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Marsdan's avatar

My understanding is that literacy rates refer to Latin literacy (not sure if the graphs reflect that, but I think so). By that standard, Europe is mainly illiterate at the present, with a sharp decline in the last few decades. The rate of people that knew how to read in their own language was significantly higher. However, since we are talking about Aristotle, how his ideas were being adopted, and assuming that his works were mainly available in Latin at that time, your point stands.

As a personal comment, Aristotle view on time stayed in place until the early 1900. Newton's view on time was basically the same. Moving the reference point from the earth to the sun helps in understanding the motion of planets and having better predictions, but the view on time as a parametrisation of events is the same. Until special relativity, no paradigm shift had occurred for over two thousand years. Time was just the ordering of events and was convoluted with the idea of motion.

So in fencing, tempo is initiating the right motion at the right time, and I would add, performing it in sync with the opponent (e.g. so a parry doesn't miss the incoming attack by being too early or too late). Due to the latter, you cannot practice tempo by yourself. I think this is the main reason why one should find and fight not just one partner, but as many people as possible.

I don't have enough skill to prove the following, but I think that if someone can speed up or slow down his actions in a controlled fashion, it would make him the most dangerous fencer in the world (cuz on averaged, our monkey brains are good at syncing to certain speed of a motion - and why masters say to test an unknown opponent a bit before an attack - but suck at gauging accelerations and thus the variation of speed; the ones more able to do the latter being better at contact fighting).

I also want to give points for including the animation of sorts of the plays in an article about tempo, and thus movement. Good job!

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