struggle results in refinement, and lack of fitness leads to extinction. — Sculptor

Well, the ladedaimonikans agreed with that, but most of the Greek city states preferred the struggle of commerce to the struggle of war.

The Greeks also did not believe in any personal God. Most people just had to take it as it was thrown at them, and they tried to get the God's attentions at temples, but didnt really put much hope in it.

Camus is never depressed — Sculptor

That's the most depressing part of Camus, lol.

Good luck then.

I'm going to go a bit left field and say that the most depressing philosopher is Australian bioethicist Peter Singer; making animals have so many rights that they could get medical treatment ahead of me is a depressing thought — orcestra

I must agree, my mother decided to live with a vegan poet for a while, who wanted no fences around cattlefields, because cows should be able to walk wherever they want; and he wanted cars cars not to drive faster than 6mph, in case they hit a cow. It was the most depressing experience in my life to walk down the street with him.

I don't know if Anaximander expressed an opinion on the end of the world.

He thought the world was the center of the universe. From an entropic view, science so far finds that he is still right about that.

He had an opinion on the beginning of the world, that chaos emerged from paradox, battling with the order of the Apeiron, to create the Universe we experience. The four alchemical elements of earth, water, air and fire are simply products of that battle.

But he did also say chaos is impermanent, so the universe must also end. In which case, there would be no physical matter any more. Time would end. Titans, Gods, elementals, and humans would cease to exist. All that would remain would be boundless energy, with no physical or spiritual power acting on it.

Well so far I only stated one, which was Anaximander's first theory: because the universe is primarily ordered, chaos is transient. Therefore chaotic powers, such as war, are ultimately ineffective. And he substantiated the theory with the 7-year Trojan war, after which the victorious King of Kings was murdered by his own wife while in the bathtub. As was written down, about 100 years earlier, as Homer's Iliad.

Agamemnon's death may seem inconsequential to the Trojan war he started, but, again, according to the ancient Greeks, the act of starting war summoned the three Moirai, the Fates. Even the King of Kings could not escape the vengeance of the Moirai, even by winning a war to prove himself right. And even the Gods could not stop his fate, the Moirai being more powerful than the Gods. In Hesiod's cosmogony, the Moirai are the force by which Titans control both Gods and the human race.

Anaximander observes that war is transient, and therefore ineffective compared to the primarily ordered universe. Fate is the power which ensures that war ultimately does not reward its instigators. He looks to the one historical text he has, the Iliad. And its main protagonist, Agamemnon, was victorious in the war he started, but the account ends with him being murdered by his own wife.

The power of Anaximander's theory is echoed by Xenophon, recording the futility of Cyrus' expedition to conquer Persia; and then by Alexander the Great, whose empire broke apart almost straight away upon his death. So the idea of Anaximander also became the main subject of the tragic playwrights, such as Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus during the height of Athenian culture 300 years after Anaximander. That's because there had been three major failed conquests, by the time they started enactment of the stories for the illiterate, over a long weekend every year.

If it's true, the Bush family will never be in the White House again. That would be my projection. But as you observe, that is open for debate.

Well as a classification system, its the same as Eichler's taxonomy of species. If you think it's wrong, you change the classification. So you are right there. It's interesting as a thought experiment, still, because there are projections that can be made from it, just like for the Darwinian theory of evolution from Eichler's Taxonomy.

i was wondering, with the recent news that Kushner and Ivanka made 82 million last year, whether anyone knows anything at all they did for the nation last year.

Early traces of pantheist thought can be found within the theology of the ancient Greek religion of Orphism, where pan (the all) is made cognate with the creator God Phanes (symbolizing the universe), and with Zeus, after the swallowing of Phanes.
— Wikipedia

No mention of Pan, the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature of mountain wilds, rustic music and impromptus, and companion of the nymphs. :chin: — Pattern-chaser

What I said is that Pan and Gaia were not worshipped. What I said was there were no pantheists or gaians. There were no temples to Pan and Gaia. They had no acolytes or priests. Pan was some kind of amusing quirk, like Santa Claus more than anything else, even the Greeks did not take him very seriously. Gaia was part of the cosmogeny, but neither of them particularly cared what human beings did so no one worshipped them. I know thats not what you want to hear, but thats the way it was.

the NEAREST to it was a large number of degenerate Dionysian cults who took drugs and had orgies in forests in the very late years of ancient greece, who said anything whatsoever and no one paid any attention or bothered writing any of it down. Im sure some of them decided they were Pan or Gaia when they were drunk. Otherwise, no.

