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Ok, I am fully sold on the new format for Hacker News. This is a truly enlightening article. I've never liked Plato (I am a big Aristotle fan), and this art
by gibsonf1 19y ago
Ok, I am fully sold on the new format for Hacker News.
This is a truly enlightening article. I've never liked Plato (I am a big Aristotle fan), and this article shows in a convincing way how Plato used his communicative gifts to "corrupt" the historic record to make Plato's very bad political ideas more palatable to the public. Socrates was killed for repeatedly advocating the violent overthrow of the Athenian Democracy in favor of a brutal oligarchy. Was this punishment warranted? I think so. In the same way that the identical punishment is warranted for those who convince their followers to blow up others.
- byrneseyeview 19y agoGlad you liked it, although I thought the point I. F. Stone missed was that democracy is a terrible idea (and a dangerous intellectual fad). Progress happens when new ideas contradict established ideas -- it is, in other words, intrinsically undemocratic (Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein all spent time as constituencies of one).
- gibsonf1 19y agoI would definitely take the Athenian Democracy over the brutal dictatorship. I think Aristotle did a great job of pointing out the problems with a pure democracy, and John Adams did a great job of helping invent the best solution to those problems - a constitutional republic. But as far as talking about scientific progress in political terms, I guess I don't follow your reasoning there. Apparently, one of the virtues of the Athenian Democracy was free speech, one of the key ingredients enabling great thinkers to thrive.