/lit/ - Literature

Greeks were pure ]kek]

>>18671276
I got this reference.

>>18671276

Logos

>>18671391
Life started in water, so they aren't too far off.

>>18671276
You might think Thales is naive and said too little but he's actually extremely interesting.

>>18671276
The only constant is sad

>bursts into the scullery and frightens a made who was washing dishes
>"it's actually vapor, not water"
>disappears with no explanation

phlogiston

>>18671276
fire

>>18671276
What happens if you assemble a team made of Thales, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus?

>>18671391
How is that absurd?
On a physical level life began in water and on a spiritual level life began water.

>>18671276
Nothing which is also everything which has no properties which creates all the properties which is one which creates many

>>18672222
water

sneed

Agua

>>18671276
WO'AH

>be greek
>say some dumb shit like "everything is made of [insert anything here]
>fuck little boys in the ass all day
>be unable to unite your shitty polises into one country
>2000 years later incels claim you started civilization

semen

>>18672321
People are retarded. The observation that all life needs water and that water comes from below and above was one of genius.

>>18673485
sneed, troon

>>18673485
lol, it's funny because it's true

>>18671276
WATER GOES IN EVERY FIELD
>Thales.png

Water?

>>18671410
Based

>>18673485
>waaaaaah civilization must be like my strategy games where I conquer everyone
Faggot

>>18671276
dont play water

>>18672321
>he's confusing physical water, a particular chemical element, with philosophical water
NGMI

Water is great. After sculling a glass of water I received the inspiration to make this post.

>>18671276
"Everything is made of water."

This is absolutely one of the most brilliant intellectual steps in history. The guy was slightly wrong in a minor detail in, like, the tenth decimal place, and all the cretins fixate on that and ignore what he got right.

— What did he get right?
What are things made of? Are green things green because they're made of little green blocks, wet things wet because they're made of little wet blocks, etc?
Thales postulated, NO. Everything is probably made of basically the same thing, it's just the ARRANGEMENT that gives things different properties. This idea is:
a) profound
b) not obvious
c) <as far as we can tell from the trends of modern science> CORRECT

— What did he get wrong?
He got the basic building-block wrong. It's not water. But that wasn't at all a bad guess, given the technology available to him. He saw that water couldn't be broken down into anything simpler. It could take different forms (ice, steam) but you couldn't get rid of it or make more of it. Water is incompressible. It's infinitely malleable but infinitely strong. That's the perfect building-block for making other things — something that can take lots of different shapes but can't itself be fundamentally altered.

Water is not that far from what we now think of as the fundamental building-block of matter. It's not a huge step from H2O to electrons and protons and not a huge step from electrons and protons to quarks. So Thales basically said the answer to the universe was 41.9996 and people laugh at him because we now know it's 42.

There's an interview with Feynman somewhere where he is asked, what's the single most important insight of all our science? If we could only save ONE fact about the world to tell future generations (if everything else was lost), what should it be? And Feynman said, the atomic theory of matter. Say that everything is made up of basically millions and millions of tiny things which are all the same, just arranged in different patterns. That's what Thales worked out.

Well done Thales, and everyone else can piss off.

This is water

>>18673762
b..b..b.basado

>>18671410
Kek'd hard

>>18673485
Based honestly. All the various philosophical traditions around the world come to roughly the same conclusions and explore most of the same ideas. I'd even bet that most of it predates writing. As Nietzsche said philosophy is like an ecosystem where all the viewpoint niches get filled and this just repeats itself over and over again.

>>18672309
I’m not smart enough to do a A:TLA or MMPR joke using the sophists, but I’m sure someone is.

>>18673762
Ancient atomic theory is hugely overrated. There are only two possibilities, that matter is continuous and that matter is not continuous. Not hard to believe that at least some people would take the latter position even though there was no evidence to support it. Nowadays we're back to continuity with Quantum Field Theory though so they're both right.

>>18674142
Thales did much more than just say "matter is discrete". He said that when you get down far enough, there's only one sort of matter. That's the real stroke of genius. (I don't care if he was synthesizing other philosophical concepts in the air at the time to come up with it. No-one works in a complete vacuum.)

>>18673762
nice

>>18673670
>philosophical water
Alcohol?