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Comment by ComputerPerson

9 hours ago

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.

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ComputerPerson

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dr_dshiv  8 hours ago

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

  • ComputerPerson  8 hours ago

    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.

  • nonameiguess  7 hours ago

    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.