What made ancient philosophers so intelligent?

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Divine right to rule said:
Sometimes God is in a good mood and creates like 12 geniuses in the same generation at the same place.

Happened a lot in the Renaissance and the 19th century.
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More is to be said for Political, Historical and Cultural unity than there is just random place an time - when you look at it from a chronological POV these people existed in very stable periods of time, same with the Renascence and Industrial revolution these where times of relative peace.

Mnutu said:
Survivorship bias. There were plenty of retards back then too, they were called sophists and hypocrites. They were also from a very influential and powerful culture that endured through the ages. They may not have been the first people to say what they said, but they’re the earliest ones we know.
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Indeed, however while those people where mostly forgotten some of there ideas an ideals persisted, the problem is no idea exists in a vacuum and a thesis will have an anti thesis and there is no original ideas, just implementations and in 3000 years we're going to see the same arguments were seeing today and the same results of those ideas - just with new words an costumes.
 
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Flame War Vet said:
I'm sorry but Diogenes is reddit's favorite philosopher(right after Karl Marx).
>Dude, dude, Diogenes was like, so based! He gooned in public and like, epically dunked on Plato and Alexnder the great!
>What were his contributions to philosophy? Uhhhhhhhhhh... I don't fucking know. Who cares? Did you know that he lived in a barrel?
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That's too bad, reddit probably needs his philosophy the most. One of Diogenes' main tenets was battling with Pleasure (often portrayed in the feminine) and considered it essentially a snare that led people away from both virtue and freedom. Very similar to how Christians frame carnal sins, just different language. Maybe reddit 'philosophers' would be compelled to stop gooning and smoking weed if they took time to actually read the bit of recorded history we have on the skeptics.

Edit: If anyone is interested Diogenes of Sinope - Life and Legend is pretty good. It's just a raw collection of primary sources that mention Diogenes without any faggy editorializing.
 
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Flame War Vet said:
I'm sorry but Diogenes is reddit's favorite philosopher(right after Karl Marx).
>Dude, dude, Diogenes was like, so based! He gooned in public and like, epically dunked on Plato and Alexnder the great!
>What were his contributions to philosophy? Uhhhhhhhhhh... I don't fucking know. Who cares? Did you know that he lived in a barrel?
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It’s objectively based that there was a homeless man so legendarily homeless that his story has been told throughout generations.
 
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There is a Chinese proverb,forest no tigers monkey is kings,If you go to an era where most people are ignorant, you will also become a genius
 
Penis Drager 2.0 said:
Simply because they were around before the "easy" shit was invented. They had the opportunity to be the inventors.
The smart people of those days weren't any smarter than the smart people of today. It's probably quite the opposite.
The difference is making a discovery today means having to catch up on thousands of years of prior discoveries so you have even the barest grasp on what's left to discover. And doing so gets you far less popular appraisal because what you discover is going to be much more niche in its application and difficult for random people going about normal lives to understand the significance.

If Socrates were alive today, he'd just be a regular, albeit bright, dude.
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I have to hard disagree. These guys figured out shit like how far away the Sun is from the Earth by looking at shadows on the ground. They figured out insane stuff like the area of a circle by rotating cows in their heads. I'm stunned at the amount of genius that these dudes had to the point I often wonder if cavemen weren't mega-geniuses and it's all been downhill since we invented writing and number-keeping.

Starting from scratch is harder than building on a foundation. They also were much more likely to be Renaissance men (unlike today's monomaniacs in academia).
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Starting from scratch is harder than building on a foundation.
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In some cases yes, in other cases no. While they did have much less to work with, the problems they were working on were much simpler in nature. Pythagorean Theorem was independently discovered by multiple different cultures across space and time. Could I independently discover something like that? Probably not. But that problem is absolutely trivial in comparison to modern mathematical queries like the continuum hypothesis.

Being a modern polymath is as easy as being a nerd with an internet connection and spending less time on Pornhub and more on Wikipedia. And I agree that it takes a much brighter mind to be able to do that without such luxuries. But there was much less to learn back then and every invention or discovery made today is one which cannot be made tomorrow.
Scientific exploration is much like geographic exploration. The more ground is tread, the harder you have to look to be the first to set foot somewhere.
 
