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Jayson_Virissimo comments on Rationality quotes January 2012 - Less Wrong
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-Saint Thomas Aquinas
I wish I would have memorized this quote before attending university.
*This comment was inspired by Will_Newsome's attempt to find rationality quotes in Summa Theologica.
Summa Theologica is a good example of what happens when you have an excellent deductive system (Aquinas was great at syllogisms) and flawed axioms (a literal interpretation of the Bible).
Aquinas probably meant something different by "literal interpretation" than you think. For instance, I'm pretty sure he agreed with Augustine that the six days of creation were not literally six periods of 24 hours.
Out of curiosity, where did Augustine say that? It's interesting that anyone bothered doubting that the six days were literal before the literal interpretation became embarrassingly inconsistent with established science.
The first three "days" happened before the sun and moon were created, so a literal interpretation was problematic even then.
Eh, there's an easy hack around that: God already knew what the length of a day was before it created the sun and the moon.
The literalness or otherwise of the description wasn't really a issue of major debate one way or the other until there was a strong alternative hypothesis. Theres no political or signalling benefit to supporting a bizarre position when you have nothing to compare it too.
Yes. So, the question is, Which alternative hypotheses were on the table before Darwin, and why were they considered compelling?
If I was copying over rationality quotes from the Summa I'd have gone for way different stuff, Aquinas was a fucking beast of a rationalist. I was just testing LW. Karma is not nearly as useful as accurate beliefs.
I don't know about a beast, but in general philosophers from the Middle Ages are far underrated compared to, say, philosophers from the "Enlightenment".
I think thats a product of people being evaluated by the 'rightness' of their conclusions rather than the validity of their arguments, so someone who rationally derived a wrong conclusion from bad data is less respected than someone who found a conclusion similar to our present ones by bad reasoning or sheer chance (e.g. certain ancient philosophers).
Maybe, but that doesn't explain why there is so much misinformation about medieval philosophy in popular sources. For instance, as Will Newsome tried to point out, Saint Thomas Aquinas was arguably a compatibilist with respect to the problem of free will, but I was taught in university that the "right" solution to the problem of free will (compatibilism) had to wait for a cognitive scientist (specifically, Daniel Dennet). There are numerous issues where thinkers from the Middle Ages did come to roughly the "right" answer, but that moderns teach that they didn't. There has got to be more to the story.
I am surprised by this. The proto-compatibilism of Aquinas might be little-known, but I thought it was common knowledge that compatibilism has a long pedigree before the late 20th century, including most logical positivists like Ayer and earlier British empiricists like Hume (I would include Spinoza as well). What Dennett gives is a version informed by modern cognitive science, but not especially novel in its basic features.