Footnotes to Aristotle
Claire Berlinski, Ed. ·
Aug 24, 2011 at 11:40pm
I'm seeing endless appeals to the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West in the media. For balance, I would like to urge upon everyone a proper weighting of our Greco-Roman heritage.
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Dec '10
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Ooh, ooh! I sorta have something to contribute to this discussion, although I'm largely ignorant on the subject. Yesterday, I heard Dennis Prager interview James Hannam, author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution. It was such a fascinating interview I ordered the book from Amazon, where you can save a few bucks on the hardback at the moment.
He makes the case that Aristotle was important to the development of science, although he had it all wrong, but it was Aquinas and other lesser known Christians who really advanced science as we know it. Apparently he earnestly defends the significance of the Middle Ages.
I've been meaning to post a proposal for a Ricochet Book Club discussion on Hannam's book. Any takers?
Sep '10
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Crow's Nest: "One should start with Plato: the first and definitive defense of an authoritarian state headed by a philosopher king."
I'll just direct you to this conversation had within the last two weeks in which several of us, including Prof. Rahe, debunk this very claim. · Aug 25 at 8:24am
I blush, therefore I am.
Sep '10
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
I've been meaning to post a proposal for a Ricochet Book Club discussion on Hannam's book. Any takers?
Well, its a little more complicated than Hannam says, but how about you post something in Member Feed when you're done the book and then we can go on from there? Though, of course, if others are interested in discussing that book then in no way take my reluctance because of workload as discouraging you from going hard and heavy at the book with select members.
Even if he somewhat oversimplifies, the broad sweep narrative and corrective to egregious historical errors of the past is certainly welcome. I should warn you though that if you get bitten by the bug, History of Science is an addictive field.
Jan '11
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
That episode is up next in my podcast queue. Prager -- again, I love him, I pay money to subscribe to his show, etc. -- is the #1 offender on this. I have never once heard him mention either our Greco-Roman or Enlightenment heritages except to sneer at them dismissively, or point out that Voltaire was an Anti-Semite, as if that somehow invalided the contributions of Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Smith, etc. It's nasty and intellectually dishonest.
Edited on Aug 26, 2011 at 6:28amFeb '11
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Western Chauvinist...the Hannam book sounds interesting. It should be noted that there was considerably more technological development in the Middle Ages than is generally assumed. To pick one example: waterpower was known to the Greeks and Romans, and a couple of impressive installations were built, but on the whole they did little with it, surely in part because slave labor was so cheap. The Middle Ages developed waterpower not only for the milling of grain, but also for operating furnace bellows, fulling textiles, and a whole range of other applications. "Stronger Than a Hundred Men," by Terry Reynolds, offers an interesting history of waterpower history. In addition to the slave-vs-free (or partly free) labor point, he suggests that Christianity did not have as negative an attitude toward practical hands-on work as did the classicals, and observes that monasteries were in the forefront of waterpower development.
Sep '10
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Really? A single book by a professor at Lewis & Clark has laid waste to one of the titans of human thought?
By all means, count me among those who didn't know...
Sep '10
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Bravo. Saved me from having to say it...
Mar '11
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Apologies for not jumping in earlier - I was flying across the pond.
Yes, Plato has been debunked. Yes, it has been done by a professor at Lewis and Clark (but you get points for the ad hominem). And yes, it reads like brain candy. You should read it because anyone who thinks they understand Plato but has NOT read this book, is missing something quite extraordinary. It really is wonderful stuff.
The book explains, beautifully, why "market" solutions in everything from thermostats to the body politic to the human body, are better at finding optimal solutions than any philosopher king could ever be. And it is hardly surprising that most political philosophers don't go here, because homeostatic systems are not exactly in the standard curriculums.
A better link .
Sep '10
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
iWc: Apologies for not jumping in earlier - I was flying across the pond.
Yes, Plato has been debunked. Yes, it has been done by a professor at Lewis and Clark (but you get points for the ad hominem). And yes, it reads like brain candy. You should read it because anyone who thinks they understand Plato but has NOT read this book, is missing something quite extraordinary. It really is wonderful stuff.