The point about Pheidippides epiphany was that it signified how important what he did was, because it was the only time Pan ever did anything with humans, and it must have been made up by other people, because when Pheidippedes got to Sparta, multiple records, including Thucidides, said he died from exhaustion immediately, without saying anything.

Yes, modern iditots impose many suppositions on the beliefis of the ancient greeks, among them, ideas of cults of panthesists and gaians. There were many cults, but pan and gaia were part of a mythology and were not worshipped. It would be like worshipping Q in star trek. They didnt do anything for people and so they werent worshipped. But its been convenient money maker to say so since.

This is essentially the Gaian perspective, — Pattern-chaser

I couldnt say exactly where this Gaian perspective came from except perhaps Star Trek

In anceint Greece, pantheists believed there was one god for everything, called Pan, who didnt care much what people did. There is one epiphany, for Pheiddipes, otherwise, Pan just played with wood nymphs and left people alone.

It seems to me there has been no attempt to systemize them as Lavoisier for the periodic table, or Eichler's taxonomy of species. You are right it's new, they were still filling in slots in the periodic table when I was born. But since then, especially with computerization, everything seems to be pretty filled up now.

Apologies. The way you ask your questions frame the responses as arguments in this case.

(3) Facts are things we ought to believe. — PossibleAaran

there's many problems with this, most typically, the Santa Claus problem. There are many cases where facts do not define what we ought to believe. And the problem goes deeper, as I just found in an argument with Terrapin about Anaximander.

What you are trying to do is like arguing whether photons really exist. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Sometimes models representing light as particles create theories that are empirically substantiated, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes we loosely say light behaves like a wave instead. The point is, we dont need to know whether light is a particle or wave in order to use the models. We just need to know when the two models or light are useful, and when not.

My contention here is that Anaximander's model is useful, in fact, it is far more productive of theory than the piecemeal scatterings of bits in the social sciences, even now.

Maybe models do have something to do with what the actual world is like, and maybe they don't. They are only models.

So now you're going to explain how it would enable a prediction of an even if it's just any arbitrary thing we're making up? — Terrapin Station

If you're asking me, I think Anaximander was right. The Apeiron is primarily ordered, so predictions are possible. But they only appear to be predictions to us because we have limited perception through the water element, otherwise we would simply be able to observe future events without needing a model to predict them.

Anaximander deduces a theory, that anything which disturbs the order must be transient. Therefore, he hypothesizes, wars are limited in effectiveness, and he points to the Iliad as substantiation.

What you are doing is like confusing mathematics, numeric quantities, and equations. The field of mathematics, which is a domain of science, defines a numerical model, whereby fixed quantities may be added to themselves to make equiproportional geometric sequences, known as numbers. From the numbers you can make more abstract theories of relationships, instantiated by equations. Equations assert something which may be considered to be true or false.

Mathematics just provides the numerical model. You don't say mathematics is true or false. You don't say the numerical model is true or false. You say the equations drawn from the numerical model are true or false. That's exactly the same for any other model in science.

Now one may wonder whence Anaximander's thought derived. We do not believe he had much handed down to him from prior philosophers, such as Heraclitus. He had four main texts, all first written about 700 BCE, although Homer had been handed down by word of mouth for quite a long time before:

Homer's iliad
Homer's Odyssey
Hesiod's Theogeny
Hesiod's Work and Days

Theologians and moral philosophers may wish to argue with the beliefs laid down by these prior authors as to whether Gods exist or not. Anaximander was really not concerned with which Gods really exist, if at all. There were many competing pantheons at the time. Even across the Greek city states, there were many variations in the Hellenic Pantheon (as Hesiod's Theogeny is now known).

Anaximander was more concerned with making his model compatible with existing thought on the higher forces. He didn't care whether Love and War were really sentient Gods. He merely stated that such abstractions exist, but are not physical, because, unlike us, their bodies contain no Earth element. there's been alot of confusion on that point in the last three thousand years.

