I doubt many modern uni researchers want to be granted a personal library and have an opportunity to get in with Trump’s kids. Internet is our public library now. Having an interconnected worldwide information cloud is far superior to having a collection of manuscripts stashed somewhere, we’re better off in this regard.
To be more precise, we shouldn’t compare Aristotle with average student, not even with someone doing research in a uni basement. Would be fairer to compare to Carl Sagan, Steven Hawking, who also mastered several fields of study. In the case of Hawking, it's fairly obvious that he operates at a higher intellectual level than Aristotle. By virtue of absorbing the entire physics lineage in the course of a long life. In the case of average student - the volume of information is yet to transform into quality that can be compared with life's work of greats.
Sorry for the late reply (and continuing the tangent), but yeah, I'm not trying to compare Aristotle with the average student. The people I was referencing are, by any academic definition we care to provide, incredibly intelligent. And your examples of Sagan and Hawking are actually very useful for me here. It's not enough to just be smart. I know it kinda breaks people who rely on a universal meritocratic approach to the modern world, but time and place (effectively: lucky) have a huge impact on how famous you are and therefore the amount your work shapes public consciousness.
There's not even necessarily a relation between being famous and doing good work. Edison vs. Tesla being a fantastic historical example (where Tesla
is famous, but mostly being for That Funny Inventor Dude, and not the guy Edison nicked ideas from and got rich on).
But what I meant about being granted a personal library is being granted that kind of
resource. And a resource is time (see: my reference to the rat race). How much of Aristotle being able to work is dependent on the conditions that cultivated that? I'd never say 100%, but it's not going to be 0% either.
I had a family by choice, and I have all the time that comes with that (not much). But even before my partner and I started a family, there were constraints on my time that meant I couldn't work on nearly anything that I wanted to. Constraints that we accept as the way the world works, etc, et al, but these are constraints that historically, exceptional figures were able to bypass or mitigate in some fashion. And they're exceptional in part
because of that. The British codebreakers that worked on Enigma was a lot larger than Turing himself, and many of them comparable levels of genius. But we know Turing more for a variety of factors. Fame is complicated. And in Aristotle's case it's compelling for us because there's still so much we don't know. There's only so much of his work that we've recovered. And that drives investigation; it drives the
mythos.
I'm not saying this despairingly, stuff like this is why I love history. But I really think people undervalue the impact the modern world has on people, and just saying "folks have the Internet now" doesn't mean they have the time or other resources to use it to its fullest potential. My ability to sift through junk to find actual knowledge is a strong point for me personally. It carries through into my profession, where it sets me apart in my team, and in my business unit. I'm just good at it. I'm bad at other things. But that ability is predicated on time I rarely get, because there's always something else to be fixing, always some other crisis to be managing. Because I work at a job to earn money to pay the rent, because I have to work 40-odd hours a week. I am
intensely aware of what the Internet can be used for (both the good and the bad). And again, I have nothing to say about "average students". I'm simply talking about
all students, the high-achieving, the low-achieving, and everything inbetween. We lionise the past, at times, perhaps more than we should. The fact that brilliant people in the past made world-altering discoveries isn't incompatible with nothing that our modern world often gatekeeps the potential for that kind of discovery from people without either the financial and / or political means (or luck, or all three).
(there's also a fun secondary tangent in here about how high-achieving in academia doesn't actually mean high-achieving in a professional context, and vice versa, but that's way out of bounds for a philosophy thread)
