Quote:
Originally posted by Schwan
I think you guys are heading in the right direction. I think we’re half done though, because the question we need to answer is: could the gothic arch or the string quartet be developed by a different culture, or is it something absolutely exclusive and un-repeatable? Depending on the answer, we can get the final answer for the stated problem. If it could be repeated by a different culture, the no, it's not a rational element of a western culture, because a completely unrelated train of thought led to same conclusions as those in our culture, and philosophy says that things don't happen twice without a reason (I guess someone said that somewhere  ). So there must be something elese, some kind of ideal floating around, that's available for every culture at a certain point. If, however, it is not possible to replicate it in a different culture, then it's a rational element of our culture, exclusive only to us, because we slaved over it for thousands of years and came to this particular conclusion. There's a high level of randomness involved in the process.
You need to go sci-fi on this if you don’t catch my drift. What if a meteor struck Europe four thousand years ago and created a sea in that place. What if Greece never happened. Would someone else come up with these ideas?
So what wouldn’t be a rationale element of the western culture? Roads. Although they were invented by Romans, they were also built by the Chinese, Egyptian and Aztec.
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Well now! There's a question that actually makes sense!
I believe that gothic arch most definately would have. It's simply an application of engineering. Plenty of scientific disoveries happen concurrently, so its safe to assume that an even longer development would also have occurred, without its specific circumstances.