So for Anaximander, empirical observations were drawn on, for example, the accounts of Aphrodite and Ares facing off during the siege of Troy.

That's actually a segue to the second part of Anaximander's model. Because it encompasses more than the physical world, it does not regard the nature of time and space to define the center of the universe. Geometrically in space and time, the earth is not in its center, but on the edge of one galaxy where the anvil was struck with just the right force, upon matter of just the right nature, to create the spark which ignited life.

If one considers a map of the universe in terms of entropy, instead, then, we know that organic compounds can reach a far greater degree of ordered construction than any other matter we have been able to find, all the way from the DNA in viruses to the human brain. One human brain has more neural connections in it than stars in our galaxy.

Thus, from the perspective of entropy, the world we know as the earth, with all the people on it, is actually the center of the known universe. As entropy is a measure of order, versus chaos, it should be the primary measuring stick for the universe, not geometric space, according to Anaximander's model.

A model defines relationships between concepts, which enable predictions of events. Like a computer program, a model does not 'claim {subtext ASSERT THAT IT IS TRUE}' anything. It has no consciousness. We conceive ideas from a model about the way the world works, and then test them with hypotheses if we are scientific. But the model doesnt try to say anything is true or not. It's merely an abstraction.

no a second time, it is one step above claim, it is the model. The model makes no claims. It is an abstract but ordered construction, like mathematics. One draws theories from the model which can be tested empirically. the model itself makes no claims. It is merely a model.

Chaos and order emerged to fight with each other" is an empirical statement, isn't it? — Terrapin Station

No, that is Anaximander's first proposition, or assertion, in his model of how the universe that we experience derives, or fits within, the boundless, called the 'Apeiron.' He also believed that, in addition to the known universe, there are an infinite number of unknown universes, now called 'possible worlds.' But he did not argue that point, it was only a belief.

He did argue that Apeiron is primally ordered, but paradoxes in the primal order then created Heraclitean chaos. That is, he disagreed with Heraclitus, who said chaos was primary. There is a directly equivalent debate in Far Eastern philosophy, known as the conflict between yin and yang. Neoconfucianists assert that the passive, ordered nature of yin is primary; whereas, Taoists assert that the active, chaotic nature of yang is primary instead.

But Anaximander is not just describing primal forces. He presents a building-block model. Therefore, it was argued, to create a model, chaos must be secondary to order, otherwise no model is possible at all. By contrast, Heraclitus, like Taoists, can only say that chaos makes all prediction indeterminate.

Anaximander's point is that order can be observed empirically, and therefore, the Apeiron must be ordered, even though boundless.

Further, he asserted that there were two main types of the water element: ordered time, also known as chronological time; and unbounded time, also known as Ionic or Eonic time, within which the main eras, or ages of the human race are defined: the golden age, silver age, bronze age, and iron age.

If "complete" means "incorrect," okay. — Terrapin Station

As I say, its only a model. It can't be correct or incorrect. Your statement shows little understanding for the philosophy of science. One uses models to form a theory, then tests the theory with a hypothesis. The hypothesis is either correct or incorrect.

Let's assume the hypothesis is correctly drawn from the model, which is defined by the field of science called logic.

• If the hypothesis is correct, then the theory is substantiated, making the model more useful.
• If the hypothesis is incorrect, then the theory is unproven, making the model less useful.

The model itself is neither correct nor incorrect. It is only a model. Note, also, a theory can never be proven, only substantiated.

It has been a long-standing naive confusion in the modern world, so you are not to be blamed for misunderstanding that, only for not accepting it now you've been told.

oh dear I keep having to add new depressing philosophers, lol

And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. — Joshs

Well that means Heidegger believes that terror is due to mistakes. Kierkegaard's point is that fear is a natural reaction to God, who intentionally does bad things to us. That's far worse, lol.

