[RD] Ancient Philosophy (from Thales to Socrates) discussion thread

Those notables seem to have waited for four hundred years for the Ottomans to weaken before they could express their support. Maybe the love for ancient Greek philosophy wasn't the main cause, but the desire to deter the ever-expanding Ottomans.
Just guessing.
You are conflating two things: notables and people in power. Obviously Victor Hugo, Lord Byron, E.A. Poe etc were notables, but they didn't control armies.
You didn't ask if Greece was to be helped to be liberated, only if ancient Greece was prominent enough at the time to deter some confusion with other cultures.

But the thread is about philosophy, it most certainly isn't some Greece#1 thread. I was (it seems not all got it), playfully replying to Angst that I don't mind idealization. Better to discuss philosophy ^^
 
No, because the three ancient categories (eg mentioned by ancient writers of the subject, like Laertius), are Ethics, Dialectics and Physics, and "ethics" includes everything vaguely sociological :)
Though maybe you refer to something more ethereal, like some argument about archetypes of beauty etc, but then you'd need to be specific, since I don't recall!

Fwiw, apparently ethics wasn't a major part of Greek philosophy, until the sophists and Socrates=>late 5th century.
this kind of builds into the core of the problem. aesthetics don't fall under ethics because the greeks thought so. simply not the case.

when we study aesthetics in uni, we study greek aesthetics, delineated as such. i've read some of the greek writings on the matter and it wouldn't surprise me if a bunch of our aesthetics theory falls under physics, there's a bunch of math involved in the definitions of tonality for example. most of it is ethics though, i believe
 
It is to be expected that the subcategories or distinct fields didn't immediately exist (Aristotle named most of them). It's a direct consequence of ancient philosophy being primarily either about the study of the physical world (Physics) or the notional world (Dialectics). Scientists up to the era of Newton still had the title of "natural philosopher", and Greek philosophers themselves were at the earliest stage called "Physicists" (Φυσικοί) and most of their works were titled "On Physics".
That said, there was a lot of debate about which parts are really about the physical world, and which about the notional, and - again - Aristotle focuses on that a lot, since he liked to assign the presocratic philosophers to either of those types. Then again there is the massive topic of whether the physical world is even "real", along with what being real means - itself a modern debate too, and already heavily featured in presocratic philosophy.

Anecdotally, it is believed that the term "philosopher", instead of the previous "physicist", was first used by Pythagoras to describe the field. Presumably because a person can only aspire to be a friend (philos) of wisdom (sophia), not possess it outright.
 
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The fundamental point you were replying to is still right.

The fundamental point I was replying to was about comparing combined life experiences of two philosophers with modern student. In what way a modern 20yo solved more complex problems than two ancient philosophers with 120 year combined experience in life and study? Modern student solves some problems, which are complex, but in terms of amount of them during a long lifetime, fields of study and interlap between study fields, the modern “average student” is yet to rise to an idea that depth of their immediate professional specialisation is just 1 facet of life.

It means you underestimate people today, because you can't effectively compare then and now.

You agree with the fundamental point of average student being smarter than Aristotle and Plato combined. In other news you declare we can’t compare then and now. Which one is it?
 
In what way a modern 20yo solved more complex problems than two ancient philosophers with 120 year combined experience in life and study?
Faced more problems. The word was "faced".

And this is simply true. We have centuries, if not millenia, of cultural development behind us. Our brains have to process more, with less downtime than ever before. Things we take as just being the way things are.

There is more data to process on a daily basis than ever before. I'm not claiming this is therefore inherently a good thing, I'm pointing out a fact. When you combine that with the rat race of needing a job to survive in society, educational requirements for most jobs, and so on . . . our concept of free time is incredibly different to someone like Aristotle.

Not that this means people are automatically "smarter" than he is. I'm saying our way of measuring that is a near-impossibility. There could be someone as smart and as driven as him, but they could be in a university basement somewhere doing pioneering research on lasers. They're not going to get in with king of Macedonia and be granted their own library.
You agree with the fundamental point of average student being smarter than Aristotle and Plato combined.
I think that is this the conclusion you've reached, you need to go back and reread my post, especially the bit where I take pains to note the importance of what Aristotle discovered (and / or formulated).
 
There could be someone as smart and as driven as him, but they could be in a university basement somewhere doing pioneering research on lasers. They're not going to get in with king of Macedonia and be granted their own library.

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.
 
