Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[vulcanlogician]

I don't think anyone is asking that a person accept what Plato or Aristotle says without question. It is enough to understand one of these thinkers (even when you understand that they're simply wrong).

Another figure who is highly regarded among philosophers is Thales. Thales famously postulated that everything is water. Turns out, everything is not water. But Thales' importance never hinged on his being right or wrong about the "waterness" of everything.

Here is a guy from humble beginnings who earned a fortune by investing in olive presses when he predicted an abundance of olives that year. He also predicted a solar eclipse. How did he do these things? Most likely by paying attention to patterns in nature. While the rest of Miletus was freaking out, thinking the gods had cursed them, Thales understood that the moon had passed in front of the sun. (It wasn't so obvious to the ancients that that's what an eclipse was... as a solar eclipse always happens during the new moon).

No writings from Thales have survived to modernity. All we know of him is via secondary sources. So why is Thales important? Because rather than trying to attribute the goings-on in nature to the gods, Thales proposed a theory for why natural objects behaved the way they do. After Thales died, other philosophers tried to propose better theories. Everything is not water, "everything is air" -- "everything is earth" -- (and my favorite) "everything is fire." Eventually the Greeks came to think everything was "water, earth, air, and fire."

YES. The damage system used in your favorite fantasy RPG was invented by Greek philosophers.

Wrong as they were, this IS the nub of understanding the world. "Things behave according to properties. Not the whims of the gods." It's hard for us moderners to recognize this, but the fact of "natural properties" is not included in the human mind from birth. It was hard won. Same thing with math. The ancient Egyptians and Sumerians used geometry for architecture and agriculture, but it was the Greeks who really concentrated on the theory of geometry. Not "geometry just to build this thing over here," but to essentially understand right triangles. Physics didn't fly out of Isaac Newton's ass. There is a line of succession: Galileo, Copernicus, you must include Ptolemy and Aristotle here, and even Thales belongs in this succession.

Some of us are only interested in "the latest and greatest" of this succession of knowledge. And that's understandable. After all, why pay attention to a bunch of historical "wrong shit"? But there is also value in following our knowledge back to its roots. Some of us, like Neo (and myself), are very interested in that project. Socrates is an explosive figure in the succession of knowledge (as far as philosophy goes), and in the aftermath of Socrates, arose two towering figures: Plato and Aristotle. Just like Thales, it doesn't matter that these figures were wrong about a ton of shit. They were pivotal in improving human knowledge. And someone interested in how to get from ignorance to knowledge generally (aka philosophers) is going to be profoundly interested in these insightful thinkers.

And, believe it or not, some of their knowledge has yet to be improved upon and still holds up today. But (as I said before) that isn't what makes them important thinkers.