uninverted comments on This Failing Earth - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 May 2009 04:09PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 24 May 2009 07:18:08PM 2 points [-]

Actually, a lot of the ancient Greek philosophers despised empiricism. All they trusted to prove anything was deduction; they didn't believe their senses at all.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 25 May 2009 02:22:13AM 5 points [-]

But a lot didn't.
Most notably, Aristotle's school and most of the pre-Socratics were empirical. So were the Epicurians, and in their own way the skeptics, cynics and stoics. Aristotle and his followers failed to actually BE empirical because they propounded beliefs on everything and only had time for a few experiments, but you know, the Greeks had good enough data to need lots of epicycles.