Stathol wrote:
Yes, by all means let's pretend that the "pompous blowhards in Greece" had nothing to do with the development of Greek republics, the emergence of the Roman Empire, and its many advancements in technology and human governance. Let's pretend that rediscovery and renewed interest in their work didn't also drive massive reforms in Europe during the Renaissance, dragging it out of nearly 1000 years of cultural, technological, and economic decay. Let's further pretend that the intellectual revival of the Enlightenment with its political theories of Locke, Voltaire, Montesqueieu, ... had nothing whatsoever to do with the fall of European monarchy, the rise of republicanism, and the industrial revolution. Let's instead pretend that a bunch of peasants in the middle ages rose up and overthrew the aristocracy because -- you know -- that actually happened.
Please, by all means, lets pretend that this all happened just because some people sat around and did a lot of reading, thinking, and debating about things such as the nature of knowledge, empiricism, natural rights, etc cetra, ad nauseum, as opposed to the very real problems faced by actual, real-world people every day. I could list endless abuses by all sorts of people and institutions throughout history, but clearly the real reason for social progress has been the availability of plenty of writing on things like whether human beings have access to objective knowledge or not.
While you're at it, keep on with the strawman about a bunch of peasents in the middle ages, because clearly the fact that there wasn't a successful peasant uprising in the middle ages must mean that the various practical challenges that people faced throughout history had nothing to do with any progress. No, it all must have been because of the occasional guy who was lucky enough to be able to spend time and effort on writing treatises on various abstract concepts. I mean clearly, without that, no one would have any drive for improvement! We'd all be sitting around wih our thumbs up our asses unable to so much as cook meat without someone to lecture us on abstract morality.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but the vast majority of "philosphical" writers held some other job as well; most of them were not overprivileged nitwits like David Hume who could retire to the country to do thought experiments. As a general rule, philosophies were driven by historical events, they did not drive them. People saw what was happening around them and attempted to either makes sense of it or justify the change they wanted to occur; they didn't just happen to think up natural rights one day out of the blue.
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Most of all, let's keep ignoring that "science" as you know it is precisely a philosophy which owes its very existence to those greek assholes you so deride. You can't dismiss their contribution to human progress while simultaneously lauding western science. Well, you can, but it just makes you sound like an historically ignorant, anti-intellectual troglodyte.
Except that it doesn't. As Talya pointed out, science and philosophy are not the same thing and a major change that
has occurred is the realization that these people were utterly wrong to treat it as such.
Furthermore, lets not pretend as if humanity would have been in some sort of scientific paralysis without philosophical thinking. In point of fact, area after area of scientific study has been stripped away from philosophy as history has gone on and on. Archimedes would hardly have failed to determine the density of the crown had Socrates never existed.
So no, it doesn't make me sound like a "historically ignorant, anti-intellectual troglodyte." What it makes me sound like is someone who is not willing to let a bunch of two-bit wannabe intellectuals on the internet selecting a few lines and brief summaries from a small portion of what constitutes the body of philosophy and trying to use it as some internet tacical nuke to pretend that your areas of study somehow make you more educated than those of us that have studied different areas. The point of philosophy is not to allow people with large vocabularies and mysterious ever-expanding lists of credentials to lord it over those they suppose to be their lessers. Most of these philosophers that get cited so carelessly here would probably believe themselves to be far less authoritative than they are presented as. Socrates, after all, thought that the oracle's question was a paradox and did not consider himself wise except insofar as he was aware of his own ignorance.
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