He thought some humans were slaves by nature and women were naturally inferior to men.
edit: whoa, I didn't realize how racist this guy was. He could be classified as a eugenicist I suppose.
He also believed in spontaneous generation (fair, without technology we have now it would be really confusing to understand where all kinds of things come from).
Seemed to believe infinity was impossible yet also that the heavens are infinite. Maybe he distinguished between the earthly and heavenly planes, but still seemed to think they were similarly constructed from elements.
many humans are still slaves by nature -- look at how averse many folks in the society are to rational and pragmatic thinking, being enslaved by religion, ideology and showing indifference to human suffering, and endless worship of wealthy.
We need to distinguish between "many people are born into slavery" and "many people are meant to be slaves by their inborn nature". The former is true, the latter is not, even in the example you've given.
Also, he was referring to people performing labour, not people adhering to spiritual belief or ideological systems.
I see what you mean, but I don't think this means what he believed was true. I see it as categorically different. People adhering to beliefs without critical thought vs being forced into labour due to their 'nature' are very different matters.
>He thought some humans were slaves by nature and women were naturally inferior to men.
These are unfortunately still all too common beliefs. The latter has mostly been folded into racial essentialism and racial realist beliefs, because slavery is no longer legal (13th amendment loophole notwithstanding) and you can still find people arguing women are intellectually inferior and incapable of rational thought.
The whole anti-DEI movement is based on the premise that non-whites and women categorically don't deserve the same status in the workforce as white men, and the only reason they have "equality" is due to anti-white racism.
He stated, in a separate work, that women had fewer teeth as an example of his views on their inferiority. Makes you want to take everything he said with a grain of salt.
In his defense (sorry if defending him offends here), women probably did, at the time, often have fewer teeth due to worse dental care.
Women and men have identical dental anatomy, so no, it's not wisdom teeth. Women would technically be earlier and thus have more, if you get into the details.
Aristotle has flaws, that's all.
I love his work on happiness. On the academic side of Philosophy, I believe his conception stands alongside what is typically called "Hedonism" defining the two major schools of thought, obviously with modern takes and twists. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on "Happiness" if you're interested.
The thing I always come back to is Aristotle's belief that if you release an object being circled about your head by rope, it will move perpendicular to the tangent line of the circle. This is trivial to disconfirm by experiment. It moves parallel to the tangent. It's just that science of his school of thought was rationalist. They believed in the power of thought more than the power of experiment. You can surely observe the lifecycle of women and men and see they develop and shed teeth in exactly the same ways and same number, but why bother doing that if you earnestly believe you can just intuit laws of nature purely by thinking really hard?
To be clear, I'm a huge Aristotle fan. He's a towering intellect I will never come close to equaling. His ideas set the stage for very nearly all western thought. It just goes to show that everyone everywhere has deficiencies and blind spots. The smartest person who ever lived can still be wrong in extremely obvious ways in retrospect. Intelligence is no guarantee you're going to actually be right about very much.
He thought some humans were slaves by nature and women were naturally inferior to men.
edit: whoa, I didn't realize how racist this guy was. He could be classified as a eugenicist I suppose.
He also believed in spontaneous generation (fair, without technology we have now it would be really confusing to understand where all kinds of things come from).
Seemed to believe infinity was impossible yet also that the heavens are infinite. Maybe he distinguished between the earthly and heavenly planes, but still seemed to think they were similarly constructed from elements.
The list goes on.
many humans are still slaves by nature -- look at how averse many folks in the society are to rational and pragmatic thinking, being enslaved by religion, ideology and showing indifference to human suffering, and endless worship of wealthy.
We need to distinguish between "many people are born into slavery" and "many people are meant to be slaves by their inborn nature". The former is true, the latter is not, even in the example you've given.
Also, he was referring to people performing labour, not people adhering to spiritual belief or ideological systems.
I see what you mean, but I don't think this means what he believed was true. I see it as categorically different. People adhering to beliefs without critical thought vs being forced into labour due to their 'nature' are very different matters.
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>He thought some humans were slaves by nature and women were naturally inferior to men.
These are unfortunately still all too common beliefs. The latter has mostly been folded into racial essentialism and racial realist beliefs, because slavery is no longer legal (13th amendment loophole notwithstanding) and you can still find people arguing women are intellectually inferior and incapable of rational thought.
The whole anti-DEI movement is based on the premise that non-whites and women categorically don't deserve the same status in the workforce as white men, and the only reason they have "equality" is due to anti-white racism.
He stated, in a separate work, that women had fewer teeth as an example of his views on their inferiority. Makes you want to take everything he said with a grain of salt.
In his defense (sorry if defending him offends here), women probably did, at the time, often have fewer teeth due to worse dental care.
https://sourcelibrary.org/book/problemata-text-beginning-omn...
An original source for this. I wonder if wisdom teeth affected this count? It’s so odd of a claim
Women and men have identical dental anatomy, so no, it's not wisdom teeth. Women would technically be earlier and thus have more, if you get into the details.
Aristotle has flaws, that's all.
I love his work on happiness. On the academic side of Philosophy, I believe his conception stands alongside what is typically called "Hedonism" defining the two major schools of thought, obviously with modern takes and twists. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on "Happiness" if you're interested.
2 replies →
The thing I always come back to is Aristotle's belief that if you release an object being circled about your head by rope, it will move perpendicular to the tangent line of the circle. This is trivial to disconfirm by experiment. It moves parallel to the tangent. It's just that science of his school of thought was rationalist. They believed in the power of thought more than the power of experiment. You can surely observe the lifecycle of women and men and see they develop and shed teeth in exactly the same ways and same number, but why bother doing that if you earnestly believe you can just intuit laws of nature purely by thinking really hard?
To be clear, I'm a huge Aristotle fan. He's a towering intellect I will never come close to equaling. His ideas set the stage for very nearly all western thought. It just goes to show that everyone everywhere has deficiencies and blind spots. The smartest person who ever lived can still be wrong in extremely obvious ways in retrospect. Intelligence is no guarantee you're going to actually be right about very much.
Sorry for defending Aristotle? Have we lost the plot as a society?