Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby luke » Wed Jan 26, 2022 6:23 pm

reineke wrote:Here are some quotes attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.

“He said that the root of education is bitter but the fruit is sweet.”

Τῆς παιδείας ἔφη τὰς μὲν ῥίζας εἶναι πικράς, τὸν δὲ καρπὸν γλυκύν.

Not sure why I went for a quote on education at the time, but the subsequent discussion has been interesting. I think I was trying to insert some light heartedness and at the time, a tangential quote seemed apropos.

And not specifically at reineke either, but on the quote above, I'm hoping we're not saying that Diogenes said Aristotle said it, but we don't have a record of Aristotle saying it, and therefore must conclude that Aristotle didn't say it.

To make that conclusion, one would have complete records of everything Aristotle wrote and said. (or maybe it's a rule academia that you can pretend to know things that are unknowable). :lol: Why not? In real life people do it all the time.

I'm not saying Aristotle said it, only that it's speculation to say, "he didn't say (something quite like) that". (We know of course he wasn't speaking English, and therefore for that reason alone, we know he didn't actually use those words). ;)

But if we want to go with "based on extant written records, I'm not finding any work attributed to Aristotle that I'd translate into that quote", I'd understand what was meant by the conclusion "he didn't write that".

And just so it's clear. I much prefer accurate attribution and don't like being a bother.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby Ezra » Wed Jan 26, 2022 7:40 pm

einzelne wrote:As a matter of fact, well-educated persons never, ever in the history of mankind have had to know six languages. Case closed.

But times are changing and standards are rising. In Bede's time knowledge of Latin and relatively small canon of books would be enough for a well-educated person, but since Renaissance requirements has grown considerably ;).
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby reineke » Wed Jan 26, 2022 9:02 pm

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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby reineke » Wed Jan 26, 2022 11:55 pm

Ezra wrote:
einzelne wrote:As a matter of fact, well-educated persons never, ever in the history of mankind have had to know six languages. Case closed.

But times are changing and standards are rising. In Bede's time knowledge of Latin and relatively small canon of books would be enough for a well-educated person, but since Renaissance requirements has grown considerably ;).


The times have changed many times over since the era of the Venerable Bede. The knowledge of several languages has been more valuable in the more recent past than is the case today and we can safely say that the standards have fallen in this regard.

As for Bede he wrote "scientific, historical and theological works, reflecting the range of his writings from music and metrics to exegetical Scripture commentaries. He knew patristic literature, as well as Pliny the Elder, Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Horace and other classical writers." Wikip. He apparently also knew some Greek.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby Dragon27 » Thu Jan 27, 2022 5:28 am

luke wrote:I'm not saying Aristotle said it

The issue here is, of course, the huge time period between Aristotle and Diogenes (hundreds of years). I mean, quotes are being routinely misattributed during people's lifetimes even in modern era, where it should be much easier to verify the source. The fact that we have the first attribution of that quote (as far as I understand from all this) only hundreds of years after Aristotle's death makes this attribution very unreliable. We can't say whether Aristotle really said that, but we can say that Diogenes Laertius attributed these quotes to Aristotle in his book (whatever that implies). BTW, when he attributes a quote to Aristotle does he even cite the source for the quote?
Last edited by Dragon27 on Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby rdearman » Thu Jan 27, 2022 9:36 am

Dragon27 wrote:
luke wrote:I'm not saying Aristotle said it

The issue here is, of course, the huge time period between Aristotle and Diogenes (hundreds of years). I mean, quote are being routinely misattributed during people's lifetimes even in modern era, where it should be much easier to verify the source. The fact that we have the first attribution of that quote (as far as I understand from all this) only hundreds of years after Aristotle's death makes this attribution very unreliable. We can't say whether Aristotle really said that, but we can say that Diogenes Laertius attributed these quotes to Aristotle in his book (whatever that implies). BTW, when he attributes a quote to Aristotle does he even cite the source for the quote?

I agree, and it reminded me of that famous quotation from Abraham Lincoln. "Never believe anything you read on the Internet."
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby Ezra » Thu Jan 27, 2022 11:00 am

rdearman wrote:I agree, and it reminded me of that famous quotation from Abraham Lincoln. "Never believe anything you read on the Internet."
The Internet was yet in infancy back then, but the great man already made correct conlusions...
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby reineke » Thu Jan 27, 2022 3:15 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
luke wrote:I'm not saying Aristotle said it

The issue here is, of course, the huge time period between Aristotle and Diogenes (hundreds of years). I mean, quotes are being routinely misattributed during people's lifetimes even in modern era, where it should be much easier to verify the source. The fact that we have the first attribution of that quote (as far as I understand from all this) only hundreds of years after Aristotle's death makes this attribution very unreliable. We can't say whether Aristotle really said that, but we can say that Diogenes Laertius attributed these quotes to Aristotle in his book (whatever that implies). BTW, when he attributes a quote to Aristotle does he even cite the source for the quote?


