(February 19, 2015 at 10:08 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: Pre-socratics: Heraclitus and Thucydides.
Plato: Phaedrus (not a fan, BTW)
Aristotle: poetics and Nicomachean Ethics
Greek: Sophocles, Epicurus
Roman: Tacitus, Seneca
Romans who wrote in Greek: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus
Cicero: On Old Age
One of the relatively few benefits of a Catholic education: an appreciation for the classics.
Whatever initial brainstorming ideas humans came up with have been surpassed by labs, scientific method, testing and falsification and peer review. They are good to know as far as history, but still outdated even if some principles apply.
The biggest flaw all of them had was lack of modern scientific knowledge. We cant put all our weight on their ideas. The Greeks came up with the word "atom", but that was not a modern scientific description. It was more of a idea of thinking about the smallest indivisible thing they could imagine. They had no way of knowing about protons, neutrons, electrons or the Higgs Bolson particle.
They came up with some axioms, yes. But making an observation does not mean you understand what you observe. This is a flaw in our species. When we make guesses at things we over conflate in retrospect the things prior societies got right by luck, and attach too much weight to what amounts to a lucky guess.
I once ran into an idiot who claimed that Aquinas knew about Quantum Mechanics. When I asked him about his math, all he could do was quote and ambiguous quote. Much like theists do in pointing to their holy books to claim they match science. It is retrofitting after the fact.
Yes they added to school of thought, but even the ancient Greeks got things wrong and with what they did get right, it wasn't that they had any way of knowing scientifically why they were onto something.
I hate philosophy in general, because we have improved way past the point that what they came up with is horse and buggy compared to our cell phone and Mars rover knowledge today.
I may have mentioned it in this thread before. But Dawkins places much of the blame of our religious and political dogmatism on Plato's idea that if you simply thought about something you could find it's "essence". That idea of finding perfection has allowed humans to cling to their patterns at all costs, rather than question with testing. Plato's idea of questioning lacked modern control groups. His idea of questioning was unfortunately a way to justify a position, rather than test the position. The word "apology" stems from that.
There is a huge difference for making a "justification" which is nothing more than making an excuse to hold a position, and quality control which leads you to evidence, not where you want it to go. Plato had no concept of what quality control was.
I still think for example, Epicurus's problem with evil I think still stands the test of time, not as scientific evidence debunking a god claim, but debunking the idea that an "all powerful" god can be called moral. But even that to me is not the best reason to reject a god claim. It is only good to show the contradictions of the claimed attribute vs what we see in reality.
