To be precise, he said “I know that I know not.” That means he said he doesn’t know everything, not that he knows nothing.
We read portions of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics in Ethics 101, and I felt this way about everything we went through. Yes, demonstrating admirable traits will lead to a virtuous life. That’s almost true by definition. Oh, but you still might not achieve a happy life even if you’re a good person? Well, that’s because you also need to be lucky! Oh, and generosity is apparently 2 different virtues for some reason.
I’m sure he had other works, but reading his “insights” made me wonder how this could be the guy everyone wouldn’t shut up about. We also studied the stoics, epicurians, nihilism and existentialism, Kantian ethics, consequentialism, the role of divinity, and probably other topics I can’t remember. Literally all of them were much more interesting than Aristotle’s eudaimonia ramblings, so I was quite annoyed that he took up almost half the class and made everything else rushed.
Aristotle also believed that women were defective men, that some people are naturally destined to be slaves, and rejected atomic theory.
I feel like you can change this absolutely imbecilic image to “the hole left by everyone just accepted Aristotle’s idea that you can just think everything from first principles and don’t have to do any experimentation” and it’d actually be somewhat accurate.
okay. the renaissance seems to begin right around the time a dude in turkey invented a steam engine to rotate kebab.
coincidence? who cares. kebab.
donar kebab is +seventy billion science points
we need to add a mod to Civ that lets you research steam powered kebab, it is a wonder and gives +70 billion science points but you are unable to invest in science for 450 years after researching it. i don’t know how science in Civ works but this makes sense.
I don’t know when shitting on the Greek civilization became a thing, but the irony that this trend comes from the same country that voted for Trump twice and made Idiocracy a tame historical documentary is not lost on me.
Pretty sure this is just a self-aware joke that a lot of scientific and philosophical breakthroughs seem obvious after the fact.
I hear the same about the conceptualization of zero as a numeral that operations can be performed on (a crucial turning point in human thinking) which is also laughable. It simply was not compatible with the Greek understanding of mathematics which emphasized the discrete and trigonometric but fit very well into the more abstract view towards math on the Indian subcontinent. There’s a reason why human discovery has global roots.
Simple rule of thumb. If it has no real world use case in your avg dudes day to day.
It ain’t getting discovered.
Now you also need to have that avg dude be someone of note, power and reach so that the discovery actually goes somewhere and doesn’t just die with him.
The more esoteric and rarer those two things line up.
True that it takes a degree of imagination. We can draw a fairly direct line from Brahmagupta, Al-Khwarizmi, Fibonacci, Piero della Francesca, to Leonardo da Vinci describing the East to West transfer of zero and the decimal place value system.
It often comes down to what a culture considers “useful”.
No you wouldn’t. All this stuff may seem obvious now but it only does so because somebody figured it out before.
I would, too! I would have invented math! All of it!
Teaching “common sense” is so hard because kids get so offended that you think they are stupid.
Too bad I don’t get to sit around and think all day so I can discuss with others who sit around and think all day.
Have you tried being born wealthy? Hope this helps!
“Socrates was the wisest man in Athens.”
Dude, the population of Athens and it’s surrounding territory at the time was about 200k-250k people, a very sizable portion of which were foreigners who probably had a different primary language, and even more of which were slaves (like 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire population). Would be like talking about the wisest person in Dayton, Ohio 2500 years later in every philosophy textbook in the world becuase he realized it was better to say “I dunno” than to talk out of your ass.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know things. He specifically showed you how you didn’t know things you thought you did. That’s quiet different.
It’s literally still called “the Socratic method”. And it made the ancient Athenians so mad at Socrates they executed him.
If you manage to have things named after you a few thousand years from now by saying “I dunno”, I’ll raise my hat to you.
The socratic method, which, as the name suggests, he did, is about asking probing questions to expose gaps or contradictions in their knowledge which reveal their ignorance. Both to themselves and oftentimes to other’s, as well. He didn’t stump them with his own knowledge. He only asked questions until they stumped themselves.
He found that wisdom was found in humility. “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” That is what I paraphrased as “I dunno”. Understanding that you do not and cannot know all things is a core principle of his idea of wisdom and his methodology.
“Only tasked questions”
Yeah and Einstein “only wrote some equations”?
The point is the questions he asked, just like the point is that E=mc^2 really isn’t as simple as it seems, but has a world of theory behind it.
Socrates knew to ask the right questions.
This is utter bullcrap. Must be funny somehow, but that I am sadly missing.
