[travel] Tell me more about the dead white people

[mattbell]

My college humanities courses tended to avoid the canon of dead white people at all costs, instead focusing on alternative voices, indigenous cultures, oppressed peoples and the like. Some of it was very interesting, some of it wasn't. However, after a visit to the stunning Athens Archaeological museum, which showed me firsthand the achievement's of Athens' Golden Age, I want to learn more about the intellectual culture that spawned the world's first democracy, a rich theatrical tradition, and numerous other achievements. To those of you who sought out the traditional classics, I ask what you would recommend, keeping in mind that I'm on the road so online material is preferred. I assume it's all well out of copyright, even the translations.

Comments

[veleda.livejournal.com]

http://plato.stanford.edu/
has lots of good stuff.

Honestly.. I would read some Plato and Aristotle. This is good stuff.

I think the passion of the western mind is a great book in terms of scoping western intellectual culture across the ages.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

That link is to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which probably does have a lot of stuff about Ancient Philosophy, but I think it has much more by and about living white people than dead ones.

[mongo42.livejournal.com]

Do you like reading plays? If so, you might want to check out the comedies of Aristophanes, and/or the tragedies of Euripides.

And I actually enjoyed reading Homer's Odyssey, way back in school. I wasn't as interested in the Iliad, though.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I think lots of the good translations are still well within copyright (I remember hearing about Robert Graves at Princeton being a good translator of Homer in the '90s - I could ask classicist friends for other recommendations).

What you may be more interested in is the Perseus project, which I believe is an open-source project to digitize everything about the ancient world. I remember when I was taking Ancient Greek in high school, our teacher had lots of fun showing us the CD-ROMs, and showing how you could switch between the Greek, the English translation, and some sort of canonical Latin translation, and how every word in the texts was indexed into a central database where you could look up every instance of that verb, or tense, or mood, or conjugation, in the entire library of all Ancient Greek writing that has survived.

However, I don't know what to recommend as far as things that would actually be interesting to read. What I know from philosophy is that people think Aristotle is amazing. Plato is more literary, and was the teacher of Aristotle, but Aristotle is the one whose ideas stand up. He's really the first person to do interesting, rigorous studies of things, both philosophical and scientific. Of course, he got lots of stuff wrong, like thinking that the function of the brain is as a radiator to cool the body, but at least he got the project started. Also, I had always thought that "metaphysics" refers to the stuff that's "beyond physics", in the sense of explaining what the physical world is made of, so that physics has a foundation. However, it turns out that it's just the stuff that happened to be in the book that Aristotle write just after he wrote the book called "Physics", so, "meta" just means "after" here.

I don't know how much sense it'll make out of context though. I haven't really read any myself.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I had always thought that "metaphysics" refers to the stuff that's "beyond physics", in the sense of explaining what the physical world is made of, so that physics has a foundation. However, it turns out that it's just the stuff that happened to be in the book that Aristotle write just after he wrote the book called "Physics", so, "meta" just means "after" here.

A friend of mine mentioned this to me recently. Then we debated for a while what metaphysics really meant... he was saying it had more to do with philosophy of mind than philosophy of physics... and that many of the things I probably thought were metaphysics are actually philosophy of physics.

Occasionally, the word "metaphysics" comes up in physics papers (for instance, my advisor has a couple papers where a whole section is dedicated to "metaphysics"). And I can say that in those cases, that the meaning is clearly having to do with the foundations of physics... basically whatever questions arise because of our current understanding of physics but do not appear to be answerable through empirical study. So then the question is if the meaning is actually different in philosophy, as this friend of mine claimed.

Then I went and showed him a blog entry by Chalmers where he tries to do a taxonomy of philosophy, and under metaphysics he listed pretty much exactly what I would have expected to be listed. When my friend saw it he said "oh, well maybe I am wrong then... it does seem to include more philosophy of physics than I thought".

So would you say that the story about it being named after the chapter in Aristotle's book is just a story about how it got that name? or does it actually mean that metaphysics is not really about answering questions about the nature of reality that go beyond what physics can answer?

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Oh, and also, probably a lot of things you think of as metaphysics are more often studied under philosophy of physics, but that's because they're not of interest to core metaphysicians. Just as a lot of metaphysics is done by philosophers in just about any other area of philosophy. Despite what the positivists said, you can't say much of anything meaningful without making metaphysical claims.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Despite what the positivists said, you can't say much of anything meaningful without making metaphysical claims.

