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I've never understood the line of thinking in this sub-thread. What important point is being made by nitpicking and tearing down people who - for perhaps a comp

• handrous 5y ago
  > What important point is being made by nitpicking and tearing down people who - for perhaps a complex set of reasons including luck - have managed to reach legendary hero status? Why not just let them have it, let people have their heroes? That you see any of that in this sub-thread is an example of how both "sides" of this issue (Jesus, why are there sides? And this article is entirely part of the problem) are talking/writing straight past one another (not to blame you for that being the case—you see those things in this sub-thread, meanwhile I didn't intend them in my posts and don't see them at all in mine or others').
• efficax 5y ago
  Aristotle is pretty clearly not a lone genius -- his philosophy is a direct descendant of Plato's (who was his teacher). He even (reputedely) began by writing dialogues (like Plato. These are now lost). And though he has been the perhaps the most influential (entirely because of his adoption by Islamic and then Christian scholastics in the middle ages), he had numerous contemporaries (Diogenes and Xenophon are standouts here). But those thinkers work is simply lost to us, or was never written down (Socrates for example never wrote down his teaching and it was controverial of Plato to do so). Aristotle is one of the worst examples to give for evidence of the "lone genius", in any case. His work is clearly the output of constant dialogue with his students and with his contemporaries. It primarily consists of considering the various pre-Socratic, Platonic, Sophist, and other philosophical views of his time, and showing how they don't solve pressing philosophical problems (the aporia) then forming an argument which adopts parts of their thinking and rejects others so that the philosophical impasse can be overcome. If anything he's a synthetic thinker, a unifier of the whole of Greek thought (that is his particular genius). He's nothing without his contemporaries.
  • jrowen 5y ago
    I think the "lone" part of the phrase is what's problematic. I don't think people intend to claim that they worked entirely on their own in isolation. I interpret it more as having been noticeably in a league of their own; possessing some special vision or quality that separated them from their peers. The same thing comes up all the time with Steve Jobs, people will say variants of "he's nothing without his contemporaries." And yet, he somehow managed to be the driving force that brought all those people together to create some amazing things, and those contemporaries believed in him. I guess it does just come down to differing philosophies where some people are unhappy with glorifying individual efforts.