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I think people commit a grave error when they try to pick out absurd-sounding beliefs that ancient people may or may not have held. The larger point is that Ari

I think people commit a grave error when they try to pick out absurd-sounding beliefs that ancient people may or may not have held. The larger point is that Aristotle and Plato gave us ideas and concepts that we still think with. To give some perspective, at the time these guys lived they were still inventing alphabets and didn't put spaces between words. Reading was still a crude and unpolished form of communication, most people (Plato included) were illiterate. Their ideas are rudimentary but fundamental so it's easy to nitpick technicalities but completely ignores their most important contributions. /rant

abecedarius 12y ago
Can you back up this claim of an illiterate Plato? That sounds like the sort of assertion this post complains about. Plato's dialogs do have Socrates complaining about book-learning. AFAICT literacy rates in classical Athens are uncertain. I recently read http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Lives-Ancient-Greeks-Peoples/dp/0313385718 http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Lives-Ancient-Greeks-Peoples/... which left me with an impression of relatively high rates for male citizens, but I don't remember anything concrete. Searching turns up http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/literacy-and-democracy-fifth-century-athens http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/classical-stud... which says the orthodoxy is for low rates, but argues against it.
- jeangenie 12y ago
  In my hasty reply I wrote Plato but meant Socrates. In fact Plato was most definitely literate. In fairness this was also only unsubstantiated rumor. Socrates upbringing was supposedly poor so it's possible he could have been. However my overall point was that this isn't important in light of his larger contributions.
abecedarius 12y ago
On the general point that the European literate culture pretty much starts with classical Greece: yeah. OTOH if you look just a little later at people like Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, ... you see work that's both correct and of the highest quality. I wish there was much more left from that era to give us a better idea how that happened. Later antiquity had terrible taste in what to preserve.

abecedarius 12y ago

Can you back up this claim of an illiterate Plato? That sounds like the sort of assertion this post complains about. Plato's dialogs do have Socrates complaining about book-learning. AFAICT literacy rates in classical Athens are uncertain. I recently read http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Lives-Ancient-Greeks-Peoples/dp/0313385718 http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Lives-Ancient-Greeks-Peoples/... which left me with an impression of relatively high rates for male citizens, but I don't remember anything concrete. Searching turns up http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/literacy-and-democracy-fifth-century-athens http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/classical-stud... which says the orthodoxy is for low rates, but argues against it.

jeangenie 12y ago
In my hasty reply I wrote Plato but meant Socrates. In fact Plato was most definitely literate. In fairness this was also only unsubstantiated rumor. Socrates upbringing was supposedly poor so it's possible he could have been. However my overall point was that this isn't important in light of his larger contributions.

abecedarius 12y ago

On the general point that the European literate culture pretty much starts with classical Greece: yeah. OTOH if you look just a little later at people like Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, ... you see work that's both correct and of the highest quality. I wish there was much more left from that era to give us a better idea how that happened. Later antiquity had terrible taste in what to preserve.