Without any "for instances", there is nothing I can say about this post.
edit: it looks like I'm not going to get a coherent reply so "You are wrong because I say so" is something that I'm happy to ignore.
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Without any "for instances", there is nothing I can say about this post.
edit: it looks like I'm not going to get a coherent reply so "You are wrong because I say so" is something that I'm happy to ignore.
What exactly do you expect? You posted a very feeling driven argument - Rome didn't produce big name philosophers - which is 99% guaranteed to just devolve into very subjective views and nitpicking if anyone tries to refute it, so expect people to give awkward responses like his and now mine. You have very big names like Marcus Aurelius and Augustine representing Rome. You can see the Greek influence in eg Cicero but you can also see a post-roman evolution to Greek thought itself through eg Epictetus. Just because Rome adopts Greek and later Judaic philosophy rather than independently developing their own doesn't mean they don't both expand on them and submit plenty of great minds to philosophical thought.
Man has this thread gone way off track.
I expect someone who disagrees with me to say why because we're a bit too old for "You're wrong because I said so".
Now the reason why I said that Rome didn't produce any big name philosophers is pretty clear. They didn't. I could name medieval philosophers but they are hardly going to be figures equivalent to Plato, Socrates, Aristotle etc but they would all expand on what Greeks said. Augustine is more of theologist than a philosopher per se. The point being whilst Rome wasn't a philosophy desert, it wasn't much different from medieval Europe.
Given that I was replying to the point that Rome was superior to medieval Europe in terms of philosophy, it is hard to avoid making subjective comments yet you don't seem to have an issue with the original subjective point.
Honestly, even pre-renaissance I could name at least three or so very important medieval philosophers (Aquinas, Ockham, Anselm of Canterbury) without going into arabs. For the romans there'd be Boethius, Augustine, Plotinus, etc. All very important. (though you can easily get lost in semantics about cultural essentialism when trying to argue about whether or not a greek-speaker living in imperial Rome counts as greek or roman, or both)
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Rome did produce big name scholars. They have giants of philosophical history. Cicero is the single most important classical philosopher in regards to the renaissance and he very much belongs in the Rome camp. The fact that modern schooling happens to most heavily echo the Greek (Athenian really) names is not an accurate measurement of their philosophical clout, but the lingering love for them. It's not really surprising either; we live in societies that seek the emulate the distilled good aspects of their democratic thought, their culture is in British museums, and they flow very easily one after another when shoveling some philosophical history into a kid's textbook.
The dark ages weren't even devoid of philosophy, they were relatively sparse on records (hence "dark") so it's no surprise that people in that era (outside the ERE) get lost to history. Meanwhile, come Islam, you have tons and tons of brilliant philosophical minds and I daresay most English speakers would struggle to name more than a couple (if any). Hell I'd guess half of Americans couldn't name all of India's major religions let alone its major philosophers, and China's would consist of Confucius and maybe a Sun Tzu or Mao. Persia? None. Clearly, popularity and prominence in anglo or western education are not and should not be the sole measurement of philosophical achievement.
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Like I said I think a lot of those are theologists rather than philosophers per se though I appreciate that it's not always particularly clear cut.
But my broad point was that whilst both medieval Europe and Rome were inferior to Greece (wicked, evil subjective comment I know), it wasn't the case that Rome was obviously superior to medieval Europe in terms of philosophy. They were probably about on a par.
And that's my even broader point. Classicists coined the term "Dark Ages" and it's easier to talk about things that were lost when Rome fell but it's generally forgotten that many things actually improved during this era. It's not so much about Rome being a higher tech level as there were different tech trees.
It's more a case of philosophy having a fairly clear starting point or at least we have no record of it having existed prior to Classical Greece.
It's not simply a case of British museum bias because Roman culture is put on the same pedestal as Greek culture. We even have an umbrella term that categorises both "Classical". But the reasons why Greek and Roman culture are honoured are different.
It might be my subjective opinion that Greece>Rome but it's widely shared and yes I realise that doesn't make it objective but there just isn't an objective way of measuring these things.
Err I did mention that medieval European access to the likes of Avicena and Averroes was one of the reasons why medieval philosophy wasn't so inferior to Rome....
I could mention another few but it's bloody tricky spelling al-Kwarazeem and I'm certain I've got it wrong.
But that aside Rome is not some distant land, it is both closer geographically and in time to modern England than Classical Greece was it's hardly a cultural issue.
Medieval battles may have been small, but now we've got Internet battles that are down to 2 contestants. Obviously, now it's not about making a valid statement or point of view, it's about WINNING! Think of all those 1s and 0s at stake.
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Charlemagne couldn't take a steaming bath with thousands of other men.
Caracalla could - and did.
Rome wins again.
eh, not really. I mean, we could take the random chance that a cement genius emerges fully armed from the head of Zeus upon the scene in Aachen, but that's exceptionally unlikely. It took a LONG time to understand how cement works. going from zero to Pantheon is impossible in a single generation.
Charlemange could have totally invaded Cordoba and taken a steaming bath with his thousand closest friends. He just didn't want to trigger a coalition war. Paradox patched the game halfway through his life.
It's not going from zero. They already have the hard parts, architecture. The ancient Egyptians probably did go from zero to concrete in a single generation, the rule of Sneferu. But the first concrete pyramid had a partial collapse and the second one has a weird bent appearance when they realized halfway through they were building too steep. Concrete was easier then basic architecture about the steepness of a wall. What took almost 3000 years was going from concrete to all the other stonework in the Panthenon.
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Pantheon. Not Parthenon.
^ Pantheon - it's still the world's largest un reinforced concrete dome. It's been standing in earthquake ridden Rome for 1800 years.
^ Parthenon. Not a piece of concrete in sight not poured in the 20th century.
We're not talking about a single generation. The medieval era lasted centuries.
The main reason why concrete was not rediscovered for centuries is that medieval Europe was able to build magnificent structures without it.
That may not be true. Experts now reckon that the "bent pyramid" was actually deliberately built like that.
the first comparable structure built in Europe is the Duomo of Florence. The superb cathedral was left roofless for a generation before Brunelleschi vaulted it with his innovative double bricked pattern. He had to figure that out, and he did it a thousand years plus after the Pantheon was built. And after centuries of European tinkering with Gothic architecture.
Yeah and that's not even getting into the theological philosophers that were active in the early medieval era. Theology might be a bit of a bastard offspring of the philosophical tree in some people's eyes but it moved a lot of thinkers in that era, including some of the greats like Thomas Aquinas. The squabbling over the exact nature of deity and how many angels could dance on the head of a pin were not that interesting, but discussions of comparative morality were, and a lot of common European mores were hashed out in this era.
Dante, the summation of High Medieval thought, is far superior to any writer in the Roman poetic corpus. Fact.
When the Empire went into decline and people stopped building grand new urban architectural projects, it wasn't important to use concrete anymore and no-one bothered to keep the knowledge around. It's very easy to do. In the 20th century NASA somehow lost the knowledge of to build a Saturn V rocket after cancelling the Apollo programme. If we wanted to go to the moon again humans would have to design a new rocket from scratch.
When the Empire went into decline and people stopped building grand new urban architectural projects, it wasn't important to use concrete anymore and no-one bothered to keep the knowledge around. It's very easy to do. In the 20th century NASA somehow lost the knowledge of to build a Saturn V rocket after cancelling the Apollo programme. If we wanted to go to the moon again humans would have to design a new rocket from scratch.
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