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Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

talesoftimesforgotten.com

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Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#121

Post by coliveira »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #95
coliveira wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to go to old China to give an example of this phenomenon. Fundamentalist christians nowadays still have the same mindset, nothing can be true if it's not supported by their ancient texts.

> nothing can be true if it's not supported by their ancient texts I'm probably what most people would call a fundamentalist Christian but your claim is wildly inaccurate. For example I know we're discussing this on HN even though the Bible says no such thing. Everyone has an epistemology that includes multiple sources of knowledge. There is some form of knowledge that every person thinks is ultimately authoritative.…

Your reasoning is circular: nobody is "disagreeing with God", because nobody knows what "God" thinks. Fundamentalists just follow ancient texts that present themselves as the "word of God".

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#122

Post by antognini »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #70
antognini wrote: post #35

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…

Cool podcast! Check out Shwep.net. Did you know that Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler credited Pythagoras for heliocentrism [1]? And Newton credited Pythagoras for the inverse square law [2] of gravity? Pythagoras is best... [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/228080 [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/531064

Thanks for the recommendation! That looks super interesting.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#123

Post by tablespoon »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #119
tablespoon wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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... ).

There are lots of homonyms but they are disambiguated by context. Look at it this way: you don’t need the characters when you’re listening to someone speak, so why wouldn’t you be able to sound out the phrase from pinyin and understand its meaning?

> There are lots of homonyms but they are disambiguated by context.

But wouldn't that lose something? My understanding is a lot of the puns specifically rely on the characters to force a different reading than the context would imply (or to evade censorship by having many ways to write the same sounds).

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#124

Post by dan-robertson »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #112
dan-robertson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos 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.

Pythagoras probably didn’t exist.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#125

Post by CamperBob2 »

iammisc wrote: post #84
CamperBob2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But remember, the Dark Ages weren't really all that dark, and religious figures throughout history have worked diligently to preserve knowledge rather than to destroy or conceal it. /s

There is no universality amongst religious figures. For every zealous priest that burned a bunch of books, there's a curious, yet equally zealous priest, who carefully documented a cultures behaviors and language in careful latin and published it.

[Citation Nee...

You know what, never mind.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#126

Post by dr_dshiv »

dan-robertson wrote: post #124
dr_dshiv wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos 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.

Pythagoras probably didn’t exist.

How do you figure? He didn't write anything, but his contemporary Heraclitus did. And Heraclitus insulted him for being a syncretic thinker. Why would he if he didn't exist?

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#127

Post by hihihihi1234 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #120
hihihihi1234 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is really not true, sorry. Plato was huge in the Renaissance and his academy ran in Athens (not continuously) from about 400BC-550AD. Platonism had a major influence on the formation and reception of Christianity and Islam, as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonism

You may be right, I'm very far from being an expert. Was just repeating something I read somewhere.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#128

Post by iammisc »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #109
iammisc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no secret platonic influence in catholicism. In the latin church, it's openly encouraged. I was just discussing platonic ideals after mass today with fellow parishioners and how important it is to pursue truth. The priest had even mentioned Plato in his homily on the nature of truth There's nothing secret here. Christianity is openly and unashamedly compatible with many aspects of Plato's philosophy. In fact…

I really appreciate your exposition. Maybe "open secret" is more appropriate. It is certainly esoteric, but not a conspiracy as you say. But let me put it this way. Most Christians would be surprised to discover that the original conception of god is Platonic — i.e., a god of cosmic unity, a god of ineffable oneness, as opposed to a singular god. After all, it is only in the esoteric Judaic tradition that the god of…

I'm not sure you can call the original conception of the abrahamic god as platonic. Platonism comes in when we start getting Jews who are awaiting the Logos, Jesus Christ. Certainly platonism helped pave the way for the success of Christianity.

Also I don't think there was a pope Theophilus. Perhaps you are referring to a non roman pontiff.

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