And generally speaking most of the Delphic maxims still have their validity despite the thousands of years that separate them from us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphic_maxims
Xenia plays a very important role in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The idea of obligations running in both directions makes it a much richer concept than simple “hospitality.”
Xenia is all about the relationship between the host and guest. Both parties are expected to be well-behaved and generous in their interaction. There was also an expectation that such kindeness should be returned if the opposite situation were ever to arrive. The concept was also inter-generational, with family lines maintaining a mutual bond created through reciprocal hospitality of each other. In book 6 of the Iliad we see Diomedes and Glacaus have an interaction which makes them realise their family has a history of xenia going back multiple generations which instantly prompts a bond and an exhange of armour in a symbloic gesture of mutual trust and comradery.
These obligations seemed to be very important to the culture at the time. So much so that it was considered the domain of Zeus (Zeus Xenios) to protect strangers seeking shelter. There are plenty of examples in myth of people breaking the sanctity of xenia and receiving divine punishment for it.
Another interesting fact is the difference in quality of the armours exchanged. One was incredibly valuable (gold or bronze if I’m not mistaken) and the other one was relatively poor.
Xenia was such a powerful social norm that for a warrior, in the heat of battle, is perfectly fine to temporarily be nude, exchange your finest armour for a lower grade one, and still be happy about it.
Oops I was mistaken; The article I linked is just a review of the book (and another book). It was Emily Watson's Introduction to her transation of The Odyssey that I was thinking about that touched heavily on xenia. You will be able to read it in the kindle sample https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer-ebook/dp/B06XKNHGN1/ .
Clearly the author means "revived in modern intellectual discourse in the English language". And some of them already have, e.g. eudaimonia as described by the ancient Greeks is brought up all the time in the literature on "positive psychology".
It wasn't very clear to me, as "revive" has a connotation of "in the context it originally was". If I said "we should revive the dodo" I wouldn't immediately imagine a US zoo.
I was lucky to have taken a greco-roman class in (public) high school and consider myself fortunate that the terms 'arete' 'oikos' and 'aidos' were covered. Fundamental to who I (hope) I am today.
I have been several times confused by the word "arete" - because in French (arête) it's a kind of rock formation and has been taken up by the rock climbing community, and in Greek (ἀρετή) it's "excellence."
There's a coffee shop near me, attached to and co-operated by a climbing gear store, called arête. The proximity to the climbing store suggests one interpretation, but it is an excellent coffee shop.
arêter is a common verb in French that means to stop. It is a cognate of to arrest.
The ê before the t is evidence betraying the disappearance of a historic s, which is still present in English cognates:
hôpital -> hospital
forêt -> forest
The word arête means edge, similar to bord.
Not every bord is an arête; only some protruding ridge or sharp edge. It seems to be used for geological ridges, like mountain crests and such, but evidently it can also refer to the blade of a knife or sharp too or such.
French arête in the sense of "ridge" comes from Old French areste and Latin arista "bristle, fishbone", whose etymology is unclear [1] (Etruscan has been sometimes proposed, among other hypotheses), but which is certainly not related to Greek arete.
Interestingly, thesaurus.com lists arete as an English word that is a synonym for excellence. But when you look up that word, it gives crag and crest as synonyms.
This is because it's stripping the circumflex accent somewhere. English dictionaries list arête.
According to good old etymonline.com (thank you, Douglas!) the unaccented form exists in English, as well as the separate word of Greek origin:
A similar situation exists with the word parity which has two entirely different meanings: "number of pregnancies" (where the word shares etymology with parent and parentage) or equal status, from Latin paritas.
This ultimately traces back to a homonym in Proto Indo-European:
Αρετή is more than excellence. Philosophers of the time go quite in length about its meaning, its a mix of excellence, honour, good, nobiety(?). I admittedly have hard time finding exact synonyms in english, but the point is that αρετή according to I think Aristoteles (need fact checking) is the ultimate virtue to strive for.
In Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, Pirsig (or perhaps one should say Phaedrus, his former self from before he got electroshock therapy) stumbles upon arete while trying to define quality.
