The golden age of Greece was embraced by the rennaissance for precisely that reason that reason prevailed and shaped their discourse, or so it seemed. Our understanding of the ancients was that they prized mathematics and scholarship above all. The Greeks were by no means alone, as many civilizations, Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian had advanced learning and celebrated schools of thought.
Copernicus and Galileo were persecuted after the middle ages. The Petrarchean defined dark or silent ages were defined as 300 AD to 1300. It is ironic that the Church advanced scholarship at least amongst the monk sect, as much as it rigidified thinking, and locked thought into an earth-centric anti-Greek Aristotelian philosophy. But after the fall of Rome, and perhaps before that, Egyptian thinking and Greek which had measured the earth's circumference and started to see the planetary motions had fallen by the wayside for the most part. The Romans did not produce a mathematician of note, yet their practical engineering science was very profound.
I think Aquinas, Erasmus, Ockham, Scotus and Bacon advanced philosophy and thought as much as many Greeks.
Rigidification of thought happened throughout time, and is still happening today. Free schools aren't many. Natural selection and global warming have as many out-of-hand rejectors as acceptors, and for very narrow ill-fed reasons.
It is a lesson that discourse and debate cannot become a tyranny so must be let flourish. However because I belong to The Sinistral Cult of the Obsessed Purificate Engineers, (SCOPE) I must reject your thesis without inspection. :)
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