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Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
- rurban 1y agoNot just Plato, Aristoteles even more. He kept Mechanics for 2000 in the dark ages, by assuming that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects in proportion to their weight. He argued that a 10-pound stone would fall 10 times faster than a 1-pound stone. Continuous force is needed for continuous motion - without a force pushing it, a moving object would immediately stop. In fact continuous force leads to continuous acceleration. A bit of mathematics would have helped.
- bazoom42 1y agoAristotle formalized logic though, so credit where credit is due.
- Osmium 1y agoIt’s actually a very reasonable approximation within a certain regime: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057 There’s a reason people without training in sciences sometimes have the intuition that heavier things fall faster. This intuition isn’t developed in a vacuum (hah).
- TimorousBestie 1y agoYour pun made me audibly chuckle, so that deserves an upvote.
- WithinReason 1y agoYou can disprove this idea even in a simple thought experiment, you don't even need an actual experiment. If I take 2 large stones, connect them with a string so it's 1 object, will that object fall twice as fast than the 2 stones fall separately?
- Mikhail_K 1y agoThat will depend on the length of the rope, once aerodynamic effects are taken into account
- WithinReason 1y agolength is negligible
- cogman10 1y agoWorking under the theory that large dense things fall faster than small things, you'd expect that the large stone would drag the small stone. Much like if you attach a piece of wood to a rock with a rope and throw it in water, the rock will drag the wood down. You'd probably argue that even though they are connected with a string they are still 2 things and there's a density gap between the two of them. Now, if you try and figure out what makes a thing a thing, it starts breaking down. But if you've already have the working theory, then making an explanation isn't terribly hard.
- monkeyelite 1y agoHe didn’t keep anything in the dark ages. He asked questions about things in a way nobody had and few came after inquired deeper. Also if you read his physics tons of his questions are still relevant because he is asking more than “what’s the position of this object after falling” but “why is the object even moving”.
- jerf 1y ago"He kept Mechanics for 2000 in the dark ages," You can blame him for being wrong at first, but somewhere around, oh, 200 years later (very, very conservatively), the people who treated him as an unimpeachable source really ought to be assigned about 100% of the responsibility. "A bit of mathematics would have helped." Your use of modern terminology in the previous sentence leads me to think you're not clear on how primitive mathematics is for Aristotle. The calculus you are referencing comes from give-or-take two thousand years in the future, and while you can make a case that physics was "held back" by some very bad understandings, I think if you survey the history of mathematical development that you can't really make that argument for math [1]. Are you personally ready to stand and give an account to the future for failing to understand concepts that will be considered obvious and taught to whatever the equivalent of schoolchildren is in the year 4025 AD? 'Cause I wouldn't take that responsibility on. [1]: What I mean here is that while mathematicians also had some errors, that just by the nature of math being built up from the ground those errors were never as fundamental as the physics errors because there was always a clear sense of what was well-grounded versus speculation. You have things like the casual assumption of Euclid's parallel postulate being true, but that didn't really "hold back" mathematics in the same way; it prevented the investigation of hyperbolic and spherical geometry but not discovering and/or investigating a new field is radically different than being persistently wrong about an existing one for centuries at a time.
- ARandomerDude 1y ago> you're not clear on how primitive mathematics is for Aristotle Completely agree, and to add some color: Aristotle lived about 100 years after Pythagoras, meaning in his time a²+b²=c² was groundbreaking material.
- TimorousBestie 1y agoThey didn’t even have access to algebraic notation (IIRC, an innovation of the Islamic Golden Age, a result of cross-pollinating Greek geometry with Indian arithmetic). So the groundbreaking material was that famous diagram of a right triangle with squares constructed on each side.
- pixl97 1y agoAristotleles lived 2000 years and kept people from dropping two objects off a cliff at the same time the entire time? I'd say something else entirely kept the rest of humanity from experimenting and sharing their knowledge about this.
- BrandoElFollito 1y agoHe did not keep anybody anywhere. People decided to blindly believe him, without reasoning nor checking. Given that 80% of the world today believe on some form of god, this must be something ingrained in our minds to follow something instead of being skeptical.
