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Post Index
  1. Intro Definition of Technometry
  2. Famous Ramus
  3. Humanism
  4. The Puritans, the Moderns, and Classical Christian Education
  5. Technometry: Theses 1-3 - Art
  6. Technometry: Theses 4-8 - The Arts are Ideas
  7. Technometry: Theses 9-21 - Eupraxia and Imitation
  8. Technometry: Thesis 22-30 - Arranging Eupraxia
  9. Technometry: Theses 31-37 - Euprattomenon, or Things Made by the Arts
  10. Technometry: Thesis 38-47 - The Best Known Force of Art
  11. Technometry: Theses 48-60 - Types - Metaphysics?

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Technometry: Theses 31-37 - Euprattomenon, or the things made by the arts

While on vacation a couple of weeks ago, I visited an unbelieving family member.  He explained to me his belief that humanity moved from riding on horseback 200 years ago, to using smartphones now, because space aliens intervened and gave us secret technological knowledge.  But I've found a better explanation for modern tech than space aliens. Ames' Technometry provides a bridge (one of several, but an important one) from the medieval world to our modern, technologically advanced era.  This section on euprattomenon is the girder of this bridge.  The Puritans were adamant that good works must come from good ideas.  Ames taught that since a rational God created good works, we humans can study His rationality and use that knowledge to create good works.  And beyond basic morality, good works produce good  things.   Puritans encouraged the creation of systems of knowledge so that people could learn concrete bodies of knowledge (science), along with the liberal arts, in as efficie
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Technometry: Theses 9-21 - Eupraxia and Imitation

Art is the idea of eupraxia . - Technometry, Thesis 1, William Ames Eupraxia means "good action." Specifically, eupraxia is good, principled analysis and acts of creation. Eupraxia is both the object and culmination of the liberal arts.  Each art is an idea that represents something, and as such, it directs action.  An art culminates in a good action - not because the purpose of an art is to rule our behavior, but because that is the nature of an art.  That's just what ideas do. In thesis 15, Ames goes metaphysical and gives his answer to the question of the "one and the many." Lee Gibbs gives a brief explanation of Ames's argument which helped me begin to sort it out.  Ames says that art is one unique and simple act in the being and work of God. But it works out like a refraction of rays from God as many concrete, divisible created things. So the art exercised by man is also refracted and divided.  One God; several liberal arts. There are two part
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Technometry: Theses 48-60 - Types - Metaphysics?

Ames defines  type as things created and ruled by God or (secondarily) things created or conceived by humans in imitation of God. Type is "that in which all art shines and from which its principles, which produce human understanding, are gathered by man." God creates a thing, and from it shines arts and principles which help us to understand the arts and the thing itself. Then we use the arts to imitatively create and these works of creation bring glory to God. To understand this further, I recommend the illustrations in this article by David Hill Scott: http://www.leaderu.com/aip/docs/scott.html Theses 50-54 deal with metaphysics. Ames attacks scholastic metaphysics and he makes a logical case that the field of metaphysics was overstepping its rightful bounds ("put its sickle into a harvest not its own").  He says that the arts themselves, and by implication his theory of technometry, ought to replace much of metaphysics' stolen ground. He also has a long
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