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RobbBB comments on Greatest Philosopher in History - Less Wrong Discussion
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Major philosophical traditions seem to have arisen independently three times: In Greece (following Thales and Anaximander), in India (following the Upanishads and Śramaṇa), and in China (following the Confucian texts). That's a pretty high success rate for large, long-lasting literary civilizations. It also suggests a selection effect; philosophy-like things probably arise frequently and just aren't recorded as well in most cultures.
'Philosophy', though, is probably too coarse a category for us here. More interesting would be 'philosophy vibrant and robust enough to survive sophism', since sophists did a lot to weaken early Chinese and Indian thought as forerunners to science and rationalism.
And, as I noted, Plato and Aristotle founded Western philosophy about as much as Ronald Reagan invented liberal democracy. In both cases, the 'founder' in question appears some 200 years late.
Sorry, 'emergence' was probably the wrong word. 'Persistence' or 'development' is probably more to the point. The Chinese got unlucky with that madman of an emperor, but in any case I don't think anything coming from either the Indian or the Chinese tradition can really be compared to the European/Greek tradition after Aristotle. I'm not extremely confident in that judgement. My exposure to Indian and Chinese philosophy is not trivial, but obviously not extensive. I'd be pretty surprised to find that there's something in the Chinese or Indian tradition, at any period, that's anywhere in the ballpark of Kant, or even an early medieval commentary on Aristotle.
Maybe. I expect there's going to be a close enough relationship between literacy and philosophy that this isn't a safe claim.
Can you elaborate on that?
Maybe we disagree about Ronald Reagan, but it seems to me that Plato and Aristotle marked a radical upswing in sophistication. And both did found philosophy in many ways: everything that preceded them was comparatively narrow in scope, and generally lacked any systematic or thoughtful approach to ethics, logic, epistemology, etc.