I found his two books very interesting and I had not heard of arete until reading him, even though I had read Homer (in Spanish).
Excellent is a perfectly usable translation, if you extend it to the Bill&Ted interpretation: "be excellent to each other". It's just that excellent tends to be used in a much narrower way in present-day English.
Well, apart from the indigenous people, the colonists (who took the land by force) and the slaves who were brought here against their will, the vast majority of the population of the United States were able to come here due to the liberal immigration policies of the US, which can be seen as xenia.
Is there a Greek work for wanting to slam the door on others after your family made it through?
(I expect this thread is getting off-topic, though.)
If one could, somehow, peer into the soul of everyone who self-describes as conservative and against unrestricted immigration, I doubt a general unanimity of motive would be seen.
It's called out quite a lot, just not literally with the word akrasia. When it is called out, you're being "judgemental" or restricting someone's freedom/autonomy, which is of course sacrosanct to moderns.
Those responding in such a way are not in fact acting against their better judgement - they lack a judgment better than the one they have, therefore the criticism is moot.
I don't know if we're talking about the same thing, but to me it seems like there's potentially two issues at play here: self control to act in accordance with one's supposed morals, and, the changing of the presumptive morals of a society.
For self control, I feel like it's universal human experience to always find this falling short. Throughout history we do things we know we shouldn't, as in, we agree they're bad for our health or unethical, but we're really good at doing it anyway for whatever reason. Reasons like forgetting in the heat of the moment or dreaming up some unreasonable justification. So, to say there's something new in modern society about this, I don't know if I agree. If anything I think each individual's ability to manage this is under direct attack by increasingly effective mechanisms manipulating our cognitive biases and flaws, such as notification bells and other UX dark/whatever patterns.
As for the changing of presumptive morals, this I feel is quite noticeable in modern society, and I wonder if when someone appears "offended for being called out," what's really happening is a misinterpretation of their morals. In fact they're acting out their morals just fine, and there's a disagreement.
The example of this I most often think about is laziness. I personally feel bad if I spend a day at home watching netflix or whatever. I think I should instead be reading my HUGE backlog of books I want to get through, or work on my personal projects, or go clean the local park, or do literally anything. If you catch me watching netflix, that's a failure to act out my morals.
That said, I don't have the strongest argument for my morals. After all, what's all that wrong with spending a lifetime sitting at home watching netflix? Honestly? Do we need to have massive expectations for all the billions of humans? Maybe we do, and maybe the person works really hard during the day, and that's good enough? Or maybe our technology has advanced to the point where perhaps it's just fine for us to relax and float on the river of life. In fact maybe technology has nothing to do with it, maybe it was always ok to do nothing. In Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway," there's a subset of the culture that exclusively do nothing, contribute nothing, so as to lessen the guilt of hardworkers when it's time for them to take a break: "Relax, there's no way you can be lazier than us after all!"
What examples of people being offended, for being called out for what, did you have in mind?
> What examples of people being offended, for being called out for what, did you have in mind?
Just very simple things, like if you were to suggest to someone evidently overweight to perhaps move around a little more or watch their diet, they (or other people for that matter) are likely to call you judgemental and be offended.
Strictly speaking you are being judgemental - assuming of course that like most people that say such things without invitation that you’re acting on a limited set of knowledge about that individual and their circumstances.
It’s one thing to state that collectively, people are more obese these days than in the past, and that certain proscriptions (food intake type and quantity, activity type and quantity) are called for. In most cases such statements would be unremarkable and get broad agreement. But you don’t know me or what I’ve been doing/trying etc, so on what basis do you think you can make a comment like that about me and expect me not to be offended? I find that expectation quite remarkable. It’s not that people are more offended these days as much as it is people find it perfectly acceptable to do and say what in the old days would be considered “rude” or “impolite”. Civility has been upended by “truth telling”. Can’t say I’m a huge fan tbh.
Which is a totally understandable reaction, since you overstepped a line and pretended you have the right to judge others. In my book, you only have the right to do this with your children, until they are 18 or something. After that, you are just being a dick.
