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[Jackrabbit]

It turns out I've been the bad person these last six months. I've been obsessive and scarily dangerous. I've hurt someone for a percived slight, badly, and I scared my mum so much she cried for the first time I've ever seen her cry in sixteen years.

I need councilling. I can't be this sort of person.

[Max White]

Is this something you want to talk about with somebody, Jack?

[Jackrabbit]

A psychiatrist, yes. I'm seeing one as of now, under my own steam.

[Mindmaker]

"She told me, that her friend wants to get laid by me. Gonna check this out."
And then he ditched us, for one and a half hours, leaving me with a guy I barely know, who doesn't talk much.
Later he said: "That's almost too easy. If I didn't have a friend staying over, I'd take her home."

That just doesn't seem like him, it's more like he's overcompensating.
A sort of "Ow crap! I didn't have a girlfriend yet!" early, geeky midlife-crisis.
I'm worried and blaming society.

[Reelyanoob]

Aristotle wasn't even known by the church until the Crusades. Europe didn't have any of his works. Also, the reason he promoted the geocentric world view was because that was what his observations had shown. He was doing scientific work, in that case.

http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1998/9809fea3.asp

This source says they translated his works on logic in the 5th century AD. While they did get other works later, they did have some of his works, though Plato, Aristotle's mentor was the more influential scholar in the Chritian shere of influence earlier on.

His science sucks btw. He was not a scientist. Did not look highly on experimentation, but relied on polemics and introverted speculation. None of the stuff he wrote works out.

Saying Aristotle was a scentist is revisionism, it's very anachronistic because he did not work at all like anything the scientific method would recognise. He did NOT do observational science.

e.g. :

As the philosopher Betrand Russell noted:

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

http://intjforum.com/showthread.php?t=10351

His science includes that women have less teeth. See, the guy just sits around thinking rubbish, writes it down, didn't even check the obvious stuff. Are you going to trust this guy on the big questions if he can't even count?

[Grakelin]

Yep.

[Dsarker]

Ooh, let's see. His works on biology relied a lot on observation. So we know, by virtue of his surviving works, that he did use observation.


As for the teeth, I would submit that yes, it is a recognised fact that everyone has a perfect set of teeth and that these teeth are retained throughout life. I also submit that he did not have access to skulls, which would have been easier to get and also easier to count the teeth, and would also be far more likely to have perfect teeth, if that is possible, than living people.


Oh, wait.

[Vector]

Look, even his logic has blatant contradictions ("works are valued more when they come from unexpected sources!  But an identical work is not as good if it does not come from as fine a source [i.e., hoho, an unexpected one], which is why all work done by women will always be worth less than any work done by a man!").  He's got some misogyny issues going on (the only good personality traits a woman can have are to be temperate [i.e. not eat too much and so on] and to have a non-sordid occupation [i.e. not be a prostitute]).

The man was pretty cool, and he wrote down a lot of interesting things, but I'm really not going to sit here in an Aristotle-parade.  There's been many better thinkers.

[Bauglir]

In b4 irrelevant comparisons to his contemporaries?

[Vector]

It's true that he is much better than, say, the Pythagoreans, who believed women were not ensouled.

[Bauglir]

This is true, I mostly just meant that your criticisms seemed to have nothing to do with how awesome he was for the time, and more to do with how that tends to result in his actual flaws being kind of swept under the rug and ignored. So if somebody brought up some other thinkers and pointed out that Aristotle was ahead of his time or something, it wouldn't address anything relevant (regardless of its truth value).

EDIT: And somebody always does that.

[Vector]

Meh.  Awesome or not, the very least I expect is logical consistency and deeper thinking than "whatever the majority thinks is true must be true."  Oh, and did you know that there was a slight majority of men in Ancient Greece?  Yup!

Eh.  His statements on the "equitable man" are extremely cool, I must admit.

[Fenrir]

During research for a college paper, I read some of Aristotle’s work in which he asserted that worker bees could not possibly be female, as they bear stingers, and nature would not entrust females with weapons.

It shall suffice to say that I was not much interested in reading any more of his writings after that.

[Bauglir]

Right, exactly. I was just making a cynical prediction that so far has not been borne out.

[Duke 2.0]

 Investigating an increasingly common occurrence of my optical mouse drifting around reveals that my desk is too shiny. It's a wooden desk, the area around the mouse has just been polished to a shine by years of my wrist sliding around on it.

 I... might be on the computer too much.