Moving on the the eleatic philosophers, there are two main areas of interest with them. The first originates in Xenophanes, teacher of Parmenides, and his idea of the cosmos being a perfect sphere. This motif of a perfect spherical world persists in ancient Greek and related philosophy, even spilling over to mysticism (such as the hermetic phrase about the world being a sphere with infinite periphery and no set center). But the sphere is the shape that expands the same towards all directions, so symbolizes oneness - which brings us to the most famous eleatic phrase, that "All is One".
The second area of interest is, of course, the paradoxes by Zeno. It appears that not all have been saved (Zeno did publish a work, that is even mentioned by Plato). Aristotle mentions a number of them, the famous Achilles, the dichotomy, the arrow, the stadium etc. Here too, part of the ancient debate was on whether the paradoxes are actually on nature (physics) or strictly on notions/mathematics. Mathematically, they have been examined. Naturally, on the other hand, they bleed into modern theory, such as relativity and importance of the observer to define a result.

In summary, the four eleatic philosophers were, in chronological order:

Xenophanes of Kolophon (view of the cosmos as a sphere)
Parmenides of Elea (claim that literally nothing in human thought is real, while a higher, unknowable reality does exist)
Zeno of Elea (the paradoxes)
Melissos of Samos (notion of the "void")
 
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)
 
Most of the ancient philosophers were rich (Aristotle, who you mentioned, was the son of the royal physician of the royal court of Macedonia - his book on ethics, the Nikomachean Ethics, refers to his father, Nikomachos).

That said, a few highly prominent philosophers were born very poor, including Protagoras and Socrates :) In both their cases, they got as patrons some very affluent people, Plato and his brother Glaucon in the case of Socrates, Democritus in the case of Protagoras.
 

I made this (10min) video about why, imo, hedonism is superior to Stoicism (YouTube won't let me use greater than symbol for some reason)

Open to feedback from Kyr or others because I have quite a layman's understanding of both philosophies.
 

I made this (10min) video about why, imo, hedonism is superior to Stoicism (YouTube won't let me use greater than symbol for some reason)

Open to feedback from Kyr or others because I have quite a layman's understanding of both philosophies.
had a very quick look, so
- i agree that in the end, people respond to pleasure, whether that be material, emotional, and in extension of that, moral delight and self-fulfilment, and that hedonism (in the broader sense of negative hedonism, not the libertine or orgi...al sense) is a good philosophical path to understanding that, much more than stoicism; and that most things are a veil over that base fact; and on the other hand, the search for pleasure does not make it impossible to act morally; my reasons for being wherever i am politically is not because i'm ideological, but because i look at policy that works, policy that, in the end, brings pleasure
- however, i'd like to make a fine line about stoicism; some of it has actually been pseudointegrated into psychology even if unrelated; if you know about cognitive therapy, it's about repeated steps of logically carving out what's going on and not and what you can change. of course, these methods as self-help differ from actual stoicism in a bunch of ways. the thing you talk about around... was it 6 minutes in? - the problem is that stoics (like, true stoics) think that virtue is a reward in itself, not even happiness; virtue is. to actual stoics, being virtuous absolves whether you're unhappy or poor or whatever. modern internet stoics aren't really about that. it's about a bunch of white guys high fiving each other over something that group generally agrees is awesome without understanding it (ancient greece and rome is like a root pillar of tradition for the white manosphere); using it as part of the grind is nonsense, and in the end, is pure marketing. stoicism kiiinda fell to the wayside for many centuries and the current trend is very much a rebrand for sigma bros or whatever
 
being virtuous absolves whether you're unhappy or poor or whatever.
1stly thanks for the feedback.

That does feed into my theory that stoicism is ultimately a cope which I don't like. Most religious & philosophies are also a cope (Christianity - life sux & you're getting punked by the rich but it's ok cuz in heaven the tables will be turned).

I don't want to cling to some code of conduct in the face of getting punked by life, I want to continuously seek the best out of life. Maybe my application of hedonism won't work but at least I could say I tried (rather than taking cold comfort in Seneca or Jesus in the face of misery)
 
Are you aware of any written texts that prove Democritus came up with his idea of atoms by observing phase transitions, e.g. ice to liquid water, water to steam?
 
Are you aware of any written texts that prove Democritus came up with his idea of atoms by observing phase transitions, e.g. ice to liquid water, water to steam?
Late edit.
I'm sure he would have noticed that steam condenses back into water.
Therefore steam atoms must be very small.
Furthermore, they cannot be connected to each other because that would be liquid water or ice.
Therefore, it seems logical to conclude that steam is composed of water atoms, and that each must be surrounded by a void.

Does that sound like a "reasonable" take on the way Democritus might have reasoned?
 
You mentioned the eleatic phrase "All is One".
Is that the reason that some Greek philosophers did not regard one as a "number"?
 
Are you aware of any written texts that prove Democritus came up with his idea of atoms by observing phase transitions, e.g. ice to liquid water, water to steam?
i remember reading somewhere that the Greeks came up w the idea of atoms
You mentioned the eleatic phrase "All is One".
Is that the reason that some Greek philosophers did not regard one as a "number"?
I'm not sure I understand the question
 
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