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Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
11–20 of 115 posts
Re: Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
#12This 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.
After 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.
Re: Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
#13Yeah 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.
Re: Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
#14Not 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 conti…
"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.
Re: Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
#15This 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_...
Re: Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
#16How can you start an article like that unironically with "when it comes to reputation, people prefer tearing down to building up."
If they have good reason - they should tear down, even if it is the popular thing to do. But you do need good reason, which most people don't.
Re: Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
#17Not 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 conti…
Aristotleles 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.
Re: Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
#18This 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.
After 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.
I suspect someone prompted an LLM: write an article that makes an unconventional argument about a philosopher.
Re: Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
#19I'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…
You're essentially describing Idealism vs Materialism.
Related is Nietzsche thinking he was the one to overturn Plato. Heidegger thought that Nietzsche was instead the logical conclusion of metaphysics. Heidegger's project was about "returning to the Question of Being" which he thought was first occluded by Plato, so he is in strong conversation with the Pre-Socratics. Deleuze has an interesting critique of Plato built on flipping the latter's hierarchy of model and copy.
> insane forms of magical thinking like [...] where people believe that our thoughts determine reality.
This can't be hand-waved away as easily as you might think.
Re: Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
#20This 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.
> This is a midwit-level take on Plato.
Is this intended as a pejorative? Why not just say "dimwitted"? It would communicate your semantics much clearer.