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In general I don't comment about other's blogs on my blog, and I also don't usually read anything with the word 'vomit' in the title. I did run into an interesting post over at Vomit to Lukewarm though, and I thought it deserved comment. He makes a funny but good point about classical poetry,
To complain that Latin is a dead language can only be a part of a proof of the fact that dead men are the only ones worth listening to. The sort of thing that Virgil does with words simply cannot be done in English, and the craftsmanship of what he does can no more be done by a modern writer than an ancient doctor could perform interuterine surgery or build the space shuttle. One can certainly talk about "beautiful modern poetry", but this means about the same thing as "cutting edge- 13th century chemistry".
But then he goes and says something that one can only describe as BAT SHIT CRAZY.
There is something to comparing Tennyson or Rimbaud to Cutullus, for example, but it would be utterly meaningless to try to compare, say, Wittgenstein to Plato, as though the two could be measured by a common unit.
What the hell does that mean? I say let us compare Wittgenstein to Plato, and Plato is going to come out the worst for it (sorry guys but it's true). Let's see, Plato didn't have
(1) Logic
(2) the distinction between sense and reference
(3) the notion of a demonstrable argument
and a whole bunch of other shit that is slightly important if you want to find the truth about anything. I hate to tell you guys this but philosophy develops. When someone comes around and discovers something, (like Aristotle and logic, Boethius and the fourth figure, Russell and formal logic) it makes the subsequent philosophy better.
Mr. Vomit might say that that proves his point, Plato is missing so much that Wittgenstein is taking for granted that there can be no comparison. I say this is the wrong way of looking at it. We can never know what Plato's blind spots are if we don't compare him with later philosophers. To say otherwise would result in the conclusion that we cannot point out the logical fallacies in a Socratic argument.
To complain that Latin is a dead language can only be a part of a proof of the fact that dead men are the only ones worth listening to. The sort of thing that Virgil does with words simply cannot be done in English, and the craftsmanship of what he does can no more be done by a modern writer than an ancient doctor could perform interuterine surgery or build the space shuttle. One can certainly talk about "beautiful modern poetry", but this means about the same thing as "cutting edge- 13th century chemistry".
But then he goes and says something that one can only describe as BAT SHIT CRAZY.
There is something to comparing Tennyson or Rimbaud to Cutullus, for example, but it would be utterly meaningless to try to compare, say, Wittgenstein to Plato, as though the two could be measured by a common unit.
What the hell does that mean? I say let us compare Wittgenstein to Plato, and Plato is going to come out the worst for it (sorry guys but it's true). Let's see, Plato didn't have
(1) Logic
(2) the distinction between sense and reference
(3) the notion of a demonstrable argument
and a whole bunch of other shit that is slightly important if you want to find the truth about anything. I hate to tell you guys this but philosophy develops. When someone comes around and discovers something, (like Aristotle and logic, Boethius and the fourth figure, Russell and formal logic) it makes the subsequent philosophy better.
Mr. Vomit might say that that proves his point, Plato is missing so much that Wittgenstein is taking for granted that there can be no comparison. I say this is the wrong way of looking at it. We can never know what Plato's blind spots are if we don't compare him with later philosophers. To say otherwise would result in the conclusion that we cannot point out the logical fallacies in a Socratic argument.
1 Comments:
Take a middle course: Philosophy didn't end with Aristotle or Aquinas, but it doesn't simply get continuously better.
There is much in modern philosophers that is an improvement over ancient philosophy, but there is much lost as well. Again, in ancient philosophy, there were a few giants, such as Plato and Aristotle, and a bunch of people worth reading, such as Proclus and Marcus Aurelius. So too, in modern philosophy, there are a few giants, such as Kant and Hegel, and a bunch of people worth reading, such as Hume and Rousseau. As regards the giants, they are each very different, and although it may be possible to say which are better, each one has captured something profound which none of the others have.
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