Xah Lee wrote: > Software Needs Philosophers > > by Steve Yegge, 2006-04-15. > > Software needs philosophers. > > This thought has been nagging at me for a year now, and recently it's > been growing like a tumor. One that plenty of folks on the 'net would > love to see kill me.
No, we all wish you a long and quiet life! Although some of us are a little annoyed that you keep cross-posting articles wildly to completely unrelated newsgroups... > People don't put much stock in philosophers these days. The popular > impression of philosophy is that it's just rhetoric, just frivolous > debating about stuff that can never properly be answered. "Spare me > the philosophy; let's stick to the facts!" > > The funny thing is, it's philosophers who gave us the ability to think > rationally, to stick to the facts. If it weren't for the work of > countless philosophers, facts would still be getting people tortured > and killed for discovering and sharing them. > > Does it ever strike you as just a teeny bit odd that after a brief > period where philosophy flourished, from maybe 400 B.C.E. to ~100 C.E., > we went through a follow-on period of well over one thousand five > hundred years during which the Roman Catholic Church enslaved > everyone's minds and killed anyone who dared think differently? I wonder where you get your historical "facts" form? (Monty Python movies?) Let's just add a few fun facts: Yes, philosophy did flourish in ancient greece, but liberty certainly didn't. Yes, Athens was (at least most of the time) a democracy - which by the way, most philosophers thought was a very bad thing. But still, about 90% of the population of Athens were slaves at that time. Not just "mentally enslaved", no, real, physical slaves. Also, it was dangerous to have oppinions that authorities didn't like (Socrates for example was sentenced to death because of impiety, Anaxagoras and Aristoteles had to flee because of similar charges, Hipposus, who _proved_ a flaw in Pythagoras' number theory was drowned). And, sad to say, if philosophers would have been in charge, things would probably have been even worse (Ever read Plato's "The State"?) Also, has the roman catholic church really "killed anyone who dared think differently"? The Spanish Inquisition for example killed about 1000-2000 people in two centuries. That's bad enough, no question, but "anyone who dared think differently"? Hardly. > What's weirder is that we tend to pretend it didn't really happen. We > like to just skip right over the dominance of religion over our minds > for a hundred generations, and think of religion today as a kindly old > grandpa who's just looking out for us kids. No harm, no foul. Let > bygones be bygones. Sure, there were massacres and crusades and > genocides and torture chambers with teeth grinding and eyes bleeding > and intestines torn out in the name of God. But we were all just kids > then, right? Nobody does that kind of thing today, at least not in > civilized countries. Hmmm. There were massacres in the name of liberty to, e.g. in the French Revolution. Does that make liberty (and those who value it) equally evil? (The same is of course true for money, love, or probably anything else people like) > We try not to think about the uncivilized ones. We do! Let's think about some of them: The Khmers rouges come to my mind, also China, and a few years back the Soviet Union. Notice something? Right, no religion. In fact, they were more or less following the works of the philosopher Karl Marx. > It was philosophers that got us out of that Dark Ages mess, and no > small number of them lost their lives in doing so. In the "Dark Ages" pretty much the only chance to get a decent education was to become a monk or at least be taught by monks. So, it isn't surprising that almost all of the philosophers at the time (like William of Occam or Roger Bacon) were monks. Therefore, philosophy was never clearly separated from theology during that time. The end of the middle ages is probably marked by the renaissance and the reformation, the latter of course started by a priest. What have we learned? Yes, Religion was an important power in the development of europe over the last 3000 years (yes, I'm including the Antiquity in this, it didn't just take a break to watch the philosophy channel). So were money, and military power, technology, social factors, and of course philosophy. Yes, it did have bad consequences, and it did have good ones. The same is true for all the other powers as well. (BTW: Have you ever considered the possibility that philosophers might not be interested in tab-versus-spaces-debates in the first place? Maybe they have more interesting matters to discuss. Just like the rest of us.) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list