orthonormal comments on How to Draw Conclusions Like Sherlock Holmes - Less Wrong

-5 Post author: abcd_z 27 December 2011 01:29PM

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Comment author: orthonormal 27 December 2011 05:09:10PM 5 points [-]

Socrates didn't believe in Zeus- he was executed for atheism and corrupting the youth.

(His Ideal of the Good did have a theistic flavor, but you can't accuse him of believing in the Greek pantheon.)

Comment author: dlthomas 27 December 2011 06:21:17PM 4 points [-]

That he was executed for it does not necessarily mean it was true, particularly in this case. I don't think we have reliable enough reporting to tell one way or the other what was actually going on inside the man's head.

Comment author: orthonormal 28 December 2011 01:06:02AM 4 points [-]

Oh, come on. Thomas wrote a comment on the assumption that because Socrates lived in Greek times, he must have believed in Zeus. I've read about half of the many surviving primary sources on Socrates' life (the dialogues of Plato and plays of Aristophanes). According to that evidence, Socrates would be classified today as an atheist, agnostic or at worst Deist, and both his detractors and his students claimed he disbelieved in the Greek pantheon.

I wasn't making a claim with 100% certainty, because you can't do that, but if Omega had me stake my life to that assertion, I'd feel a lot better about it than about plenty of other historical claims.

Comment author: dlthomas 28 December 2011 01:21:32AM 1 point [-]

I was not demanding 100% certainty, I was demanding reasonable certainty. I am certainly not a scholar of the period, but I have done more than a little reading of my own, and my recalled interpretation clearly differs from yours. I don't know if we'll get further without citing sources in detail.

Comment author: Thomas 28 December 2011 01:03:48PM 1 point [-]

I did some readings, too! Socrates, for example, refers to accusations of being a believer in a Moon as a rock as ridiculous. For those ideas were commonly known as cheap and can be (text) bought on the market in Athens for a little money. Socrates was not keen for a cheap knowledge to distribute.

At least, that was his defense.

My dear Meletus, do you think you are prosecuting Anaxagoras? Are you so contemptuous of the jury and think them so ignorant of letters as not to know that the books of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae are full of those theories, and further, that the young men learn from me what they can buy from time to time for a drachma, at most, in the bookshops, and ridicule Socrates if he pretends that these theories are his own, especially as they are so absurd? (26d)

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