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There's no way to know if Socrates' absence would have led to a net benefit or not Edit: to expand on this, we can say it is fortunate that his words were writ
by Bakary 4y ago
There's no way to know if Socrates' absence would have led to a net benefit or not
Edit: to expand on this, we can say it is fortunate that his words were written down, but in a Socrates-less world or a world where his thoughts evaporated, you don't know which philosophers would have taken up the mantle instead and what the consequences would have been
- lupire 4y agoYes, no one can ever no anything about a counterfactual. So does nothing matter beyond whatever each individual chooses to matter? (Nihilism / Hedonism.)
- Bakary 4y agoI meant more in the sense that we are primed to take one side of the issue by the default, the one we know. In the counter-factual Socrates-less world I'm describing, we are the unprovable counter-factual and people there are posting about how grateful they are that Eulogothenes' words were put to papyrus. Perhaps a better way to illustrate this is to point out that the Mona Lisa's cultural prominence essentially ballooned once it was stolen.