- api 1y agoI've believed for many years that Plato got something incredibly fundamentally wrong: he believed that logic, math, and the language of thought was primary and preceded existence. This error underlies all kinds of things all the way up to and including the present-day philosophical fad of "rationalism." (the Yudkowski variety) It's a popular idea because it's a "truthy" idea. When we introspect, thought feels primary, and there are certain patterns that exist in the universe that are so fundamental that they seem to precede any concrete. Logic and mathematics are chief among these. It is impossible to imagine a universe where 2+2=15 or not-true=true. The apparent transcendental fixity of these things leads us to think there exists some category of truths that precede existence. I do believe these things are fixed and axiomatic, but I do not believe this implies that they precede existence. It implies that they are deep fundamental laws of the universe, and nothing more. Being something that exists within and is embodied in this universe means that we have inductively learned (both through evolution and neural learning) these laws. We can't imagine a universe where they are different because such a universe would be fundamentally alien to a degree that would invalidate our very cognitive processes. Something that evolved in such a universe -- if such a universe were even able to support life -- would have an utterly alien form and function. Ultimately it all reduces to the anthropic principle. We are here and exist in this universe because we are having this conversation. If we didn't exist, we would not be, and if the universe were fundamentally different we might be having a similar conversation in which we assume those laws are axiomatic and immutable, and would be incapable of imagining any different. I think this is a very bad error, and one with a body count. It leads to beliefs like "only one form of human being is consistent with the eternal order of nature," which implies that anything else is an abomination and should be marginalized or killed. I leads to insane forms of magical thinking like New Thought / "The Secret" / prosperity gospel / etc. where people believe that our thoughts determine reality. It leads to nonsense like the AI hard takeoff "foom" idea, which only makes sense if you think that a sufficiently intelligent being can deduce all that it needs to know from the laws of logic and mathematics without embodiment. (The Yudkowski super-AI is just a philosopher king.) I don't think it's a coincidence that Plato is the father of many forms of authoritarianism either. Authoritarianism naturally precedes from the idea of transcendent laws that can be grasped by sufficiently intelligent philosopher kings without feedback from reality. Edit: I'm not 100% certain it's impossible to imagine mathematically and logically alien universes. I wonder if one could simulate such a universe by encoding an alien system of logic/math behind the scenes in the form of a kind of translation table. There's been some work in artificial life and cellular automata like this.
- tgv 1y agoHow can you start an article like that unironically with "when it comes to reputation, people prefer tearing down to building up."
- speak_plainly 1y agoThis is a midwit-level take on Plato. Arguments: Plato is responsible for a dualistic model of mind and matter that hampers our thinking today. Plato had an unrealistic ideal of what knowledge is. Plato had weird methodological assumptions. There are real criticisms you could make about Plato and his work, but this misses the mark by miles.
- michaelsbradley 1y agoAfter reading it, the feeling I had: I was hungry for lunch but all that was on hand was 3½ oreo cookies and half a small bottle of soda that's losing its fizz.
- pcthrowaway 1y agoI suspect someone prompted an LLM: write an article that makes an unconventional argument about a philosopher.
- MangoToupe 1y agoUnconventional would be Bataille.
- danielbln 1y agoIn 2018? That's pretty impressive.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoWe need to coin a phrase for this constant accusal of "being written by LLM". LLM-ophobia?
- readthenotes1 1y agoLlamanoia
- pfdietz 1y ago
- boxed 1y agoSBMC has a takedown of Plato that is 100x better than this article, while being 10x shorter, and funny. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/cave-2 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/cave-2
- analog31 1y agoKarl Popper trashed Plato in The Open Society and its Enemies.
- fmajid 1y agoAnd Bertrand Russell in his contemporaneous "History of Western Philosophy" (1946), which goes into more details on the historical context with Sparta. Plato was basically a disgruntled aristocrat who despised Athenian democracy that led to his social class losing absolute power. Socrates was executed for being a nexus of Spartan collaborationism (the "misleading the youth" was a thinly veiled work-around around the amnesty that was granted as part of the peace settlement with Sparta). "The Republic" advocates for full-on fascism beyond the wildest imagination of Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin. For a more accessible critic, there is I.F. Stone's "The Trial of Socrates".
