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Hah, you can't make this stuff up. 6. Socrates on the Forgetfulness That Comes with Writing (newlearningonline.com) 33 points by indy 1 hour ago | hide | 5 co

• Avshalom 4y ago
  On a similar note: because Socrates never wrote anything down, it's entirely possible everything attributed to him was made up.
  • virissimo 4y ago
    Possible, but improbable, since some attributions (approximately) agree across independent sources like Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, etc...
    • Avshalom 4y ago
      Fan fiction manages to agree about made up stuff across thousands of writers. Fictional canons in general easily produce (approximate) consistency across writers.
      • hunterb123 4y ago
        It isn't fan fiction, generally fans don't talk directly with the creators of their process, for years on end. Socrates pupils listened and discussed his ideas with him directly and very in-depth. Instead of him writing down statements to be misinterpreted, he instilled his philosophy into many people through direct conversation.
        • Avshalom 4y ago
          I mean don't get me wrong I'm just having fun, I'm not some socrates-truther but "generally fans don't talk directly with the creators of their process, for years on end" have you met fans? Hell yesterday the entirety of Tumblr decided to invent a fake Scorsese film with memes and slash/fic and fanart and arguments about it's place in his canon. They probably produced more in a day than was written about Socrates in a century.
          • hunterb123 4y ago
            It's not about how much you produce, it's about how well you knew the reasoning behind the thought. By talking with the person directly you're able to understand that reasoning much better vs interpretation.
      • tshaddox 4y ago
        Especially when the huge amount of clear contradictions are ignored. I don’t know if that’s the case with Greek philosophy, but it’s certainly the case with some other historical writings.
      • cratermoon 4y ago
        Especially once headcanon is established.
    • wrp 4y ago
      Also, secretaries who recorded speeches in shorthand were a well established institution is ancient Greece and Rome. Since Socrates was a celebrity teacher, it's likely his every speech (after becoming famous) was taken down verbatim.
      • jasonhansel 4y ago
        Well, Plato and Xenophon both present Socrates' Apology speech, and their versions are almost completely different. So at least one of them is made-up, rather than being a verbatim copy; probably both of them are (to some extent) fictitious.
  • aap_ 4y ago
    Plato's Socratic dialogs are certainly not meant to be taken as a transcription of dialogs that actually happened. Socrates is used as a literary device. It's quite likely that earlier dialogs are more in line with Socrates' actual character but the later ones are what you might call fan fiction for sure. For a completely different account of Socrates see Clouds by Aristophanes. I find Socrates a very fascinating character and Plato's dialogs very entertaining to read. He is such an expert troll (no wonder they sentenced him to death).
• mataslauzadis 4y ago
  This post was likely made as a counterpoint to the other
  • nehal3m 4y ago
    Makes sense, yeah. I still chuckled.
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    I don't think there's a counterpoint at all - on the debate of handwritten notes vs typed notes the Socrates argument would definitely not be on the side of faster typed notes but rather on putting more effort into careful writing, it's just that he's saying that you should go way beyond taking mere handwritten notes and verbally repeat the same content until you can fully memorize it by heart. The first article is saying that A < B and Socrates is saying that B < C - and both of them use similar argumentation (essentially, that taking shortcuts to do it faster is counterproductive to proper understanding), there's no contradiction and no counterpoint.
    • hunter-gatherer 4y ago
      I've not studied greek philosophy for some time, but is strict memorization really what Socrates and Plato taught as a tool to learn? Or did they happen to mean being able to, for example, present a lecture without notes?
• wahern 4y ago
  These things aren't contradictory. Ancient Greek students used wax tablets for taking notes, etc. What Socrates (and Plato and others) were upset about was the growing reliance on permanent writing to displace memorization. For example, giving a speech from notes rather than from memory; or in rhetoric citing to a work without being able to literally recite that part from memory. To the extent writing aided memorization and comprehension, they had no beef. The debate was about the nature of knowledge--whether knowledge could exist independent of an internalized form within the mind--i.e. memorization.
  • dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Beautiful. Do you have more written about Plato or related topics?
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      It’s all in their mind.
      • salawat 4y ago
        Not at all! In fact, the part written in their minds is the part that has tangled with the dialogues and their associated context. Socrates was about the living of philosophy, not merely writing or reading it.
    • wahern 4y ago
      For a very in-depth analysis of this topic, see The Art of Memory by Frances Yates. Much of that book is conjectural, and I don't think it ever found much purchase within the scholarly community. (Not because it's outright B.S., I don't think, but rather because the implications aren't particularly interesting to modern scholars of philosophy or history; the conjectures aren't worth proving or disproving.) However, it definitely helped me to contextualize Ancient Greek thought in this area, especially Platonic thought and its effect on subsequent philosophy in the Western tradition. I don't think this aspect of Ancient Greek philosophy or Platonic thought, especially the historical context, is clarified until rather advanced philosophical studies in university, if at all, so when you do you see it discussed or alluded to it's not stated plainly and it be can difficult to recognize. Usually it's just the implications and the more abstract aspects that are discussed, pre-translated into modern terminology and concepts. Memorization was an important technology of the time, and like most technologies it was used (and abused) to analogize and conceptualize abstract processes and phenomena, often to the point of equivocation. Failing to appreciate the role that memorization played back then is like failing to appreciate, for example, how the Internet and social media shape our understanding and debate of culture and politics in the early 21st century; the debates can all seem very esoteric, random, and confusing unless and until you have the historical anchor to contextualize things. Then much of the logic, presumptions, and emphases become easier to understand and translate into more familiar terms; banal even. I'm reminded of this admonition against technological equivocation from a mathematics professor, E.C. Zeeman, discussing the role astronomy as reflected in the Antikythera Mechanism had in shaping ancient thought on the nature of the world: > I would like to conclude by telling a cautionary tale. Let us try and place the Antikythera Mechanism within the global context of ancient Greek thought. Firstly came the astronomers observing the motions of the heavenly bodies and collecting data. Secondly came the mathematicians inventing mathematical notation to describe the motions and fit the data. Thirdly came the technicians making mechanical models to simulate those mathematical constructions, like the Antikythera Mechanism. Fourthly came generations of students who learned their astronomy from these machines. Fifthly came scientists whose imagination had been so blinkered by generations of such learning that they actually believed that this was how the heavens worked. Sixthly came the authorities who insisted upon the received dogma. And so the human race was fooled into accepting the Ptolemaic system for a thousand years. > Today we are in danger of making the same mistake over computers. Our present generation is able to view them with an appropriate skepticism when necessary. But our children's children may be brought up within a society dominated by computers, that they may actually believe this is how our brains work. We do not want the human race to be fooled again for another thousand years. http://zakuski.utsa.edu/~gokhman/ecz/gears_from_the_greeks.pdf http://zakuski.utsa.edu/~gokhman/ecz/gears_from_the_greeks.p...
• 627467 4y ago
  I've noticed the increase in these occurrences in HN where an article on an idea pops up and almost simultaneously another article on the opposite of the that idea appears. It may seem coincidence but I came to understand that it's just the community digesting and reacting to the original idea very quickly
  • kelseyfrog 4y ago
    It's a bit of a karma hack. Posting rebuttals and references is a quick way to leverage the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Speaking of which, I should probably something about the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon soon.
    • mjhay 4y ago
      Having just read what the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon[0] is, I think this is a rare virtuous karma hack, because it would give a series of related posts more interest, at the same time the information around them are more in the forefront of the reader's minds, making it more efficiently absorbed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
• deleted 4y ago
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