Clinias wrote:In the Protagoras (§342a-343c), Socrates says:
“The most ancient and fertile homes of philosophy among the Greeks are Crete and Sparta, where are to be found more sophists than anywhere on earth. …they pretend to be fools.”
Then, he explains their methodology of hiding their wisdom and ends the paragraph with this:
“And in these states there are not only men but also women who are proud of their intellectual culture”.
-Unfortunately,
they are not the only ones. On some other forum, an atheist woman complimented herself - and her correspondant - because of their own culture...
I think that so long one is proud of his own (culture, or something else), the reason is that this same person is not gone far enough (in this domain).
I oppose the simply people with culture (even large as it is (relatively) often the case) to the scholars. As I understand the last one, he does not necessarily has as much culture (as the first), but is at least gone deep and maybe around of a theme. (For me, he is the real intellectual.)
-In a not so restrictive way, I opposite social culture - usable to communicate or more than that - and the personal culture. I understand in this way, that to be eclectic is not necessarily the same as knowing a "lot".
For me, the first way of an extended culture can almost consist in being open to any (deeper or not so deep) "knowledge", what can result in a way in being symbolically a waste bin.
The second way is I think not so large, but deeper. It consist in thinking your own concepts again and again, until you have reach a "sufficient" step of coherence. Not only some basical concepts, but some analogies between different knowledges.
I try for myself to access the second way. By example, when I find a book - as of Nietsche - knowing he is atheist, and the other fact that it took a lot of time for me to become protestant after a sceptic period, I know that I won't read such a book. What doesn't mean to be close to other way of thinking, but simply, if it doesn't correspond to my heart, I prefer not to continue.
But nowadays, being more sure of myself, I like a lot being questioned about my convictions, although a lot of people don't like this.
Clinias wrote:
Philosophy was started by the Doric Greeks. In 2007, I wrote a paper "Doric Crete and Sparta, the home of Greek philosophy" and it seems to be a whole lot of skepticism out there. I wrote a followup:
The Case of the Barefoot Socrates
I am hoping this settles the case. If philosophy is about first causes--shouldn't philosophy know its own origins?
-I was about to answer that the origin was in the brain, but it wouldn't have been accurate enough to estimate a date, and would be a circumlocution around the origin of thoughts...
-Formally, to qualify some philosophy, we would have to consider at least several people (a society), to let the person B qualify the person A as being such a philosopher.
But if B is not a philosopher, what's going on ?
I remember at the passage, the Bible as qualifying the wisdom of humain as more crazy than the madness of God... I don't want to proselytize, but I think this is a good metaphor of what happen to A and B here before...
Or if the human is not qualified to qualify himself as philosopher, it would mean that the way of thinking should be seen "factually" (I don't like this term) as in the (technology) progress.
And this is where I would like to mean:
I think - believing a physicist of the name of Fritjof Capra (himself quoting Bohr and Oppenheimer) - that the Ancients of the Orient were maybe, or surely philosopher a (lot of) time before the Ancient Greeks.
We can suspect that some knowledge could have travelled from Orient to Occident, following the Silk Road.
The invention of the canon powder in China could have been the summit of an iceberg, which could consist of a pro-chemisty non only carthesian, because of the attitude of the orientals in not separating the diverse domains of knowledge, and called alchemy (if there was ever one).
The purpose of Capra, consist to mean that the occidental specialization has lead to rapid progress, but... it appears that arrived to corpuscular physics, the re-discover the antique oriental wisdom, quoting a proverbe as:
When you tell about something, you miss it.