- mjburgess 1y agoI think it's more accurate to say that Socrates was improperly sensitive to the climate spartan dictatorship had brought about, esp. that he had been a mentor to some of those involved. If he had been more politically-minded, he'd have given some actual apology or shown at least some sensitivity. Instead, of course, he resented being forced to attend to non-philosophical matters.
- fmajid 1y agoIn the Athenian system, after a conviction, the prosecution and the defendant would offer competing sentences for the crime. The prosecution recommended death, Socrates said he should be housed and fed for life by the state. The jurors were so incensed he was sentenced to death with a higher majority than had voted him guilty.
- analog31 1y agoIndeed, I wonder if Plato was responsible for "everybody kmows democracy is a failure" up until quite recently.
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- monkeyelite 1y agoYeah I guess is he is wrong if you are a nihilistic secular materialist, which is the dominant view. Hearing a coherent view that is different is part of what’s interesting.
- nathan_compton 1y agoThe dominant view? Weird definition of dominant. I happen to actually be something like a nihilistic secular materialist and as far as I can tell I'm in a vanishingly small minority. I see this kind of comment a lot and I am dumbfounded by it all the time. Most scientists in the US believe in God or a higher power, most Americans do too. The current government is chock full of weirdos with supernatural beliefs and its common on both sides of the aisle. Where are all these nihilistic materialists people are always talking about?
- msgodel 1y agoI think there's a plurality of views in the US but material utilitarianism is how most people including scientists seem to argue for policy. The current government is kind of an iconoclastic reaction to some of the recent failings of that view.
- nathan_compton 1y agoPlease elaborate. Genuinely curious. I'll be frank with my perspective: trying to understand recent (say the last 50 years) of US history on a "materialist -> idealist" axis is hilariously absurd. There has been literally no moment in the history of the united states that I can think of where anything like a truly materialist public facing justification for policy has ever been offered. And while its true that the failings of the ruling cast tend to be mercenary in nature, which is to say that they are mostly out for themselves, this really is neither here nor there philosophically, and is more a condition of ruling classes everywhere and one not deeply related to the navel gazing of philosophers.
- monkeyelite 1y ago
- keiferski 1y agoThis is a really weak article that doesn’t seem to have many arguments, just opinions. Plato’s argument that the soul could survive the death of the body established a dualistic model of mind and matter that still hampers our thinking today. The Greeks had a concept of an afterlife prior to Plato. Dualism seems more to me that it originated in one of the following: the fear of death and the hope for an afterlife; the fact that things seem to continue existing even when you aren’t observing them; or just because the mind seems (in a common sense way) to exist in a separate place from the body, in the sense that I can sit in a crowd and have thoughts that are not accessible to others. Anyway, I think critiquing Plato on scientific correctness is sort of anachronistic, because you could argue that the scientific culture of the Renaissance needed a couple millennia of “seeking the truth” to develop in the first place – which is ultimately a core idea of Plato, even if he got the specifics wrong. A stronger critique comes from Nietzsche IMO, but it’s a cultural and value critique, not a scientific one. Too long to put here, but essentially he says Plato established a philosophy that debased reality in favor of abstractions. https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/9i9puk/what_exactly_was_nietzsches_problem_with_plato/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/9i9puk/what_...
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- taneq 1y agoAll of the 'great philosophers' got virtually everything wrong (and where they got things right, it was by luck rather than virtue) right up to the point where a few people started believing in wacky concepts like "the existence of an objective reality" and "maybe we should test our assumptions". Before that point all "great thoughts" were basically people with too much spare time, confidently making stuff up and declaring it as fact because they thought it made them sound smart.
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- daseiner1 1y agophilosophy isn't really about answers, it's about questions. it's also not really about knowledge. a philosopher, literally, is a friend or lover of wisdom. there are decent arguments, for instance, that reasoning about God (yes, angels dancing on pinheads) laid the groundwork for things like calculus as it necessitates reasoning with the infinite. "objectivity" has been used to justify lots of bad things. and hate to be the bearer of bad news but "stuff people made up" is kinda the definition of society and culture. > confidently making stuff up and declaring it as fact because they thought it made them sound smart. pots and kettles.
