Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Tue Jan 04, 2022 7:01 am
RCSaunders wrote: ↑Mon Jan 03, 2022 2:29 pm
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Sat Dec 04, 2021 8:37 am
Has Science Killed Philosophy? Debate
Unfortunately, no. If only it had!
The only true description of, "philosophical debate," was provided by H.L. Mencken:
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
This entire thread is proof Mencken was right.
Within the normal distribution of humans there is always a small percentile [1-3%] of irrational weirdos and you are in one of this irrational-weirdos category.
Thank you for that fine, even if unintended, complement. To be categorized with the most important individuals in history is certainly an honor.
After all it was all those individuals considered the, "irrational-weirdos," of their day, like Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Francesco Redi, Sir Isaac Newton, Christiaan Huygens, Leibniz, Antoine Lavoisier, Edward Jenner, Alessandro Volta, John Dalton, Georg Ohm, Amedeo Avogadro, Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Louis Pasteur, James Clerk Maxwell, Gregor Mendel, Dmitri Mendeleev, William Crookes, J.J. Thomson, Marie Curie, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Alexander Fleming, James Chadwick, Johannes Gutenberg, Gerardus Mercator, Evangelista Torricelli, Zacharias Janssen, William Oughtred, Christiaan Huygens, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, Thomas Newcomen, John Kay, James Hargreaves, James Watt, John Wilkinson, Jesse Ramsden, John Wilkinson, Martinus van Marum, Andrew Meikle, Edmund Cartwright, Eli Whitney, Edward Jenner, Friedrich Sertürner, Robert Fulton, Nicolas Appert, Charles Babbage, William Sturgeon, John Walker, Moritz von Jacobi, John Bennet Lawes, Sir Henry Bessemer, Heinrich Geissler, Gaston Planté, Alexander Parkes, Louis Pasteur, Alfred Nobel, Nikolaus August Otto, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Sir Charles Parsons, Carl Gassner, John J. Loud, Whitcomb Judson, Rudolf Diesel, Orville and Wilbur Wright, John Ambrose Fleming, Leo Baekeland, Jacques E. Brandenberger, Alexander Fleming, Ernst Ruska, Edwin H. Armstrong--that 1% of individuals who chose to think and do what was considered irrational because it was not the accepted ideology or academically approved veiw of their day.
Every advance in knowledge and achievement in history has been brought about by the less than one percent of individuals who chose to think differently than everyone else because they chose to think for themselves. and the remaining 99% always despised them.
Mencken was right about that too.
So long as there are men in the world, 99 percent of them will be idiots. --Letter to Upton Sinclair, 14 Oct (17)
Well, at least you have a lot of company.