Comment by rmunn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmunn | Hacker News Reader

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On the first day of class in undergrad, most professors are handing out the syllabus and talking about class requirements and basically doing zero lecturing. Not my Philosophy 101 prof. The minute the class was scheduled to start, he opened the door and walked into the room saying, "The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world."

I don't remember the rest of the lecture, but his opening phrase is burned into my memory three decades later. Because in one fell swoop, he simultaneously said the following:

1. This class starts promptly. I expect you to be in your seats on time and ready to listen.

2. I have a lot of material to cover, so I'm not going to waste time talking about the syllabus. You're in college, I expect you to be able to read.

3. The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world.

(He did actually talk a little bit about the syllabus later on that day).

Unfortunately, cataloguing all the knowledge in the world created new knowledge, leading to a sort of Zeno's paradox of cataloguing.

Then they tried to catalogue which knowledge had not yet been catalogued, and it all went to hell.

I remember Arthur C. Clarke quoting someone saying that the universe was designed to keep scientists and astronomers in work. I liked that.

Which Greeks? What project is this?

Larry Page was president of the Beta Epsilon chapter of the Eta Kappa Nu engineering honor society... that's not really a frat but maybe still counts as "Greek"?

The Greek philosophers (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, et al), and the project was, as my Philosophy 101 prof said, that they wanted to learn everything there was to know. An impossible goal, obviously, but they were dreaming the impossible dream.

I’m wondering if a Greek historian would agree with that summary. Aren’t the texts we have pretty fragmented?

I could be wrong about him meaning the Greek philosophers (since I don't remember the rest of the lecture), though since it was the intro to a Philosophy 101 class that's who I assumed he meant at the time.

As for fragmented texts, at the time when the Greek philosophers were alive there were a lot more texts available to them than we now have. A lot was lost over the years, including when the library at Alexandria burned (48 BC, I believe). We know they had access to many texts we don't because they quote from them, referencing material that we no longer have access to.

But this is a side issue. The main point of my comment was how the prof managed to communicate two or three things at once by the simple action of walking into the classroom, already lecturing, precisely at the scheduled start of the class.

Might have been the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, and the Library of Alexandria, part of a project dedicated to the Muses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria?wprov=sf...

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