Many IQfyards are shilling on Euclid, but what REALLY is Euclid? What is the philosophy of Euclid
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Euclid
Many IQfyards are shilling on Euclid, but what REALLY is Euclid? What is the philosophy of Euclid
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Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
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Why not take some classes on Euclid? Asking 'what is x' is not as good as practicing to see the operations of 'x'
mmm Banana Bread
Euclid is relevant for philosophy as arguably no other non-philosopher is. His method for proof/demonstration was the gold standard for philosophical argumentation that most schools of philosopher up until Kant tried to reach. If you want to seriously study a field in pre-modern or early modern philosophy you have to most likely get familiar with Euclid's "Elements".
If you just want to jump into studying the Elements in a digestable form, I can highly recommand the free textbook "Euclid's Elements Redux". You can download it here:
https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/1071
Garbage pseud opinion. Spinoza did the Euclid meme and his Ethics is unreadable trash as a result.
You are clearly projecting. Where did I say that Euclid's method is actually "good" for philosophy? Obviously, Kant has refuted the last rationalists who tried your "Euclid meme". But as I have told already, if you want to study pre-modern / early modern philsophy -- you say it yourself with Spinoza as an example -- you have to be familiar with Euclid or will not understand what is going on.
All of Spinozas contemporaries including those greater than him also did the euclid meme, euclid was the required book to read up until recently so unless you can point out a text of his where he explicitly says euclid is why he sucks then I guess you must be moronic
If you're an intellectual historian maybe, otherwise its a waste of time.
Yes, it is ok to lack the ambition to aquire a basic well-rounded education.
Nice bait, but a well-rounded education focuses on whether philosophical arguments from the past still hold up. Euclid just follows his own arbitrary axioms and early modern philosophers have laughably bad takes on almost everything.
Better book.
Euclid is relevant for Dante because his entire worldview is centered around a perfect cosmology which is influenced by Euclidean geometry. Hell, Purgatory and Heaven each fulfill their role in numerical portion.
Euclid mostly took preexisting mathematical proofs, or known mathematical formulae, and sought to demonstrate them in a more coherent, atomic format. So, for example, the Pythagorean theorem was known when he wrote, and had been used all over the Greek and Near Eastern world for centuries, but no one had really "proven" it. As far as we can tell, Euclid seems to have started with these larger, functional and known theorems and mathematical tools and worked backwards through their fundamental parts into simpler and simpler statements, until he was able to decompose even the most complex formulae into concatenations of simple statements. So, while we know the Pythagorean Theorem is true because it works, he was able to start with statements as simple as "Two lines which are both equal to a the same third line are also equal to each other" and through combination work his way into massively complex and widely known theorems.
Another contribution of his was to apply terminology to the 'kinds' of statements that are used in constructing formulae, so he first normalized application of terms like 'axiom,' 'proposition,' 'postulate,' etc. Unfortunately, this terminology was used pretty variably by mathematicians who worked after him, like Apollonius and Nicomachus, but it at least set down in a repeatable way the fact that different components of a proof and different steps toward a theorem function in different ways depending on their relation to the rest of an equation.
Honestly, actually reading Euclid can be interesting but doesn't yield much without commentary. I would look for Sir Thomas Heath's Euclid and focus on his supporting materials, as he sketches out fully Euclid's enduring influence, as well as explaining in greater depth the value he contributed.
I love euclid, learning his geometry has been one if the best things I've done
Unfortunately, his proof of the Pythagorean theorem is as famous as it is clumsy. Although correct as far as it goes, it is unintuitive. As mathematicians say, it is not "from the book", meaning that there is some theoretical great book in which god has written down the simplest and best possible proof of each state of affairs, the one that provides the best and most useful insight into why something be like it do. Far better, and arguably the best (IMO) is the image of a square inscribed within a square, such that the four resulting congruent right trangles can, when translated, show that the big square's area being equal to that (the sum) of the two smaller squares is an invariant property for all right triangles, because you can slide the thing any way you please, and every right triangle is congruent to one of those thus generated.
Prove you read euclid or stfu
>not comparing Heath with the Bodleian library specimen
The number theory stuff toward the middle is a bit nicer but you really feel the lack of algebraic expression quite painfully. He also frequently examines one particular case which entails certain unstated assumptions shown in the pictures (Proclus sometimes enumerates these).
None of this is you, draw a figure and explain
Believe whatever you want to believe.
bit of a thread hijack but whats the best introductory mathematical text for someone who wants to put math into their philosophy?
Are you moronic?
Without Euclid, modern science wouldn't be possible.
Axiomatic document that is the basis to all mathematics.