29 NOV 2025 by ideonexus
Socrates' Criticism of the Written Word Echoes Those Agai...
En la época de Sócrates, los textos escritos aún no eran una herramienta habitual y todavía despertaban recelos. Los consideraban un sucedáneo de la palabra oral — liviana, alada, sagrada—. Aunque la Atenas del siglo V a. C. ya contaba con un incipiente comercio de libros, no sería hasta un siglo después, en tiempos de Aristóteles, cuando se llegase a contemplar sin extrañeza el hábito de leer. Para Sócrates, los libros eran ayudas de la memoria y el conocimiento, pero pensaba ... 1 
notes
notesIs it better to know things or to know where knowledge is kept and may be retrieved? You can't remember and recall every fact in every book in a library, but you can know what book has the facts you are looking for. Search engines can know where the facts are, so using them makes us twice removed from the fact itself. AI regurgitates facts, potentially removing the source completely… but so does a person telling you the fact.
19 APR 2013 by ideonexus
The Death of Socrates
The burning of the Pythagorean school had already signalized the war, not less ancient, not less eager, of the oppressors of mankind against philosophy. The one and the other will continue to be waged as long as there shall exist priests or kings upon the earth; and these wars will occupy a conspicuous place in the picture that we have still to delineate.
Priests saw with grief the appearance of men, who, cultivating the powers of reason, ascending to first principles, could not but discover...Folksonomies: history philosophy
Folksonomies: history philosophy
1 notes
notesRetaliation from the priesthood.
12 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Physics Demonstrates the Principle that Everything has a ...
At first sight nothing seems more obvious than that everything has a beginning and an end, and that everything can be subdivided into smaller parts. Nevertheless, for entirely speculative reasons the philosophers of Antiquity, especially the Stoics, concluded this concept to be quite unnecessary. The prodigious development of physics has now reached the same conclusion as those philosophers, Empedocles and Democritus in particular, who lived around 500 B.C. and for whom even ancient man had a... 1 notes
notesFrom the lecture 'Development of the Theory of Electrolytic Dissociation' by Svante Arrhenius.
25 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Platonic School Believed Nothing Was Knowable
A caution must also be given to the understanding against the intemperance which systems of philosophy manifest in giving or withholding assent, because intemperance of this kind seems to establish idols and in some sort to perpetuate them, leaving no way open to reach and dislodge them.
This excess is of two kinds: the first being manifest in those who are ready in deciding, and render sciences dogmatic and magisterial; the other in those who deny that we can know anything, and so introduce... 1 notes
notesThey believed science and nature were simply shadows, mere reflections of a reality we could never hope to truly know.