Hey no offense intended, but this comment seems hypocritical and self-contradictory. Are you claiming?
1. Nobody has a right to judge others.
2. I judge everybody who disagrees with me to be dicks.
Either your own rulebook applies to everyone except you (hypocrisy) or your premise is false (selfcontradction). If you hold that people should not pretend they have the right to think at others, then you should stop doing so yourself. Or is it not the freedom of thinking but the freedom of speech you dislike? Of course because you yourself enjoy your right to judge others (and have done so here) it follows that your premise is false. Thus, everyone has a right to judge others. QED
The opposite claim is less wrong: nobody has a right to be free of judgement from others. To argue otherwise reduces to: I don't like shame, so I deny its validity by blaming others. Being shameless is some kind of behavior disorder predicate, not a virtue! For example here is some random guy in Arkansas who writes about these topics:
"when disturbed characters do perceive that someone is judging them in a negative manner, they easily think that it’s the other person who has the problem."
The social implications topic came up centuries ago in the Federalist v Antifederalist debate. Where IIRC there was a line of reasoning that the new USA didn't need certain organs of power (law enforcement?) because the 'coercive force of shame' within communities was sufficient to self regulate. I haven't read this stuff for decades but as I recall the counter argument went like: yeah maybe for you guys up north but that only works in your homogeneous post-puritan monoculture... down here in the south we have slave revolts to suppress, er property rights to enforce.
On a lighter note, this whole topic reminds me of:"oh you strenuously object?" from A Few Good Men:
Ah, then, this sounds to me of an example of misaligned ethics (you and example overweight person).
I suppose you could argue about the health and longevity benefits of being low bodyfat, restricting calories, regular cardiovascular activities, these are scientifically documented... however, allow me to assume for a second that you haven't maximized these to their utmost. Do you, personally, fast to the maximum recommended amount, do cardiovascular to the maximum recommended amount, maintain a super cut bodyfat %, etc? Maybe you do quite well, but do you do it perfectly? Never drink alcohol (increased risk of cancer for even 1 drink a week)? Apply sunscreen in all cases you're in the sun (melanoma)? Avoid eating meats (cancer, cardiovascular disease)?
I'm going to assume no, because, what a life, right? You probably make some sacrifices to your longevity, for a life that's a little more chaotic and fun. So now the question is just, to what degree? I think that degree of variability is high, and I think it's perfectly normal to be fat and rational. I'm an example, lol, because I was once 15% bodyfat, 2pl8 lifter, 5k every other day kind of guy, and now I'm 10kg overweight. The upside is I get to eat cake, which I am obsessed with, and sleep in. I found a balance I'm happy with. I fluctuate towards and away 10kg overweight, never over, and have a life I like.
So when you see me fat, are you going to say I've lost control of my life? I think I have things under control. I think my ethics are in line with my actions.
That's part 1 of my thoughts, part 2 is a challenge to you to take some of my values that I'm more than happy to defend vigorously as ethical, and ask yourself (and tell us if you're open to it, I'm curious) what you'd feel if I asked you these questions:
1. If you live in a place that has elections, have you voted in every single election for which you've been capable, after spending a decent amount of time researching candidates first?
2. Do you prioritize taking public transit? Or, bicycling and walking, or similar?
3. The times you drive a private vehicle, do you rigorously give right of way to pedestrians and bicycles, even if it's not strictly legally required to do so?
4. You don't ever litter, right?
5. You regularly attend civil rights protests, right?
6. You write your representative about civil rights and other issues frequently, don't you?
7. You push for open-sourcing any code you write with stakeholders, yeah? And you open source all your personal project code?
8. You support strikers by not buying goods from companies undergoing a strike, and not crossing a picket line, right?
9. You are a vocal LGBT ally, right? And you challenge family and friends when they voice bigoted ideas?
10. If you are a founder or similar, do you follow the principles of fairness in labor by either profit sharing, or incorporating as a co-op?
