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I admit I'm not a philosopher, but this sounds like claiming that we're inappropriately teaching a narrowed perspective of math because we don't teach Vedic mul
by lr4444lr 11y ago
I admit I'm not a philosopher, but this sounds like claiming that we're inappropriately teaching a narrowed perspective of math because we don't teach Vedic multiplication algorithms or Mayan counting bases. These are interesting topics in their own right, but they do not constitute the (relatively) unbroken chain of mathematics as a _discipline in and of itself_ in a progressional manner with a working epistemology, namely, the formal proof. The Greeks gets that prize, by virtue of Euclid (and a few others tangentially, e.g. Eudoxus or Nicomedes or Hero), not by virtue of being Greek, e.g. Eratosthenes or Aristarchus, who gave us good results and application, but did not build on or advance the process of _how_ we do math (as far as we have record).
Similarly, Plato is the father of a philosophical tradition that to this day is recognizable as the foundation of how we develop questions about philosophical problems and analyze them. There were schools of thinking that came to various _conclusions_ with some similarity to Greek (and some later Roman) traditions, and there were certainly Greek philosophers who were steeped in mythical, religious, or simply very time and place specific thinking and no longer considered of much interest today, but as per the article's example, the "Bhagavad Gita" is a deeply religious text - its wisdom is received from a god figure, not puzzled out or reasoned by man.