Aristotle was obviously a great teacher and philosopher but he ended up being wrong about a lot. Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
He thought eels didn’t procreate because no one had ever seen it happening. (They go out to sea to fuck.) He was into bees and correctly noticed that there were workers and drones and that young bees grow out of the honeycomb. But he just assumed the Queen was a King and that worker bees were out collecting tiny baby bees from flowers. (He thought the air just blew pollen around and the honey naturally appeared.)
He had a lot of ideas that were just ideas but he was so influential and his writings were preserved and translated. It took a shocking number of years for people to question if Aristotle was full of shit.
Dude developed testable hypotheses thousands of years ago, not exactly like but very close to what we call the scientific method today. Full of shit? What an ignorant thing to say.
My boy Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women, and whatever testable hypothesis he created to prove that fact didn’t include, you know, counting the teeth of men and women.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, and will agree that “classical elements” is probably the dumbest thing to accuse him of being wrong about. Hell, I have considered getting a Bekker number tattoo, but he was definitely full of some shit. It’s okay to acknowledge he was right about some things and wrong about others. That’s the whole point of this thread.
Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
That’s basically correct, though, as long as you’re intepreting “elements” to mean something more in linenwith “states of matter”, rather than actual fundamental periodic style elements.
“Element” is a fairly general word, we just generally use it colloquially to refer specifically to the chemical elements. If you interpret his usage in the same way we use “states of matter”, it’s not horrendously far off. Earth, water, air, and fire roughly correspond to solid, liquid, gas, and (extremely rudimentary, very low ionization) plasma (or perhaps a more general energetic concept). In any case, an object “wanting” to get to its “natural” place also isn’t terribly far off from a statement of consistent physical laws. Solids do “want” to accumulate with other solids by gravity, energetic gases do “want” to rise above less energetic ones through buoyancy.
The worst part of it was that for a ton of stuff he had contemporaries that were right about much much more, but were dismissed in favor of his confidently incorrect BS.
For example the Epicureans, who thought matter was made of tiny indivisible parts, that light too was made of indivisible parts moving really fast, that each parent contributed to a “doubled seed” which determined the traits of the child and could bring back features of skipped generations, that the animals which we see today were just the ones that were best able to survive to reproduce, and that all of existence arose only from the random interactions of these indivisible parts of matter and not from any intelligent design.
And because Aristotle’s stupid ideas influenced the lineage of modern thought, most people learn about him but very few learn about the other group that effectively preempted modern thought millennia earlier.
But he just assumed the Queen was a King
Actually, he acknowledged “some say” the Queen was female, but then argued it couldn’t be because the gods don’t give women weapons and it had a stinger. And the identification of the leader of the hive as male was actually used for centuries to justify patriarchal monarchy as being “by God’s design” because after all, look at the bee hive (somehow when we realized it was actually a female that logic went up in smoke).
So there were other people that did know what was correct, but Aristotle screwed up the development of thinking around it by rationalizing an opposite answer with an appeal to misogyny.
Wild that he was only two degrees of separation from a teacher famed for praising the knowledge of self-ignorance and not falling into false positives and negatives.
What I’m getting from this is that people were the same back then as they are now. Aristotle was basically a hack who said just the right bigoted things for the ruling class to latch onto to justify the status quo. Like an ancient political commentator, or popular “scientist” who says anything for attention.
But the Epicureans also denied that virtue is primary in achieving eudaimonia and from a Stoic POV, that’s just a cardinal sin. Due to the Stoics is also the idea of animals being self-aware as well as cosmopolitanism and the absolutely unheard of notion that women have the same mental faculties as men and thus should also enjoy education.
But really, all the “Figuring out how to be like Sokrates” schools of philosophy were highly productive.
I think social media should be 18+ only. In fact, I don’t think anyone under 18 should have phones that connect to the internet at large, only things like maps or whatnot to get around. I think this would solve a lot of fundamental phone addiction problems we’re seeing from our youth.
I also think filters of any kind should be banned on social media. They’re fun, but not worth the damage they cause.
A friend of mine managed a pizzeria and said all the parts were portioned out. Extra usually meant an additional portioning of that topping / fixing would be added to the assembly.
There is an upper limit when a large party walks in expecting food, but it could feed like twenty people. For anything larger you had to request in advance so he could have the supplies on hand.
This was Texas in the 1970s which involved frequent people wanting to work an hour for a slice so he’d require them to wait for a rush (they wouldn’t have to wait long) and then would get a meal of food for their hour.
Wait, so like a barter? I’d work for an hour and get a slice instead of the hour’s wage?
That sounds amazing. I’m sure there are still places like that but with so much red tape nowadays I’m sure someone would… I don’t know… “get in trouble”? For what, I don’t know, but I’m sure it involves a straw man.
The answer is yes. Before the 1990s, there were was a lot of casual business. My San Francisco residence was rented to my flatmate entirely on a verbal contract (which created problems in the aughts, when utility companies were modernizing their service). This kind of casual business works well when everyone is friendly or acting in good faith, but it leaves fewer protections from fraud.
In rural parts of the US, there were regions in which there was little enough cash flow that barter was routine. And then farms often would have enough extra produce they would look for neighbors to give food to, rather than dumping it.
I’d say we’d have organized crime to thank for the necessity of making transactions a lot more secure and a lot less anonymous, but that’s really only the justification. It’s law enforcement that has turned to the same rackets that were the purview of mobsters. Not only are grocers no longer able to give away one-day expired food to homeless and impoverished folk, but kids risk legal trouble just by running a lemonade stand on a hot day.
Giving me annoying audible notifications that my battery is low. We moved to batteries that degrade when lower than ~40% and got rid of the notifications that let us know your battery is dead…
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