The primary source Diogenes used was the lost Vita by Hermippus of Smyrna. Hermippus was the librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria and was active around 250 BC. Aristotle died in 322 BC. Ancient writers were not handed any manuals of style and academic citation. Socrates purposefully didn't write down a single word and what we have of Epictetus was written down by his pupil.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby Herodotean » Thu Jan 27, 2022 3:31 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
luke wrote:I'm not saying Aristotle said it

The issue here is, of course, the huge time period between Aristotle and Diogenes (hundreds of years). I mean, quotes are being routinely misattributed during people's lifetimes even in modern era, where it should be much easier to verify the source. The fact that we have the first attribution of that quote (as far as I understand from all this) only hundreds of years after Aristotle's death makes this attribution very unreliable. We can't say whether Aristotle really said that, but we can say that Diogenes Laertius attributed these quotes to Aristotle in his book (whatever that implies). BTW, when he attributes a quote to Aristotle does he even cite the source for the quote?

I'm not saying you're wrong to be skeptical, but often when later handbooks and compilations -- like Diogenes' -- became widespread, people didn't feel the need to keep copying the earlier works that Diogenes and other compilers used as sources. And an ancient work that didn't continue to be copied tended not to survive, unless some papyrus scraps of it happened to survive in the sands of Egypt. In other words, Diogenes' very success has made his veracity harder to confirm.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby Dragon27 » Thu Jan 27, 2022 4:31 pm

reineke wrote:The primary source Diogenes used was the lost Vita by Hermippus of Smyrna. Hermippus was the librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria and was active around 250 BC. Aristotle died in 322 BC. Ancient writers were not handed any manuals of style and academic citation.

I'm not asking for any academic citation, of course, but something along the lines of "he wrote in his book <name of the book>" or "these were taken from", etc. I looked it up, and it seemed more along the lines of "It was a saying of his", so it didn't seem like anything that came out of his writings. The whole sections seems like a collection of funny anecdotes and stories, that were past down as tradition (and through intermediate source like Vita by Hermippus of Smyrna you mentioned). I've encountered some of his other stories (in the same book about different people), that are considered to be almost certainly apocryphal, like how Democritus (on his deathbed) survived for three days by sniffing a loaf of bread, while his sister was at the Thesmophoria festival, and then died peacefully in her arms, or how Socrates's wife Xanthippe dumped a chamber pot on Socrates's head after an argument (and he told that he should have known to expect a shower after a storm). So I'm personally quite unsure how reliable we could consider anything written in that book. I'm not a historian, of course, and I'm sure, that historians have methods to extract valuable information from this source, and I'm not trying to dismiss the entire work as a completely useless collection of lies. At the very least, we can see how these famous ancient personalities were viewed by people of those times and what kind of fanciful stories were told about them.

reineke wrote:Socrates purposefully didn't write down a single word and what we have of Epictetus was written down by his pupil.

Another (most likely apocryphal) story that was recorded by Diogenes Laërtius holds that
Plato once read his dialogue Lysis aloud to Socrates. Afterwards, Socrates exclaimed, “Herakles! What a bunch of lies the young man has written about me!”

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/ ... -socrates/

Herodotean wrote:I'm not saying you're wrong to be skeptical, but often when later handbooks and compilations -- like Diogenes' -- became widespread, people didn't feel the need to keep copying the earlier works that Diogenes and other compilers used as sources. And an ancient work that didn't continue to be copied tended not to survive, unless some papyrus scraps of it happened to survive in the sands of Egypt. In other words, Diogenes' very success has made his veracity harder to confirm.

It sometimes seems almost arbitrary which kinds of works happen to survive (by virtue of being of interest to people who undertook the grueling job of manual letter-by-letter copying of manuscripts, for many generations, or had the money to hire somebody to do it). Some kind of secondary superficial source survives, while a more deep and important work, that people should have payed more interest to, falls into disuse and succumbs to the entropy of time. If it weren't for the Byzantine scribes we would have lost the Greek text of Euclid's Elements (that would have been outrageous!).
Last edited by Dragon27 on Fri Jan 28, 2022 5:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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