- taneq 1y agoHi! Thanks for your thoughts. I have no issue with pontificating about angles and pinheads. What I have issue with is statements like "platonic solids are the fundamental building blocks of the universe" where the justification is "because I think they're neat". Plenty of people have used "objectively..." as the start of terrible statements, no argument there. (And let's not even get into objectivism...) But the shared belief in an objective universe governed by universal, immutable, fundamental laws is at the heart of all real science. Even if the pot's a hypocrite, that doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong.
- daseiner1 1y agoI still think you're selling the pre-moderns a little bit short, personally. I respect and appreciate your equanimity in your response to my initial comment, which was admittedly unnecessarily harsh and antagonistic.
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- aestetix 1y agoWhat's funny about this article is that it seems to focus on the Republic without addressing any of his other dialogues. What about the aporetic dialogs where there are no clear answers? What about his Parmenides where he rips to shreds his own golden theory of forms? To say that he got "everything" wrong, there's an assertion that we now have some "correct" answer which supercedes Plato. Can we now say with confidence what defines justice, which in many ways was the point of the Republic? What about defining love, the topic of the Symposium? Rather than taking an arrogant modernist high horse and saying Plato was wrong about everything, it might behoove to highlight some of the questions Plato raised, and see how well we can answer them today.
- daseiner1 1y agoYup, couldn't agree more. One of my biggest intellectual annoyances is the common (mis)conception that philosophy is about answers when, as you said, it's really about questions. Less debate, more play.
- dcre 1y agoNarrow focus on the Republic (and of course misreading it) is a classic feature of bad Plato critique.
- coldtea 1y ago>But on virtually every point that mattered he was disastrously wrong Plato no, but the author of this is. Well, he would be, if this article was anything but tripe - mass-audience mass-produced content of the kind suitable for a variety publication, and not a very good one.
- smitty1e 1y agoIndeed, the writer basically provided a demonstration of the intellectual bulldozing of which he accuses Socrates. Sure, tear everything down, but please show something improved in its place.
- scoofy 1y agoI mean, sure, this should be considered effectively trivial, but it's just click-bait. Look, I have too many degrees in my failed attempt to become a philosophy academic to just skip leaving a comment here. Apologies for the wall of text: The entire point of most of "Modern Philosophy" is pushing back on the ideas presented in "Ancient Philosophy," most of which come from Plato (and then Aristotle). Beyond that "Analytic Philosophy," in a sense, take direct aim at the way Plato sees the world altogether, and effectively asserts that he has everything backwards. Plato looks at the world and tries to derive the concepts he finds, where the Analytic tradition basically suggest that concepts, themselves, are us just pointing at things and unifying the things we see with shared words. You can really see push back with the Existentialist, who basically build their entire theory an anti-Platonic sentiments. The essences that Plato relies on and effectively rejected completely. I really thing the point of why Plato is so important is that his ideas are, what I consider at least, the default ideas humans have about the world. They represent the instinctual conceptions of philosophy that need to be effectively unlearned by exploring ideas that are counterfactual to them, or demonstrate how they create contradiction. This is important! The reason why we have ZF set theory is because Pythagoras got some things right and got some things wrong and we built from there. Plato being wrong about things shouldn't be surprising, it shouldn't be controversial, and it shouldn't mean we stop studying it.
- corimaith 1y agoI'ld say Plato is pretty relevant today in his critique of the Sophists that have direct parallels to a certain movement today.
- killfisto 1y agoITT: some of the wildest, disassociated, story mode narrative parroting All language is just a Rorshach test. You saw truth in those books, I saw a connect the dots puzzle book for kids. Those guys had the literacy of a modern middle schooler. Not gonna deify long dead people obsessed with wanking their literacy instead of inventing plumbing, etc… useful things for humans not empty mind places to gate keep
- reedf1 1y agoDo yourself a favor and read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Khun.
- kazinator 1y ago> Plato’s argument that the soul could survive the death of the body established a dualistic model of mind and matter that still hampers our thinking today. That is quite possibly going to be mainstream technology one fine day! We have machines that are beginning to vaguely grope toward having some kind of soul, and we can easily get their state to survive the replacement of their hardware. The intuition is correct that there is a dualism there. The mind is separate from the implementation substrate on which it operates and we can contemplate preserving and migrating it.