Quote:
Originally Posted by beppe
Of course. and Plato, and Aristotle, in spite of your slightly jacobin attitude, that does not belong to your generous nature by the way, made some important steps right at the beginning. 1800 years before the great Descartes, Apollonius of Perga developed in most of its sophistication analytical geometry. Mostly through abstract thinking. Luckily for me, the guy who taught us geometry in the first year, loved Apollonius and gave us glimpses of his genius. And of Pappus of Alexandria, practically the father of a very useful and difficult branch of mathematics that goes under the name of projective geometry.
Urray for Plato!
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Well, I can't deny that my hatred of Plato is slightly on the irrational side
I tend to reject something when too many people love it and tell me I should love it. But in Plato's case, I tried sincerely (I think) to like him, and was sincerely taken aback by what I can only, as a 20th Century born and raised person, see as intellectual dishonesty, both in the way he treated his adversaries and in the way he treated reality and logic.
You seem to think that I am rejecting the whole of classical thinking. I never said I hated Apollonius or Pappus, or denied their contribution to geometry. But as far as I know, Plato did not bring any original contribution to geometry or science in general.
OK, I'll try to be more honest with you and admit that there is something I admire in Plato: it's his insistence in defining the terms and concepts that he is discussing. This is something that we inherited from him and I think it's very important.
Plato was important, but he was not alone. There were many other thinkers in ancient Grece and Rome, whose philosophy the Western tradition has tended to despise or ignore because they were materialists, and who had a lot more to say than we think. My personal favorite is Epicurus, maybe because he was the first I heard about. Before him was Democritus, who is strangely absent from Plato's writings. Both happened to think that the universe was made from small particles that they called atoms. They also thought that the human mind was purely physical. I think they were right. But that's not the most important thing. They also thought that the way to go about understanding the world is to observe it, and try to make sense of what we observe.