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software objects in mediaeval thought

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An Egyptian colleague once complained to me about the amount of American jargon in software engineering. He said that Arabs regarded such notions as "reification" as alien imports.

He chose the wrong example. We are indebted to Arab scholars for many vital notions of mathematics and philosophy - from Al-Gorithms to Al-Gebra, and from reification to polymorphism - on which much of modern technology depends.

Historical Background

Object, entity & reification

Specification & implementation

Polymorphism

Reification and ratification

Information
management

CBD notions

Sylvester II
Pope of the millennium

Some Fundamental Concepts of Software Engineering
An Historical Background

veryard projects > information management > mediaeval > historical background

In the European middle ages, when the Christians (with the exception of a few Irish monks) were in the Dark Ages, the fire of philosophy was kept alight by Arabic scholars. They took such ideas as reification from the Greeks (notably Plato and Aristotle), preserved, analysed and extended them, often but not exclusively in a theological context. These ideas (with strong Islamic overtones) were then taken up by Christian scholars towards the start of the European "renaissance".

Modern object technology uses many of these notions, including object / entity, reification and polymorphism. The underlying concepts remain the same as those developed by such theologians as Ibn al-Arabi and William of Ockham, although they have been stripped of any explicit theological content.

New technology, and the jargon that accompanies it, may often appear to some people as an alien American import. I think it is useful to remember that these are originally our* ideas, despite the superficial and sometimes strange ways the American techno-gurus use them.

* this originated in a discussion between English and Egyptian consultants

And it would be a source of great pleasure to me to be able to identify in greater detail the philosophical and historical roots of object-oriented thinking.

Object, Entity & Reification in Mediaeval Thought

veryard projects > information management > mediaeval > object, entity, reification

In his magisterial book on Ibn al-Arabi, William Chittick translates the word 'ayn as entity, although it is clearly closer to the object-oriented notion of object than to the database notion of entity. He translates the word ta'ayyun as entification, being or becoming an entity, the state of being specified and particularized.

Christian theologians would later use the word reification for the same concept. Ockham in particular is known for his opposition to excessive reification; and the zeal to remove unwanted and unsupported entities from a model or theory is known as Ockham's razor. I strongly suspect that similar arguments were put by Arab scholars long before Ockham.

Reification and Ratification

Specification & Implementation in Mediaeval Thought

veryard projects > information management > mediaeval > specification & implementation

Ibn al-Arabi distinguishes between 'ayn thabita and 'ayn mawjuda. The former is an abstract, timeless specification of a thing, while the latter is its realization (or implementation) in this world. This distinction, which can be traced back to Plato, is clearly echoed in object thinking and component-based development (CBD), although of course lacking the deeper significance which al-Arabi attached to it.

Polymorphism in Mediaeval Thought

veryard projects > information management > mediaeval > polymorphism

"There is but a single Being, yet the names represent a multiplicity of faces that Being assumes in relation to the created things."

[Chittick, p 25]

Sources of Mediaeval Thought

veryard projects > information management > mediaeval > sources

William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi's Metaphysics of Imagination.

State University of New York Press, Albany NY, 1989

William Chittick is one of the leading modern scholars of the mediaeval Arab world.

This book is a large and detailed analysis of the writings of Ibn al-Arabi (whom Chittick calls The Shaykh).

Ibn Al'Arabi
William of Ockham