7/25/2023 0 Comments Diogenes featherless biped![]() ![]() The focus on finding truth through the exchange of logical arguments can be better than a more instructive approach. It’s this emphasis of dialectic over didactic which we can take away as a business lesson. We call this slightly competitive verbal jousting the Socratic Method, elenchus, in his honor. I’m not pointing fingers but Roy Thomas is a fraud and Stan Lee knew. Plato’s Republic is pretty much a comic book about an invincible man named Adeimantus who keeps striking out at people. Current consensus is that early Plato is a representation of the actual Socrates while late Plato is a kind of Socrates fan-fiction where Plato uses the characters to espouse his own thoughts. We have this idea of Socrates because we only know him through the writings of Plato (and Xenophon) where’s he’s always in discussion with other philosophers. Socrates thought that being in conversation helps you work issues out by inspecting or analysing another person’s point. Not Hegel’s dialectic or Marx’s dialectical materialism. It’s not so much that Socrates calmed people down with his soothing voice, but he believed that the route to truth was the dialectic. I want to apologise firstly for that gross over-simplification. That said, let’s kick off with my main man, the big dog… Socrates believes in talking problems out Source There has always been a great deal to learn from the world of the Ancient Greeks. Great early thinkers like Thomas Aquinas merged Catholic theology with Platonic thought, while later philosophical giants such as Hegel drew heavily from Aristotle’s work. Much Greek work was reintroduced to what we now think of as the West via increased trade with the Middle East across the 10th and 11th centuries onwards. Our understanding of ethics, politics, mathematics, and the natural sciences owe a lot to our ancient thinkers. Nonetheless, Greek thinkers contributed hugely to our understanding of the world. We should refrain from taking a solely Western perspective on Greek thinkers a narrative which often feels entrenched. This also means it’s important for us to recognize that the “Greeks” were to result in the Roman Empire to the west, the Seleucid Empire to the east, and the Ptolemaic Empire to the south. Hall points out that the closest we can find to a unified Greece would be Alexander the Great’s strong but short lived Macedonian Empire. They tolerated and even welcomed imported foreign gods. They were culturally elastic, and often freely intermarried with other peoples they had no sense of ethnic inequality that was biologically determined, since the concepts of distinct world “races” had not been invented. Greek-speakers lived in hundreds of different villages, towns and cities, from Spain to Libya and the Nile Delta, from the freezing river Don in the northeastern corner of the Black Sea to Trebizond. But it’s difficult because it’s a surprisingly disparate concept. What we refer to as Ancient Greece occurred around the period of 800 BC to 300 BC, and a little later possibly. Who are the Greeks and why are they important? Sourceįirstly, let’s just get the basics out of the way.Īncient Greece wasn’t really comparable to nation states of today or even to the Roman Empire, given that there was no one unified nation or organization of Greek speakers. In this Process Street article, we’re going to ancient Greece to check out 9 key philosophers and see what business lessons we can take from their lives and work. Whether it be recent history like The History of SaaS, 20th Century history like How Does a Franchise Work?, further back like The History of Surgical Processes, or even further back to the beginnings of civilization like How Were The Pyramids Built?, we often like to take lessons from the past. We, in the future, are in the fortunate position of being able to learn from their failures and successes if we choose to.Īnd this is why we choose to bang on about the past so much. These people have failed, learned, and then improved. In business, as in life, someone has already come before you and done the same thing. Yet, it’s equally true of smaller things. ![]() The quote is often used to talk about giant historical shifts or wars or something similar. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it – George Santayanaīig George, originally Jorge, makes a valid point with this one. ![]()
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