In twelfth-century Morocco, a court physician wrote a philosophical novel about a child raised alone on an island by a doe---no humans, no language, no scripture. Just observation and thought. Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan asked: what can a human soul discover on its own? The story traveled from Arabic to Hebrew to Latin to English, inspiring John Locke's blank slate theory, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and the entire nature versus nurture debate. Eight hundred fifty years later, we're still arguing about it in our schools, our AI labs, our parenting decisions. Are we empty vessels shaped by experience, or do we arrive carrying capacity---reason, wonder, potential already planted? Ibn Tufayl showed us it's the wrong question. The right question: will we see the spark that's already there?
Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/self-taught-philosopher
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