From Joshua Schwieso
I enjoyed Alex Pentland’s article on the death of individuality (5 April, p 30), but his grasp of the history of ideas is faulty. He asserts that before the 1700s, Westerners saw truth as coming from God and king, and that only after then did “the idea that humans were individuals with the freedom of rational choice” start to become acceptable. This is wrong.
Take the following, from Nicholas of Cusa’s On God as Not-Other, dating from around 1462: “I shall speak and converse with you on the following condition: viz., that unless you are compelled by reason, you will reject as unimportant everything you will hear from me.”
Earlier still, Thomas Aquinas, in the 1260s, saw human reason as vital not just to philosophy and science but also to theology. Reason wasn’t somehow discovered by early modern Europe – the medieval and the classical world already appreciated its importance.
Spaxton, Somerset, UK
