Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree, classical philosophy is what sparked the enlightenment, and the fact that so few scholars read those texts today, is probably why we are heading into a new age of stupidity.

Obviously you can get great in the field of physics or mathematics without reading Plato, but you really shouldn’t, because the works and thoughts of Plato are the foundation of our free society. And that’s just Plato, you really should enrich your life by reading classics of your field as well as philosophy, classic literature, arts and history.

In my country we have a word to describe this, it’s called “dannelse”, and I can’t find an English word for it. The closest thing I’ve been able to come up with to describe it is: ”give people a broad, general basis for developing their talents to the maximum and growing into strong, open and multi-faceted individuals who can assume their responsibility in society to the full.”. In my country, you can’t attend the university without a minimum foundation of classical philosophy, because you can’t do science if you don’t understand how knowledge is obtained, but I’ve never met an actual scientist who didn’t actually delve deeper into those aspects of life, because they offer so much in return.

Another example is programming. Who would you rather hire? Someone who is self taught, or someone who’s educated in best practices and patterns? The latter, because they won’t repeat the mistakes of the past 25 years. Every science is like this, and if you don’t educte yourself on the past, you’re really just wasting your time, making someone else’s mistake.

The real irony of the original story is that it excludes history from this. History happens to be my field, and unlike most other sciences, our classical works are mostly full of lies. Because they weren’t written to keep track of history, but to further the authors political agenda at the time. We use them only because we have to.

> I disagree, classical philosophy is what sparked the enlightenment

The rediscovery of classical philosophy spurred the Renaissance, the Enlightenment was later and, though it built opon the Renaissance, not really directly stimulated by classical philosophy.

If you read "Africa, Asia and the History of Philosophy" you'll see how this whole story of "Ancient Greeks were great philosophers but then their knowledge was buried during the Dark Ages by Muslim conquerors and when their knowledge was recovered during the Renaissance by Jesuit scholars the torch of wisdom lit bright again and the world found Enlightenment, yada yada" is the same sort of thing as tribal myths of "primitive" cultures

FWIW, I think the standard narrative is that knowledge of the great Greek and Roman works was lost in Europe as a result of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the immense reduction in civilizational complexity that it entailed, not as a result of Muslim conquest.

And further you'll find the standard narrative is that the Arabic world was responsible for preserving many of the great classical works and for advancing knowledge of mathematics and science during the middle ages.

Not solely responsible. For example, they didn't care about artistic works, and so they didn't take any cares to preserve greek plays.

Watches helplessly as reading list grows faster than I can consume it.

>Ancient Greeks were great philosophers but then their knowledge was buried during the Dark Ages by Muslim conquerors

Don't be silly. It was Christian Europe that lost and discarded the non-religious philosophical texts, and the Muslim Middle East that preserved them and advanced from them.

Yeah, I mean, that's a even the standard narrative; the idea that they were lost due to Muslim conquest and rediscovered by Jesuits I've never heard before, and it isn't even superficially plausible since there was no general Muslim conquest for them to be lost in, and the Jesuits were formed too late to rediscover them and spark the Renaissance.

>the works and thoughts of Plato are the foundation of our free society

Plato's political philosophy was one of "enlightened" totalitarianism, though, nothing even remotely close to our "free" society, as un-free as it is.

In my country we have a word to describe this, it’s called “dannelse”, and I can’t find an English word for it. The closest thing I’ve been able to come up with to describe it is: ”give people a broad, general basis for developing their talents to the maximum and growing into strong, open and multi-faceted individuals who can assume their responsibility in society to the full.”

This sounds like the English term "liberal education."

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