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Penis Drager 2.0 said:
In some cases yes, in other cases no. While they did have much less to work with, the problems they were working on were much simpler in nature. Pythagorean Theorem was independently discovered by multiple different cultures across space and time. Could I independently discover something like that? Probably not. But that problem is absolutely trivial in comparison to modern mathematical queries like the continuum hypothesis.

Being a modern polymath is as easy as being a nerd with an internet connection and spending less time on Pornhub and more on Wikipedia. And I agree that it takes a much brighter mind to be able to do that without such luxuries. But there was much less to learn back then and every invention or discovery made today is one which cannot be made tomorrow.
Scientific exploration is much like geographic exploration. The more ground is tread, the harder you have to look to be the first to set foot somewhere.
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You've got both "standing on the shoulders of giants" (gets easier the more work has been done) and "picking the low hanging fruit" (gets harder the more work has been done). I just think that in the Greek's day the not-having-shoulders-to-stand-on was more of a disadvantage than the low-hanging-fruit was an advantage. Not a claim I can prove, of course.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
I just think that in the Greek's day the not-having-shoulders-to-stand-on was more of a disadvantage than the low-hanging-fruit was an advantage.
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Another issue here is people kinda lump "The Greeks" together as if all this shit was happening at the same time.
Pythagoras lived from 570-495 BC. Eratosthenes, who built on the former's work to calculate the circumference of Earth, lived from 276-194 BC. They had their own giants whose shoulders they were standing on.
Now there absolutely were periods where advancement in some particular fields blew the fuck up and it seems everyone was discovering everything all at once. But I can bring up the geographic exploration analogy here too. Just like how one landmass being discovered will lead to the discovery of many related ones, one scientific breakthrough inevitably leads to a rush of many related discoveries.
 
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To be enlightened is to be a bit touched in the head instead of listening to the wise homeless sages you mock them as crazy they would have put diogenes in a mental institution.
 
Divine Power said:
What made ancient philosophers so intelligent?

Like Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, who had expertise in a wide variety of fields.

I've been curious about their lifestyle—what did they do on a daily basis? How did they reach that level of knowledge? It’s interesting because while we learn from books, they were the ones who laid the groundwork for much of what we study.
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Ancient Greece had the first culture war and that war pushed them to create philosophy.

Ancient Iran and the near East had God Kings as a given form of government. Same with East Asia and Africa.

Greece? They had the first democracy and that system had to legitimize itself. Likewise, the rival autocracies had to legitimize themselves.
 
CornBogFitz said:
i think today something that stifles philosophy is the obsession with science. having it be the end all be all of explanations. One by its very nature is subjective, multiple answers are correct. where as the other is objective. today people look to science for answers
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This, I recently took a psychology class and it tries to understand thoughts and mental illnesses through a scientific method to no avail, but unlike the heart or the lungs, the brain is so complex that you’re going to have to be more philosophical to understand things like human condition and why people do bad things.
 
Penis Drager 2.0 said:
Pythagoras lived from 570-495 BC. Eratosthenes, who built on the former's work to calculate the circumference of Earth, lived from 276-194 BC. They had their own giants whose shoulders they were standing on.
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The level of social, cultural and political change during that era is a lot greater than people think as well. In 495 BC Rome was a tiny city-state stretching along the Tiber to Ostia. By 194 BC they were the dominant power in the western Mediterranean and were expanding their influence into Greece and Asia.

50 years before Eratosthenes' birth, Alexander had created the largest empire in history, only for it to have shattered into a dozen separate kingdoms by the time Eratosthenes was born.
 
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Because no-one would've bothered to write down or remember the thousands of pseudo-intellectuals that existed at that time. We likely only know about the cream of the crop of Classical-era philosophers.
Also, these philosophers weren't bought out by massive multinational corporations or governments, and instructed to parrot things to justify their retarded policies.
 
Divine right to rule said:
Sometimes God is in a good mood and creates like 12 geniuses in the same generation at the same place.

Happened a lot in the Renaissance and the 19th century.
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There's a lot of geniuses in any generation, but most of them throughout history are not "popular" (that most people know about).

Like now when it comes to computers for example, the amount of math knowledge, thinking outside the box & algorithms/etc that go into a lot of projects that you don't even know about.
 
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