11. You don't buy from companies that engage in slavery, wage theft, exploitative labor practices, or extreme environmental harm, right? Generally speaking, you check into this before buying from these companies? And you only shop local businesses, rather than monopolizing companies like Walmart?
If you find these questions surprising, tiresome, offensive, annoying, stupid, or ridiculous, can you see how someone might feel the same if you suggested they reprioritize their life around weight loss? Because it's not just a question of ethics and capability of self control for implementing ethics, it's also a question of prioritizing certain ethics.
Obv I wasn't talking about going up to strangers and telling them to put the fork down.
Furthermore: your questions are about ethics, which mine may differ from yours. I wouldn't be offended by such questions and in fact I could quite vividly debate all of them.
However I may be concerned over someone's weight especially if they are close to me, for the objectively indisputable reason of health.
In my opinion, there is no inherent good or bad when it comes to working or not working. Both are ways to lead a life. If that life is good depends on what you expect from it. You can work and work until you drop and be deeply dissatisfied. And you can just chill, regularly almost starve. But be happy. But most people feel they have the biggest chance for happiness by trying to balance these extremes. Most people tend to lean towards the "work too much" side of things until they drop.
We hate people who game the system by not working unless they gamed it in the right way (depends on who you ask).
I think you misquoted. The actual meaning is weakness of will to act according to one's better judgement.
From the wiki article ""lacking command" or "weakness", occasionally transliterated as acrasia or Anglicised as acrasy or acracy) is a lack of self-control, or acting against one's better judgment."
Seems similar to the experience of those with executive function disorders, where the sufferer knows that they should be doing an important task, but they prioritise some other less important but more engaging or satisfying task. (In other words: procrastination.)
I guess it would be characterized by someone noticing water seeping into their house in the dead of night and then going back to sleep instead of trying to stem the flow.
Jon Elster’s ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ is about akrasia, more or less; in situations where we know we are likely to act against our own best interests, how do we credibly commit ourselves to doing the right thing, like Ulysses binding himself to the mast? One of the best social science texts I ever read
Thanks for that resource. On doing a bit of digging, it seems that Elster's more recent `Ulysses Unbound` expands on the themes of `Ulysses and the Sirens` and might be a better first read. Are you familiar with it?
I mean they have to live with the dissonance within their soul at the end of the day. Which I think Socrates was getting at with regards to how it can end up teaching what is actually in their best interests.
I'm always amused by the fact that I feel like every few generations invents a new term for akrasia, including but not limited to 'moral incontinence' and more recently 'the value-action gap'.
One of my favorite moments at Oracle was when we were on a business trip and had to get ready at 6:00 am (don't ask why). I said, "Ah, the rosy-fingered dawn!" and one guy actually got the reference.
============= This is Latin, not Greek, but ===========
Supposedly "Cicero" was pronounced "KICK-er-oo"
I don't care. I'm going to keep saying SISS-er-oh.
The pronunciation of Latin will vary depending on whether you're relying on classical (restored/reconstructed) or ecclesiastical pronunciation. "Cicero" in the former is [ˈkɪkɛroː], whereas in the latter, it is [ˈtʃitʃero] which is close to the English pronunciation. In most European languages, the pronunciation is closer to the latter (e.g., the Polish "Cyceron"), while, e.g., in Greek it is closer to the former (Κικέρων).
Not a term, but I’ve always found the fact that AG had two terms that map to nothing, e.g. my two favorite sayings: “toi sophoi xenon ouden” (the wise man is foreign to nothing) and “meden agan” (nothing in excess), one of the three Delphic Maxims: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphic_maxims
>Ou is the negative adverb for facts and statements, negating both single words and sentences. Mê is the negative used in prohibitions and expressions of doubt meaning "not" and "no." As ou negates fact and statement; mê rejects, οu denies; mê is relative, ou absolute; mê subjective, ou objective.
The particles are found in the two words for "nothing" you mentioned, ouden/meden. Meden is usually found in imperatives, oaths, i.e. something you want to never happen, while ouden simply states that something never happens.
I think this is close to the real meaning of "meek" as used in "the meek shall inherit the earth". It's not meekness as we know it but being gentle(manly|womanly).
