@toiletpaper I am not very convinced of buddhist influence on greek thought, you can make some parallels in the presocratics but I think it's parallel construction because none of it is very extensive.
Yeah. Mainly. But in that context it wasn't limited to the geography of modern day Greece, but to the whole empire from Western Asia and North Africa to Western Europe. Greeks didn't exist in a vacuum. Arguably much of the foundations of Hellenic philosophy are rooted in Vedism and Buddhism by way of Alexander's campaign into India and the philosophers (eg. Pyrrho) he brought with him.
Largely it was Greek focused also because the literature in question was hoarded away in church libraries by scholars who almost exclusively spoke Greek and Latin at the time. Even the earliest complete copies of the OT and NT were written in Greek. The Torah as such didn't even exist in writing until the 2nd-3rd century CE (ie. Septuagint), and the earliest evidence of it's practice whatsoever goes back to at most 150 BCE. To say nothing of the hermeneutics which are practically indistinguishable from Platonism in one form or another.
You could be right. The main case for it is Pyrrho. That said, the earliest temples and writings of Buddhism were created by Greek priests in Asia minor. Also the artistic tradition (eg. sculpture) is widely held to be of Greek origin. For instance that gigantic cliff face in Afghanistan (aka: Bactria) that the Taliban blew up several years ago.
In my opinion (as a non-scholar) they basically just put a Muslim spin on it without really adding much to the subject. For instance Avicenna's philosophy is all but a wholesale ripoff from Plotinus.
@toiletpaper@sj_zero I have just been suspicious about it because other areas are questionable like talking about how "islam invented modern clocks". I did a deep dive into it and basically simple clockwork knowledge was retransmitted back to the West via a single Arabic language book that didn't have anything in it that Greeks didn't already invent.
There's some stuff they seem to have done right, considering the etymological roots of algebra, alchemy, and alcohol. The Islamic golden age and it's aftermath should be a lesson but our ruling class doesn't read history.