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> Unlike the Greeks, they did not leave the world a better place at the end of their power than they found it at the start. Roman law fuels most of the world's

> Unlike the Greeks, they did not leave the world a better place at the end of their power than they found it at the start. Roman law fuels most of the world's modern legal codes. Roman languages are among the most widely spoken today, and is closer to universal if you look at written language (even now, we're writing using the Roman alphabet). The largest world religion is Roman religion. Roman infrastructure forms the backbone of European infrastructure in much of the world. That's more impact than the Greeks had.

baja_blast 4y ago
> That's more impact than the Greeks had. Our careers would not be possible if it was not for the mathematical and scientific contributions of the ancient Greeks. Not only did they greatly contribute to the foundations of math, but the way they formalized logical thinking enabled further discoveries.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  None of this shit comes out of a magic hat, we're all ostensibly observing the same phenomena - that is to say there's hardly any reason whatsoever to attribute the gleaning of some fact derivative of the shared reality to a people. And I think this can be duly evidenced by the fact many people come to nearly simultaneous independent conclusions. This can be reduced to something like Newton didn't discover gravity, Newton formally described it in mathematics, and anyone dedicated enough to pursue the formal description could have done much the same. Much in the same way, the Eurocentric view is wrong to attribute things and with the way cultural interaction spheres tend to work it's even more difficult to attribute developments to a given culture or individual. E.g. not only are we "standing on the shoulders of giants" but the scientific domain is pruning viable explanatory paths with each passing moment, narrowing the scope of positive knowledge and increasing the sharpness of the borders of negative knowledge. For instance China had what was effectively fiat currency well before it became widespread in European nations; they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution?
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    But why did China discard movable type, while it was transformative to Western culture? One reason is that Greece invented proto-empiricism. Other cultures invented math, but because of Plato only Greece elevated research and abstraction into a process of formal discovery rather than just a set of neat tricks for a limited set of problems. China was a bureaucratic empire and didn't see the need. Rome was a fascist militarist slave owning culture which soon turned into a dictatorship. Both developed philosophies which were more oriented towards ethics and morality than empiricism. So there was no formal culture of curiosity and invention. Inventions appeared and then they disappeared again. There was no momentum driving the process forward. The West did develop an empirical culture. This was partly because it inherited the principle of formal abstraction from the Greeks, and partly because a tradition of physical exploration, with accompanying developments in ship technology and weapons. China and Japan both turned back in on themselves. Rome was more interested in conquest than exploration. The West explored - physically in search of gold and trade, but also philosophically and practically. So IMO the real reason the industrial revolution happened is because the West had a culture that incubated technology and invention in a way that other cultures didn't. Not only were there associations for the advancement of knowledge like the Royal Society, and informal networks of researchers and mathematicians, there was also a practical tradition of engineering in wood, iron, stone, glass, fire, and water, on land and on the sea. And also an economic reward system - abstracted from imperialism - which made practical engineering individually profitable.
    - dd36 4y ago
      And, as stated elsewhere, a middle class that could consume it.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      The West "explored" but also in a fairly aggressive way and only after a history of violent conflict post-Rome. I read Metropolis by Ben Wilson, which focused on histories of cities, and the Middle East was experience a trade-driven era of prosperity before being "discovered" by religious explorers/conquerors from Portugal. The Portuguese didn't initially have much valuable to those societies to trade - but they did have much better weapons to use against them from that history of conflict instead of a history of trade, and an aggressive religious mindset. I think it's a very open question if the warring, violent nature of those Western cultures actually led to overall faster/better technological advancement than if they'd interacted with the other cultures they came across in a peaceful, trade-oriented way.
chasil 4y ago
I think not. Roman law is not a scientific study by any means, and the reputation of the destructive Roman impact upon general scientific knowledge is felt in many fields. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/what-did-the-romans-ever-do-for-maths-very-little-1.3940438 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/what-did-the-romans-...

baja_blast 4y ago

> That's more impact than the Greeks had. Our careers would not be possible if it was not for the mathematical and scientific contributions of the ancient Greeks. Not only did they greatly contribute to the foundations of math, but the way they formalized logical thinking enabled further discoveries.

brnaftr361 4y ago
None of this shit comes out of a magic hat, we're all ostensibly observing the same phenomena - that is to say there's hardly any reason whatsoever to attribute the gleaning of some fact derivative of the shared reality to a people. And I think this can be duly evidenced by the fact many people come to nearly simultaneous independent conclusions. This can be reduced to something like Newton didn't discover gravity, Newton formally described it in mathematics, and anyone dedicated enough to pursue the formal description could have done much the same. Much in the same way, the Eurocentric view is wrong to attribute things and with the way cultural interaction spheres tend to work it's even more difficult to attribute developments to a given culture or individual. E.g. not only are we "standing on the shoulders of giants" but the scientific domain is pruning viable explanatory paths with each passing moment, narrowing the scope of positive knowledge and increasing the sharpness of the borders of negative knowledge. For instance China had what was effectively fiat currency well before it became widespread in European nations; they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution?
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  But why did China discard movable type, while it was transformative to Western culture? One reason is that Greece invented proto-empiricism. Other cultures invented math, but because of Plato only Greece elevated research and abstraction into a process of formal discovery rather than just a set of neat tricks for a limited set of problems. China was a bureaucratic empire and didn't see the need. Rome was a fascist militarist slave owning culture which soon turned into a dictatorship. Both developed philosophies which were more oriented towards ethics and morality than empiricism. So there was no formal culture of curiosity and invention. Inventions appeared and then they disappeared again. There was no momentum driving the process forward. The West did develop an empirical culture. This was partly because it inherited the principle of formal abstraction from the Greeks, and partly because a tradition of physical exploration, with accompanying developments in ship technology and weapons. China and Japan both turned back in on themselves. Rome was more interested in conquest than exploration. The West explored - physically in search of gold and trade, but also philosophically and practically. So IMO the real reason the industrial revolution happened is because the West had a culture that incubated technology and invention in a way that other cultures didn't. Not only were there associations for the advancement of knowledge like the Royal Society, and informal networks of researchers and mathematicians, there was also a practical tradition of engineering in wood, iron, stone, glass, fire, and water, on land and on the sea. And also an economic reward system - abstracted from imperialism - which made practical engineering individually profitable.
  - dd36 4y ago
    And, as stated elsewhere, a middle class that could consume it.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    The West "explored" but also in a fairly aggressive way and only after a history of violent conflict post-Rome. I read Metropolis by Ben Wilson, which focused on histories of cities, and the Middle East was experience a trade-driven era of prosperity before being "discovered" by religious explorers/conquerors from Portugal. The Portuguese didn't initially have much valuable to those societies to trade - but they did have much better weapons to use against them from that history of conflict instead of a history of trade, and an aggressive religious mindset. I think it's a very open question if the warring, violent nature of those Western cultures actually led to overall faster/better technological advancement than if they'd interacted with the other cultures they came across in a peaceful, trade-oriented way.

chasil 4y ago

I think not. Roman law is not a scientific study by any means, and the reputation of the destructive Roman impact upon general scientific knowledge is felt in many fields. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/what-did-the-romans-ever-do-for-maths-very-little-1.3940438 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/what-did-the-romans-...