Ramon Llull

In this course

Ramon Llull's Art represents an early precedent for algorithmic and combinatorial thinking—a system that treats abstract principles as manipulable elements that can be recombined to generate knowledge and truth. The course readings position Llull as foundational to a genealogy running from medieval logic machines through Leibniz's combinatorial philosophy to modern machine learning, with the diagrammatic, quasi-computational nature of his system prefiguring how contemporary AI systems operate through systematic recombination of learned patterns. His work anchors the seminar's investigation into how the dream of reducing thought to symbol manipulation has persisted across centuries, resurfacing in different technological contexts.

Background

Ramon Llull, sometimes anglicized as Raymond Lully, was a Catholic philosopher, theologian, poet, missionary, apologist and former knight, born in Palma de Mallorca. He invented a philosophical system known as the Art, conceived as a type of universal logic to prove the truth of Christian doctrine to interlocutors of all faiths and nationalities. The Art consists of a set of general principles and combinatorial operations. It is illustrated with diagrams.

Mentioned in 1 reading