body. Now we feel that “everything is possible and nothing is certain.” Nobody and nothing offers us a credible idea of ​​the social totality. In short, the brief outline of the changes suggests that the experience and image of the We and our home are undergoing a great transformation.

Within this framework, it becomes essential to evaluate a policy according to its potential for transformation, its capacity to generate experiences and imaginaries of We that allow people to expand their possibilities of action. Considered as a cultural work, this is what politics should be about: creating the We that we want to become and the home that we want to have.

Daniel H. Scarfò

Nov. 6^Th, 2009 (Spanish original version)

Hipatia de Alejandría

Su vida dibujada 

Y una película sobre su vida: 

Al-Kindi

(Al-Kindi en una estampilla de Irak de 1962)

Matemático, filósofo y médico que trabajó también en política, astrología, astronomía, química, lógica, matemática, música, física, psicología y meteorología:

Al-Kindi: El "filósofo de los árabes"

Ulisse Aldrovandi

Científico y naturalista italiano, estudió humanidades y leyes y se interesó por la botánica, la zoología y la geología. Enseño lógica y filosofía y en la Universidad de Bolonia y en 1561 se convirtió en el primer profesor de historia natural: 

Il teatro della natura di Ulisse Aldrovandi

Al-Khwarizmi

 Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi fue un polímata que produjo obras en matemáticas, astronomía y geografía de vasta influencia. Fue Director de la Casa de la Sabiduría, en Bagdad: 

Alcmeón de Crotona

Alcmeón de Crotona fue un filósofo y científico dedicado a la medicina que buscó comprender la naturaleza de manera holística mediante diferentes enfoques. Como parte de su obra en filosofía natural, abordó diversas cuestiones médicas y biológicas y de lo que hoy llamamos neurociencias:

https://saberesyciencias.com.mx/2015/07/01/alcmeon-de-crotona/

Al-Jazari

 Artesano, artista, matemático, astrónomo, inventor e ingeniero mecánico:

Ismail al-Jazari: The Muslim inventor who may have inspired Leonardo Da Vinci

Leon Battista Alberti: vita e opere en 10 punti

Leon Battista Alberti fue un arquitecto, humanista, tratadista, matemático y poeta italiano. Como si eso fuera poco, también fue criptógrafo, lingüista, filósofo, músico y arqueólogo. Fue uno de los humanistas más polifacéticos del Renacimiento, una figura emblemática por su dedicación a las más variadas disciplinas. 

Leon Battista Alberti

Ibn al-Haytham

Matemático, astrónomo, físico, filósofo, ingeniero frustrado...y hasta escribió sobre la influencia de las melodías en las almas de los animales!:

ibnalhaytham.com

Al-Ghazali

Polímata persa, uno de los más prominentes e influyentes jurisconsultos, teóricos de la ley, filósofos, teólogos, lógicos y místicos de la historia islámica:

https://www.ghazali.org/

Nasir al-Din al-Tusi

Científico, filósofo, matemático, astrónomo, teólogo y médico persa: 

https:/

Al-Biruni

Matemático, astrónomo, geógrafo, físico, filósofo, viajero, historiador y farmacéutico persa:

Al-Biruni. más ácido que el vinagre