Would you apply this statement to physics as well, or just philosophy? I think a lot of physicists would disagree with you. I find there is a general idea among physicists that we can make meaningful statements that only refer to the prediction of measurable observables, while remaining agnostic about metaphysics. This could be due to the influence of logical positivism on scientific culture, especially with any discussions relating to quantum mechanics. Anyway, I think I sort of agree and sort of disagree. I think that we do have the ability to teach quantum mechanics and study it and apply it to predict experiments, without giving it a metaphysical framework by interpreting it. Of course, in the back of everyone's mind, I think they do have some metaphysical framework in mind... it just varies a lot from person to person. And I also think what framework you have in the back of your mind ends up affecting the direction future research will take... so in that sense, it's probably *not* the best idea to just not talk about it.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I guess I worded all of this assuming your answer to my first question was "both physics and philosophy". If it wasn't, then I guess what I said is not terribly relevant or should be worded differently.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I would mainly apply this to philosophy, but I think it's also true to some extent for physics. I suppose in physics you can often write down a formula that will tell you what measurable values to predict in certain ranges of circumstances, and thus postpone the metaphysical questions, but once you start asking how different systems interact, or how they work outside a standard range of validity for your formulas, then you have to pay attention to what the numbers in the formulas are supposed to mean. Also, even if you say that you're just using the numbers for predictive value, if you're doing theoretical work, then the direction of your research will most likely be shaped by your "unofficial" interpretations of what the numbers mean. Empirically equivalent theories suggest different modifications, both in the light of recalcitrant evidence, and also when generalizing to new situations, or when noticing oddities in the behavior of the system at certain points. And I think how your theory will develop is a very important part of one's scientific theorizing. So you can't really just ignore the metaphysics, unless all you care about is predictions of a controlled type of system in a moderate range.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Also, there's the question of whether Aristotle's chapter following physics called "metaphysics" was named that and positioned in that way for the (seemingly most straightforward) reason that it was intended to address questions raised but not addressed in the previous chapter.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I suspect that's the most likely answer. Although even part of this idea is anachronistic, because we only use the word "physics" because of this strange historical path by which one book of Aristotle's became seen as the foundation of a discipline 2000 years later, when people were dividing things into disciplines (I mean, what counts as physics, vs. chemistry or something else, is often quite arbitrary - physics talks about the small, the large, and the medium sized, so it's hard to do the simple things in saying how it's "more fundamental" than chemistry). So it's not surprising that two disciplines that got similar names because they were named after consecutive books by Aristotle, are actually similar, perhaps because he specifically intended to address foundational issues left open by one when writing the next.

Anyway, "phusein" is a Greek word that translates as something like "subsist" or "exist", or something like that. (I never actually studied enough Greek to see that word used more than once or twice, so I don't have a clear idea of its distinction from "exeinai" (third person: "exesti", from which we get "exist") or "einai" (which is the generic "to be" verb) or various others that Greek had.

I see the idea of metaphysics as saying how things fundamentally are, as opposed to what we can know about them, or how they ought to be, or how they are in more complex and less fundamental senses. Standard questions include whether properties and relations are actually things that exist beyond just the objects that have the properties; what it means for something to be part of something else (and when some things compose another thing); what the nature is of possibility and necessity, and whether there really are other ways things could have been, or whether actuality is the only possible world. But also there are lots of more specialized metaphysical questions, for instance in the metaphysics of mind, where there's a lot of work addressing issues of whether there are mental objects in addition to the physical objects that make up brains and bodies, and in either case, what the connection is between the physical stuff and the stuff of thought. (Similar questions arise in the metaphysics of language or mathematics - do propositions exist as entities separate from the sentences that have them as meanings, and do numbers and sets exist as entities separate from the things that can be counted.)

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Ok, that's pretty much exactly the definition I had in mind and what I presented to my friend as what I thought of as metaphysics. I think what happened is that he heard a few talks in a row by philosophers visiting his school which were all centered around a particular set of questions, and he got a more narrow view of what metaphysics was than what it is. This is what we both decided was probably the case after our discussion, but this helps confirm it.

[doublefeh.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed all the greek drama I was exposed to in IHUM (Sophocles, Euripides, a bit of Aristophanes).

I also second the recommendation of the Odyssey. It's not in the public domain, but Robert Fagles did great translations of both it and the Illiad (and the Aeneid, for that matter) in the past decade. The Odyssey is the only long work that we read excerpts from in IHUM that I actually went back and re-read in its entirety. Learning about the poetical structure and Homeric performing tradition was fascinating, too.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Fagles must be the one I meant! Graves was apparently also a translator of the classics, but in earlier parts of the 20th century.

[jacquesk.livejournal.com]

I would suggest starting with Plato's Republic (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html) and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html).
Your blog is cool!

[jacquesk.livejournal.com]

+ Thucydides (http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.html).

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

The Odyssey was one of the only books I read for high school that I actually enjoyed.