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Read History Of Philosophy Backwards | Slate Star Codex

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Back when I was in college, my chief complaint about my philosophy course was that it spent all its time teaching stuff by Aristotle or Plato or Descartes that was just obviously wrong. I sort of annoyed my professors by constantly raising my hand and being like “Sorry, isn’t Plato completely confused here because now we know that actually X”, and my professor would be “Well, that’s a very interesting theory” and then continue teaching Plato. None of these classes were billed as “history of philosophy”, but as “philosophy” itself. I knew better than to expect to be taught a single thing that was definitely right, but I had kind of hoped they would limit it to things that weren’t totally outside what modern opinion would find plausible. As Dave Barry puts it: “I was terrible at history. I could never see the point of learning what people thought back when people were a lot stupider. For instance, the ancient Phoenicians believed that the sun was carried across the sky on the back of an

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