/lit/ - Literature

>>11345647

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>Unless they're presocratic thinkers. Read your Xenophanes.
The fact that there was a general recognition of ancient authority was cultural, which means, as I said in my post, that it was a widespread tendency, especially in Hellenism: this does not imply in any way that it was applied to everyone. And you, blessed man, should go back reading your Plato and Aristotle to see how they both displayed a legendary hostility to philosophical authority, the first by consciously and explicitly “killing” Parmenides in the Sophist in distinguishing the existential meaning of being from the copulative one, and the second by killing off his own master in several aspects I won’t bother listing here: it should suffice to you that Aristotle said “amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas” to understand how much he did conflate authority with being “ancient”. Moreover, if you read the Phaedo, Socrates himself writes of how he started with the presocratics and found little more than discussion on nature, while in the Sophist Plato criticizes both Eracliteans and Parmenideans philosophers. Aristotle’s doxographical material in the Metaphysics is basically a long list on why everyone before him was wrong. So Please, put your presocratics back to sleep and let true philosophers like Plato and Aristotle talk like adults. You may have read your Senocrates, anon, but since you seem to not have read anything else, I think we may dismiss your opinions on ancient philosophical thought as utter and complete horseshoe.

>This brainlet never read Plato.
I think I have sufficiently showed with this post that not only I have read Plato, but Aristotle as well, and not only did I read them, I studied them throughly. And Plato never assumed everyone in old times were in contact with higher truths. He believed time was cyclical and that, as shown by the myth in the Statesman, a demiurge-like figure took hold of human matters reverting the world back to a golden age were there are, indeed, wise men. Now this may be read by you as if Plato said “the men of the past were wiser”, but this is only because he believed to be living at the end of the cycle, as shown by the story of Atlantis in the Timaeus. I bet if he had lived shortly after the beginning of the cycle, together with the wise men he admired, I may have heaved a sigh of relief at the thought of never having to deal with the likes of you and other wise men of the past.

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