Ramon Llull

In this course

Ramon Llull was a medieval Majorcan philosopher and theologian who developed early systems for generating knowledge through combinatorial logic, arranging concepts on rotating wheels to produce exhaustive permutations of ideas. In the seminar's genealogy of computational thinking, Llull represents a proto-computational imagination stretching back centuries before modern computers—his Art of Combination (Ars Combinatoria) prefigures both Leibniz's logical systems and contemporary machine learning's recombinatory operations. The course traces him through this lineage to show how the dream of mechanizing thought, from Llull's mystical diagrams through supervised fine-tuning, reveals an enduring Western obsession with automating reason itself.

Mentioned in 2 readings