K's point is, that does not redeem God of what He did to Abram. The poor guy was getting his cart ready, and putting something in it for his son to sit on, and fetching a knife to kill his son, and thinking he better sharpen it first, and fetching the things to sharpen it, and all the while, he thought all his devout loyalty to God meant he would have to kill his own son. That was not a nice thing to do to the guy. The book of Job tries to explain it is a bet with Satan causing it, which is even worse, and the only real justification in 60 chapters of argument is "Im God so I can do what I want, couldnt I do far worse if I wanted too?"

the sacrifice of the first-born was the sacrifice of the most precious thing — Wayfarer

hm, well that was K's point, that God requires such things of even the most devout. The Jewish God did not particularly redeem the problem by telling Abram he didnt actually have to do it later, in fact, in K's view, that is even more cruel.

But Camus — Wayfarer

True. On the other hand, though, Kierkegaard's 'Sicknesws unto Death' does explain how God inflicts the same type of thing on even his most devout followers, after telling Abram to sacrifice his own son. What did the poor fellow think while pushing his own son to the top of a mountain? Only Kierkegaard ever explored that in detail.

n other words, the validity of such principles as 'the relation of cause and effect', is said to be one of the foundational elements of knowledge itself. So where Hume, the empiricist, presumes that all knowledge is derived from experience only, Kant is showing that, in order for experience to be intelligible at all, such fundamental categories as the relation of cause and effect must obtain. — Wayfarer

That's true, but I also have to agree with other posters that only deduction can be known for certain, and that Hume was right to say, in cases of inference, there can be no absolute certainty that causality exists.

Just because I am cynical does not mean that I necessarily fear something, for example-a lot of people use cynicism to combat fear, they believe that expecting the worse to happen can help prepare them for it to happen, thus no reason to be afraid. — Grre

I dont agree, sir, the less intellectual generally observe a shared sinking feeling in the quarter second before the bread hits the floor, and it is definitely a feeling.

Empirical observation.

thats very interesting. I must be an odd person. When I drop a piece of buttered bread, I always have that feeling of dread. In fact I heard it as an aphorism first, and hadnt noticed before, so, I cant actually agree with you that Im wrong.

Maybe there are two types of people: those who gamble, and those who dont. I dont gamble, and I am naturally pessimistic. Gamblers are naturally optimistic.

Just because someone has established an extrinsic bias to optimism in some cases, does not mean that other people are naturally pessimistic too, or pessimistic in other cases. But extrinsically observable events are also moderated by consciousness and do not necessarily reflect the true intrinsic state, which is a general criticism of all psychology experiments on what people feel.

So we are both equally wrong, or equally right, whichever wets your whistle.

In ancient greek there is two kinds of time: chronos (ordered time) and eon (episodic time). With the infatuation in the world of things empirical since the industrial age, concepts that do not fit in with scientific explanations of the external world are dismissed as garbage most the time.

Episodic time continues to operate in more ways than personal experience, for example, there is Hegel's observation about the owl of minerva.

There is an everyday view of suffering and pleasure that sees suffering as being positively negative, and pleasure as being positively good. — Inyenzi

We already had exactly the same discussion last month in a different thread. I observed it is a false dichotomy because the opposite of pleasure is pain, not suffering. Some others agreed with me but now this thing gets reposted with even more verbage.

I dont see why its necessary for you to repost exactly the same discussion in a new thread. Have you some particular axe to grind on this issue?

I cant really speak for Afghanistan because at the time of Alexander the Great, it was entirely nomadic. The closest city to Afghanistan at the time is now called Dohuk, which is in Iraq. Alexander the Great conquered Darius III there, and just rode around for some civilized raping and pillaging in the lower Afghan foothills. When Alexander died, one if his generals formed a Hellenic state containing the Afghan territories, with Babylon as capital.

So there really isnt anything to compare with modern history of Afghanistan from the time of Alexander the Great.

I have an idea that intersectionality, or rather a lack thereof, leads to a continuous system of oppression which in turn leads to more gun crime. — Josiealeese

FYI, any neutral research on this subject (unlike the frequently quoted, NRA-sponsored propaganda) does not find that more guns means less crime. And besides DoJ data, CDC data, and University research (which are all only piecemeal studies), there is almost no source of neutral information in the USA.

I did put a couple of years into formulating answers, and the results suggested a gun violence tax would fix the problem via utilitarian pressure to reduce the tax. So now of course I must be biased. Here is a link to my study.

https://www.yofiel.com/guns/244-916-report

I wrote a sequel, which I sent to John Oliver, and he did a show based on it:

https://www.yofiel.com/guns/243-nra

There is a video of John Oliver's show at the top.