From your link - "such as temperance, moderation, prudence, purity, decorum, and self-control."
Given the rise of AI, I think "enchiridion" might be a good one to start using, based on Stephenson's Diamond Age.
> From Ancient Greek ἐγχειρίδιον (enkheirídion), from ἐν (en, “in”) + χείρ (kheír, “hand”) + a neuter suffix.
And given how news, media, entertainment and politics always gravitates towards the least common denominator of knowledge and education forcing the rest of us to deal with both demagogues and TV shows about wealthy housewives, "ochlocracy" (mob rule) is another that needs a revival.
> From Middle French ochlocratie, from Ancient Greek ὀχλοκρατία (okhlokratía), from ὄχλος (ókhlos, “multitude, crowd”) + κράτος (krátos, “power”).
These are great suggestions. Adding these words to your own internal vocabulary is totally worth it for self-reflection.
Less seriously, a grammatical construction I wish we had in English is the Latin future passive participle, typically ending in -ndus, -nda, -ndum. It means that something needs/ought to be done.
For instance "Amanda" is "she who must be loved."
So if someone asks you why your feature isn't in production yet, you can say the pull request is reviewandum.
Or you can tell the kids that the trash is emptianda, or the dog is walkandus.
These are kind of lame examples, but once you get the idea you can find places where it'd be convenient several times a day.
Indeed. For a different angle on the nuance, you will often see the gerundive translated as "worthy of". Miranda, worthy of beholding. Amanda, worthy of love.
"Must" can mean "required" or "to have an obligation to". Thus, for example, we are morally obligated to love our children. But "love" here is not meant in the desiring sense of love (eros, another Greek word) in which one desires something for one's own objective good, or even in the modern squishy sense of having fleeting pleasant or affectionate feelings for. Rather, something like agape (still another Greek word) is meant as parents raise their children primarily for the good and benefit of the children and the common good, not their own self-interest or their own pleasure, even if those elements are present or result secondarily (i.e., the pleasure of selfless acts is not the motive behind selfless acts for that would render them no longer selfless and the pleasure or liberty from self that could follow would not obtain).
On the subject of grammar, Greek grammar (ancient? I assume this one has carried into modernity) has a handy construction I like in the form of the particles μέν and δέ, used to highlight counterpoint/point through something closer to grammar than word semantics. You might see it translated as "on the one hand x, on the other hand y" or "while x, y" or "x, but y", in English, it loses a lot of its punch. Like the verbal act of holding your hands up to demonstrate in a gesture the balance of the ideas.
Yep, Ancient Greek has great particle game that English just can’t translate at all.
And as you say, they’re really like gesture words, which make so much sense, especially as text is now read/written without any human speaking behaviour at all.
Arguably emojis fill this need, but I’m unconvinced.
Coptic had these as loan words, although whether they were literary or used in daily discourse I don't know. Afaik modern Greek does not have these very handy little words sadly.
I never got too too far into the language, so I absolutely believe there are more layers and variances to the meaning than the basic glosses I learned! But that feels like it fits in the counterpoint/point kind of framework, I think? Just with an additional kind of "temporal" or "ordering" connotation.
Some of those are contextual, but "ought to be done" is certainly future tense, it's referring to a future activity. It's a pretty apt example for future passive, juxtaposing the future active "will be done."
Or at least that's how I reason it. English is rather hard to analyze sometimes.
> "I am having a party next week." That's a present continuous sentence referring to a future activity.
What about "I will have a party next week" or "there will be a party next week"?
> Some argue that English doesn't even have a future tense.
I learned this as: There's no language feature that denotes future tense (like a suffix), but it's done via grammar (and context).
I have to acknowledge that I'm not the right person to be debating this. Like most native speakers, my grasp of the rules often boils down to whether something "sounds" right.
