5 ideas
| 1748 | Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3 |
| 651 | Eurytus showed that numbers underlie things by making pictures of creatures out of pebbles [Eurytus, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Eurytus assigned numbers to things by taking some pebbles and using them to create likeness of the shapes of living things, such as a man or a horse. | |
| From: report of Eurytus (fragments/reports [c.400 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 1092b | |
| A reaction: Pythagorean. Digitising reality. |
| 5989 | Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea. |
| 20696 | We can approach knowledge of God by negative attributes [Maimonides] |
| Full Idea: You will come nearer to the knowledge and comprehension of God by the negative attributes. | |
| From: Moses Maimonides (The Guide of the Perplexed [1190], p.86), quoted by Brian Davies - Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion 2 'Negation' | |
| A reaction: Illustrated by grasping what a ship is by eliminating other categories it might belong to. The assumption is that you have a known and finite list - something like Aristotle's categories. Maimonides fears we know too little for positive attributes. |
| 19085 | Thinking of God as resembling humans results from a bad translation of Genesis 1:26 [Maimonides] |
| Full Idea: Mistranslation of 'image' has been the cause of a crass anthropomorphism because of the verse 'Let us make man in Our image after Our likeness' (Gen.1:26). They think God has the shape and outline of man, ..with face and hands like themselves. | |
| From: Moses Maimonides (The Guide of the Perplexed [1190], I.1) | |
| A reaction: It's interesting that Michelangelo still visualises God as an old man. The idea won't go away, presumably because God is understood as a 'person', in Locke's sense, though of a very special kind. |