No, I've tried arguing what you say before, but it doesnt work. If you give any one group of a popular vote disproportionate power, clever politicians exploit the difference to personal advantage. That includes groups of intelliigent people, which is what happened in the Russian revolution, and it happened again just recently when Trump exploited flaws in the electoral college.

For some reason liberals love to idealize Athens as the home of democracy, our historical tradition and origins. — thedeadidea

Your problem here is that Athens itself did not idealize democracy, so your entire debate is founded on a far deeper falsity than you state.

Socrates, who you quote, was no fan of democracy and an idealist and eventually eschewed. Aristotle is the proper origin of modern democracy (I started a separate thread on the issue of slavery (and AHEM women) on that. Aristotle was a realist, not an idealist, and called democracy the best option among worse alternatives. He was rather more practical minded and cynical and not an idealist at all.

With regard to votes, his debate centers on the benefit of oligarchy versus equality for all, the latter of which is of course, appears controlled by the poor, because there are always more of them. And I will try to summarize it because it is quite long. If you have say 2 rich and 4 poor voting equally, one of the poor quickly realizes they can be more powerful by voting with the rich. If there 2 rich and 6 poor, the poor realize they can split in two and each group can partner either with the rich group or the other poor group to win. And the latter example can collapse into the first, because there 1 person realizes, again, he can switch groups to make a 4:4 split. So what naturally evolves is a system where the rich and poor have equal power decided by a tiny swing group, or even a single person.

Does that, by the way, sound at all familiar to you?

So as to who vote for them, Aristotle agrees, with Plato, that it would be nice if everyone were as intelligent as you, but its impossible. Aristotle disagrees however that a small thinking class should have absolute power, because different crafts and skills earn money in different ways. Plato agrees with that latter point too, but Aristotle's point is, if only a small number of people control the power, they will have a natural bias towards the skills they possess themselves (also a sly stab at sophists with Socrates' view). To assure that the society acts in the interest of all proportionally, all people must have equal control in some aspects of a democratic government.

The issue, Aristotle says, is defining which parts of the system should be controlled more by an oligarchic system, and which by individual equality. So he is more of the opinion that both need to be going on at the same time, which is, in fact what happened in Ancient Greece, and which happens in the USA now too, as its almost entirely based on Aristotle's politics, as far as voting goes (doesnt include the legal wing which was instead defined by Locke's ideas on natural rights).

From Aristotle's inspiration, Alexander the Great's conquests built the largest empire ever known. Alexander died early and unexpectedly. His empire immediately dissolved into battles between his Generals. Had Alexander not suddenly died, he would have been able to institute a democratic constitution, like that of Solon (~600 BCE), in accordance with Aristotle's tutelage.

Even in the last decade, politicians have increasingly regarded the Solonic Constitution as the cornerstone of modern, healthy democracies. When Soviet Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979 CE, it thought that communism could safely supplant military dictatorship, but failed. in 2001 CE, the USA touted that its idealistic superiority justified a further attempt to invade Afghanistan, but it failed. Four years later, the USA touted the same idealistic superiority in Iraq, but this time it made the formation of a new Iraqi Constitution a top priority after conquest, even more important than terrorist suppression.

The slow success in Iraq has been internationally embittered as foul play. Some say the constitution did not really provide much of an improvement. For example, Iraqi women already had the right to vote since 1980. But the problem has not been so much in political governance, and far more with moral justification for invasion. The USA justified the invasion to the United Nations by claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), but they were never found. So the USA has now lost the moral right for further invasions entirely, no matter what the actual value of Solonic Constitutions, and has been increasingly retreating into nationalism. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has become more cynical, ironically moving back to viewing democracy as the best option among worse alternatives...just as Aristotle did 23 centuries ago.

--------------

That completes my first thoughts on Aristotle for the modern man. I welcome your criticisms and corrections.

Does Aristotle specifically say whether women should vote? No. He says slaves should not vote, but nowhere does he state whether women should or should not vote. For political reasons. Poor old Aristotle, trying to teach Alexander the Great what to do, and he can't even start his second scroll without tactfully avoiding the glaring gender gap between the ideal and reality.