I find the reality even more interesting. What were humans thinking about 40,000 years ago, with their modern bodies and brains?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAGjuRwx_Y8 "Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life's Toughest Questions"
I got the impression there was some language barrier stuff going on, but the answer to many questions was... "meat"
I also think about how some of the really great works have stood the test of time — like Plato’s. Then there are really great works that were once common and popular but have fallen out of contemporary thought.
Given the rich and documented history we do have at our disposal, it feels to me that the present era is much less diverse and more ignorant than it ought to be.
A simple argument about mathematics or engineering can be made by going to Constantinople and looking at the Hagia Sophia. Much technical and practical mathematical ability would have been needed at the time to construct it but we have little interesting mathematics from that time (6th century). I find it improbable that we would have such mathematicians as Archimedes and Apollonius around 250BCE, then roughly nothing for 750 years, and then the Hagia Sophia. I find it more believable that the tradition of mathematics continued but that only those most ancient, foundational and well-regarded works were sufficiently reproduced to make it to the present. To be clear, I am not trying to claim that one needs the kind of mathematicians produced by Apollonius to build a large dome but rather that a society capable of continuing that kind of technical ability for so long ought to have also been supporting the continuation of technical mathematics.
One then has to wonder: if this work was being done in the Greek-speaking world, what did this continuation look like? Among the known works, some of Apollonius’ work was not really improved upon until Riemann over 2000 years after his death.
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.
That's an example of the belief that all things were known in a golden age, and that the process of discovery is actually rediscovery of the knowledge of the elders. Common in a lot of pre-modern societies that had ancestor-worship. In old B.C.E. pre-imperial Chinese philosophy, before deductive reasoning had been formalized/discovered, one of the basic tests of whether a thing was true was "conformity to the teaching and practice of the ancient sage kings." Which meant that you had to cite a mention in works about the ancients of the practice or belief that you were recommending, or grounds for a reasonable belief that they practiced it.
It's the opposite of Whig history.
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. In other words if two sources make competing claims, whom do I believe? This varies based on the credibility of the claimant and the reasons for the claim. For example, if a con-artist told you he would deposit $1M in your bank account if you give him your credentials, and an FBI agent told you the guy was a scammer, based on the facts and reputations of those involved you would probably believe the FBI agent. The greater the credibility of the source, the more confidence you have in their claims. At some point you reach a level of what you think is the ultimate foundation for what you know (even if that foundation is you).
The "fundamentalist" position is that God is the most credible being, given his infallibility and omniscience. If a person disagrees with God, no matter how fervently, my epistemology is that the person is mistaken and God is correct.
That is, however, very different from believing that the Bible is the only source of knowledge. In fact, the Bible explicitly states that there are other sources of knowledge (which common sense would also tell you), for example Psalm 19 and Romans 1.
"There is nothing new under the sun" comes from this. I've never read this as saying that in a material sense there is nothing new, but more that the base class library and the primitive types don't change, if I may accost you with a silly analogy.
Perhaps Gilgamesh is the equivalent of I Dream of Jeannie.
:-)
If you’re into classical literature, what was lost can be extremely tantalizing. I read Cicero’s De Re Publica recently, of which only about 35-ish% survived. What’s there is so interesting, both for what it says about the structure of the Roman republic as it existed, and what an educated traditional Roman of the senatorial class thought about how best to structure society and government. The concluding Dream of Scipio is enough to make you cry, not just for its extreme beauty and elegiac tone, but also for the fact that the dialogue it concludes only came down to us in a mutilated state.
While much of what was lost was surely dross, we also lost some of the great achievements of human culture too.
I would very much like to read Suetonius’ Lives of Famous Whores and would bet I’m not the only one.
At least we have Bignose’s[1] pickup and breakup manuals.
[1] Publius Ovidius Naso
In fact, Islam and christianity are why we still study Plato today. There is no secret or conspiracy.
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 Moses is a principle and not a person.
Pope Theophilus supposedly massacred 10,000 monks who believed in the non-person version of God. Happy to share links on that history.
Also I don't think there was a pope Theophilus. Perhaps you are referring to a non roman pontiff.