The book explains, beautifully, why "market" solutions in everything from thermostats to the body politic to the human body, are better at finding optimal solutions than any philosopher king could ever be. And it is hardly surprising that most political philosophers don't go here, because homeostatic systems are not exactly in the standard curriculums.
A better link . · Aug 25 at 6:23pm
Fascinating - need to get this thing on Kindle...
Jan '11
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Forrest Cox
Bravo. Saved me from having to say it... · Aug 25 at 3:56pm
Thanks! To follow-up on my last post, the Prager interview with Harman was much better than I had expected. The discussion of Galileo's trial and house arrest was very accurate, and the Aristotle stuff much better than I had reason to hope. Again, I wish religious conservatives would be more accepting of our classical influences, just as I wish secular liberals would be more appreciative of our Judeo-Christian heritage. And while I'm at it, I'd also like a pony.
Aug '11
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Do we take Plato as proto-totalitarian (Popper etc.) or do we take him as a wise leader (Strauss, etc.)? This conversation reflects a fundamental division within the conservative community between those who advocate rule by those "who know and have the good of the city as their goal," and those who believe in primacy of individual liberty and human rights.
Plato is not an advocate of the rule of law in the Republic. There is no judicial system or any notion of individual rights. It is at best about the rule of technocrats. They may be very well-meaning and very well-educated technocrats, but they are top-down authoritarian decision makers who micromanage every aspect of their city to minimize faction and thus they believe maximize happiness and fulfillment.
Hayek argued that no matter the good intentions and the knowledge of the governors, this sort of system will always lead eventually to totalitarianism. Hayek does not believe that the needed knowledge is possible. Similarly, in Reflections on the Logic of the Good, I question the logical possibility of the knowledge which the philosopher king or any being—even God—would require to govern such a city.
Aug '11
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Plato is certainly writing a critique of his own city, but his views on unity and rule were not shared by most of his contemporaries. Aristotle is critical of the key requirements of Plato's Republic which are inherently "totalitarian." These ancients may have had no notion of individual human rights but they had vibrant notions of equal rights, based on competing notions of what it means for a body to be healthy. Where Plato saw chaos and irrationality, they saw balance as a result of the conflict of interests.
Parts of the Republic are clearly meant to be funny and satiric. But it is not a satire in the style of “A Modest Proposal.” Swift was not arguing that his readers should eat Irish babies. Plato was arguing that it would be good if his Greek cities followed the model of his city-in-speech.
True, Plato’s Republic was the first, the most carefully crafted, the finest, and arguably the most influential vision of the perfectly rational and perfectly good community, produced by western philosophy. Nevertheless, it should not be used as a model for an America based on the Founding documents.
Apr '11
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
This has been touched on already: Maybe Plato wasn't seriously recommending the city he described as an ideal. I can't say, but in the early 1980s, when I was writing abstracts of social science journal articles, I read an essay that argued that the sort of symposium where Socrates proposed his Republic was a drinking session cum liars' contest, where the guests would try to top one another with the most preposterous logical extrapolations of some idea.
While any such flight of fancy needs a certain ballast of truth or at least plausibility, the goal was to craft a logical structure that held together the most outrageous statements. Thus, Socrates, having allowed music for the discipline of a steady beat, later thinks of an even sillier reason to ban it.
Apr '11
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
The need of Western Enlightenment intellectuals to denigrate the Christian Middle Ages is illustrated by Lynn White, Jr., who was a pioneer in revealing the vibrancy and rationality of mediaeval technological change. Even he, caught up in the anti-Western fashions of early environmentalism, tried to blame our supposed environmental catastrophe on the Bible and the Middle Ages (The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis). The essay was published in, of all places, Science.
Another, if out of the way, example of a liberal solution that doesn't work to a problem that doesn't exist.
Apr '11
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Also informative is this interview with Hannam in the Daily Caller.
Apr '11
Re: Footnotes to Aristotle
Just out of curiosity, does anyone here have The Genesis of Science on reserve in the Montgomery County, PA library system?