111–120 of 128 posts
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A big joint project between China and France does not constitute an argument for learning French in preference to learning Chinese.
Nor does it constitute an argument for learning Chinese, assuming both parties already know English.
You seem to be answering some other, unrelated question.
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It is INSANE that we havent lost a single book of Plato's. In contrast, we lost 3/4 of Aristotle's books.
One general thing is that it is the most ‘classic’ works that are copied the most and most frequently. Early works in philosophy from Plato or even Aristotle are much more likely to survive than, say, philosophers from later antiquity (can you even think of many?) Of course that isn’t to say that all the most ancient philosophers’ works survived—we have little of Parmenides for example. Perhaps another reason for Pla…
Also the Temple of Hera was an accomplishment then. Pythagoras must have been strongly influenced by this amazing math/engineering culture. But the evidence was in the artifacts, not books.
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There are thousands of lost palm leaf books, in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, rotting away. There is simply no money to support the scholarship that would preserve these works. It's incredibly sad.
I hope they get digitized before they all fall apart. Maybe they should contact google.
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Yes! I was shocked when i learned this. I'm currently working on a Neo Latin translation from Marsilio Ficino. He is famous for catalyzing the Italian Renaissance by translating Plato (and many other Greek works) into Latin, making it available in the west after about 1000 years. He also restarted "the Academy." He was a prolific philosopher himself. The book I'm helping to translate is "De Voluptate", or "On Pleasur…
Plato wasn't translated into Latin until the middle ages?
Source: some random thing I read online somewhere; I might be wrong in the details.
Maybe someone on HN knows the answer to this question, which I've wondered for a while. Are there other civilizations of similar cultural sophistication to the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese whose writings have just not been passed down and so we aren't as familiar with them? Or are the ones whose work survived roughly it, even if much of their works are lost. E.g. there doesn't seem to be much surviving Persian literat…
A more interesting knowledge-hole is Neo-Latin, Latin written from the Renaissance to today. Surviving from the sixteenth century alone are 10,000 times more different books in Latin than survive from all of antiquity (at least according to Jurgen Leonhardt's "Latin: Story of a World Language"). People think about the Romans when they hear Latin, but they forget that it was the international publishing language for a…
To be fair, wasn't a lot of that Latin just the endless navel-gazing of Medieval Scholasticism?
I've been doing a lot of research on early astronomy lately and have been digging into how exactly we know what we know about the early Greek astronomers like Thales and Anaximander [1]. It turns out that it's pretty remarkable that we know anything whatsoever about these early figures. Thales was active so early on that philosophers weren't really writing anything down at that point. One of his successors, Anaximand…
A more interesting knowledge-hole is Neo-Latin, Latin written from the Renaissance to today. Surviving from the sixteenth century alone are 10,000 times more different books in Latin than survive from all of antiquity (at least according to Jurgen Leonhardt's "Latin: Story of a World Language"). People think about the Romans when they hear Latin, but they forget that it was the international publishing language for a…
I highly recommend this[1] blog post about contemporary Latin knowledge.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/rationibus-colloquendi-Supplementa-Hu... [1] http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignora...
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There have been various movements that have advocated for the use of pinyin as a primary writing system, for the same reason that Beijing replaced Traditional script with Simplified.
> There have been various movements that have advocated for the use of pinyin as a primary writing system, for the same reason that Beijing replaced Traditional script with Simplified. I don't speak or read Chinese, but my understanding is there are a lot of homophones (and a culture of homophonic puns) that would make that undesirable (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophonic_puns_in_Standard_Ch... ).
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Plato wasn't translated into Latin until the middle ages?
Modern philosophy courses tend to give equal weight to Aristotle and Plato (with a side order of Socrates), but for most of Western history the only pre-Christian philosopher that anyone cared about was Aristotle, who was often simply referred to as "The Philosopher". Plato was largely ignored and forgotten until there was a burst of scholarly interest in him in the 19th century. Source: some random thing I read onli…