It’s not an appeal to recency. I am just saying that appeal to the authority of Socrates is unwarranted. Not to mention interpretive arguments about Plato’s wri

It’s not an appeal to recency. I am just saying that appeal to the authority of Socrates is unwarranted. Not to mention interpretive arguments about Plato’s writings which makes the whole reference even more needless. I didn’t imply any dichotomy between physical and non-physical. Not sure what you are talking about. Identifying common features of foobars is simply not a good endeavor no matter whether they are physical or abstract. Another example as we have talked about bees. Imagine that you have been studying bees. You come up with an ad boc description without any coherent explanation of these features. Some of bees bite you, some of them only sting you, some make honey, some don’t, some are big, some are small. Their features are contradictory, some have most of them, some have only few of them. And all of that looks weird until you realize that you’ve been confusing bees, wasps, hornets and whatnot. Our modern understanding of science can help us distinguish those things to the point of tracing their ancestry by analyzing their DNA. The understanding of ur-fascism by Umberto Eco rather looks like inability to distinguish bees from wasps. We can also talk about fish. And how grouping dolphins with fish may lead you astray in your inferences. Grouping things together based on superficial similarities is just bad science. That’s all.