Reminds me of one thing I loved about Esperanto. It has (almost) all the participles you could ever need: past, present, and future, in both passive and active voices. So "to love"/"ami" would have
# Passive
amita - to have been loved
amata - to be loved
amota - to be going to be loved
# Active
aminta - to have been loving
amanta - loving
amonta - to be going to be loving
Passive and active are only distinguished by "-t- / -nt-". Anyhow, all of these are effectively adjectives, and can be combined with "esti (to be)" in any tense to express a huge variety of meanings:
Li estis amita - He had been loved
Ŝi estas amanta - She is loving
Mi estos amota - I will be going to be loved
Notice that generally the vowels "i/a/o" map to past, present, and future respectively, both for tenses of verbs and participles.
You can create 9 combinations from these simple shapes (or 18 of you count passives), and if you draw them on a time-line they will correspond to distinct sub-sets.
There also some participles like "amanda/amindo/amenda" but I have simply forgotten what they each mean. I think one of them mean "worthy of being loved", another meaning "should be loved".
I've mentioned this before on HN, but one example of this I saw in the field was "abc_delenda" tables, which contain ids or records to be deleted. The naming appeared unnecessarily obscure to me at the time, but I find myself going back to it in subsequent jobs because it is a nice and concise way to express the intent.
They might be just removing "to be", that's what I love about English you can break and abuse it and it still mostly makes sense. You could even drop the
"the" and "-ed" from those phrases and most people would still understand what you mean by "dog needs walk".
yeah, they are just dropping "to be". But "dog needs walk" sounds wrong, whereas "the dog needs walked" sounds normal to the people who use it. I don't know whether there is a reason almost nobody says "dog needs walk", but I don't know much about linguistics :)
The construction works best with words of actual classical origin. When dealing with a supermarket delivery I do sometimes refer to the things that need to go into the fridge as the "refrigeranda".
(There are some fairly ordinary English words derived from this construction. The agenda is those things that need to be done. The legend (of a map, graph, etc.) is the stuff you need to read.)
I coined the term "Xenoserver" back in 1999, for a paper in IEEE HotOS proposing an architecture for allowing systems in core networks to safely accept and execute code from untrusted users (for a fee, of course!): https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/1999-hoto...
I was inspired by the word "xenos" (meaning both stranger and guest, or in combination a stranger who you invited into your home) rather than the word "xenia" for the general concept of hospitality extended to such a stranger [EDIT: since I wasn't familiar with the word "xenia"].
The Xenoserver project at Cambridge University developed this idea, and eventually focused around the hypervisor, which took on the name Xen.
I'm fond of polis, which we do use as part of words like metropolis but not on its own. It's the word for the Greek city-state but also means the citizens or social fabric.
It's why we have the two sayings "Man is a political animal" and "Man is a social creature." They are different translations of the idea that "Man is a creature of the polis."
I also would think they are pronounced differently, but a quick Google isn't clarifying how polis is pronounced and my two classes of classical Greek taken eons ago aren't sufficient background for me to be confident about my pronunciation of the word.
If anyone could cast light on the pronunciation of polis, that would be cool.
I thought the stress would be on the first syllable.
I also thought this means the second syllable should be a short i, consistent with how we pronounce metropolis.
Because police stresses the second syllable, it sounds like ee not a short i. So I didn't readily make the connection between the two words in part because they are spelled different and in part because I don't think they sound alike.
As a Greek, living in Greece i second most of the terms. Know thyself (γνώθι σαυτόν) is a big one as well. Ancient Greeks were masters of psychology, i.e. what kind of animal humans are. Are we a good creature by nature or a bad one?
The more we study chimps the more we realize that we, as their descendants, are pretty vicious as well. Education by our parents, schools and social circles play a big role, to keep in check that viciousness. How much is any ones guess!
In my opinion we are gonna solve many of the psychological problems of humans in single digit years in the near future. Dr. Daniel Amen, have stated that after examining a hundred thousand brain scans of humans, every single psychological problem people have, is observed in brain scans, as reduced electrical signals in the brain. Problems like suicidal thoughts, depression you name it. Every one of them, means the brain do not fire enough electrical signals.
