Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
We should of course always analyse philosophical ideas, but a teacher once gave me the advice (which I think has merit) to try to accept an author's views when reading a work, and then, once you've read it, subject what you've read to critical analysis. If we start off by rejecting something outright because the author's views are unpleasant to a modern audience (which a great many works written in the past of course are), we are likely to miss the gems of wisdom that the work contains.
An example would be Aristotle's book "The Nicomachean Ethics". One of the foundation works on ethics, but the modern reader is likely to be horrified by Aristotle's views on slavery that are expressed in the book. You'd be doing yourself a disservice, though, if you avoided reading it because of that.
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I agree that there were some beliefs of the past that we find distasteful today. In ancient Ur for example women weren't taught at schools because it was felt that their brain was too small to enable them to learn. Today of course we know that that belief is nonsense but at that time that was the prevailing belief. My OP was merely meant to keep in mind that something shaped the author's viewpoint on the world and influenced them when they came up with their belief. We are all shaped by the society in which we live. Bias is just one example of that shaping. I just think that once we know what a philosopher (like Aristotle or Plato) thinks about a given topic we should go on to ask 'why' they think that way about the topic. Otherwise we risk taking a given text at face value only.