The best natural substance in the world, which we produce here in Greece from the ancient times, to solve that problem, is saffron. It is on par with the best synthetic anti-depressants, and probably better. Dr. Amen eats saffron every day, and i do as well.
So there is a solution for every person on the planet to be genius 1000x or a 1.000.000x, never suffer psychological ailments, and that is to eat a lot of saffron every day. Then most of the virtues in that list, will come natural to humans.
Indeed it doesn't mean that, you are right. We share so many genes, so loosely speaking, we are their descendants. Which we are not, but for all practical purposes, we can approximately find correlations between our species, and that one, better than any other.
We are descended from chimps in the same way that I am descended from my cousin.
Edit: I'm realizing this could be a language barrier. "Descendent" is the inverse of "ancestor". A descendent is directly downward in lineage from an ancestor.
Oh, yeah, maybe that is. So with chimps we share a common ancestor. Even more accurate, chimps are our closest relative species living on earth today, with which we share the more close/recent ancestor.
Bonobos are exactly as close to us as chimpanzees (by descent). Maybe the “default“ human behavior, independent of the last x thousand years of culture, is closer to one or the other, but I don’t think there’s a good a priori reason to assume that we are “naturally” more chimp-like than bonobo-like.
I agree. Maybe the same variations between chimps and bonobos are exhibited between humans. So some of us are more like chimps, while others more like bonobos. Ancient Greeks said that "In peace, we are the best of the animals, in war, we are the worst".
Your own link below implies this is an open debate; that it is at least arguable that the CHLCA is a species that would be correctly classified in Pan i.e. a chimp.
Yep, indeed i read it as well, there is not enough evidence to claim that for sure, but taxonomy is difficult even for living species on earth today. I thought, let's suppose for the sake of the argument, that Pan are different species.
I strongly recommend "You're Basically The Hagfish of Reptiles..." [1]. It will make your head spin.
> "As a Greek, living in Greece i second most of the terms. Know thyself (γνώθι σαυτόν) is a big one as well. Ancient Greeks were masters of psychology, i.e. what kind of animal humans are. Are we a good creature by nature or a bad one?"
Cool! I hope we can learn from this rich vocabulary the Greeks have developed to describe and to understand our common nature.
> "So there is a solution for every person on the planet to be genius 1000x or a 1.000.000x, never suffer psychological ailments, and that is to eat a lot of saffron every day."
But if this was really significant, you'd expect saffron-producing/eating countries to stand out. Iran is #1, are they really all 1,000,000x happy geniuses?
Actually it is very expensive. I am talking about consuming a lot of grams every day, 50 to 100 grams, which is not a lot given it is roughly 1/1000 of the weight of a normal human, but it is the luxury of a millionaire for the moment. It is true that we most probably don't see any statistical correlation between saffron consumption and intelligence, especially in a country level, but i would argue, that the dosage makes the genius.
Some of the virtues of the article, are a state of mind anyway, that's why i mention saffron. Many people are eating too much, only to feel better. Food has certainly the ability to alter our state of mind, which in some cases ends up in obesity.
Virtues in the article, like apatheia, ataraxia, eudaimonia include in their meaning, not indulging in every pleasure in excess, and food is one of them. Well, that can be automated by producing more saffron and lowering it's price.
I haven't seen anywhere mentioning any toxicity to the spice. Everywhere i looked no side effects. That costs too much money for me anyway, to eat a lot of it, and i guess for most people. A millionaire who values his brain too much, may try it. Someone like PG or Marc Andersen.
[edit]I would love to see PG coming back, programming a new Common Lisp by hand, and writing a 1000 page manual just by himself, if he gets a supercharged brain. GPT and Artificial intelligence will be left back in the dust.
Well, given our modern understanding of chemicals in the brain, many of the states of mind Ancient Greeks advocated for, can be summarized as: avoid short dopamine hits. The brain really loves dopamine hits, it stimulates electrical activity. I am sure that there is a way, to stimulate electrical activity, without using machines, a natural way to stimulate our brain 1000x and 1.000.000x just by using some kind of food or natural occurring substance. In my opinion that problem will be solved by saffron.
How many people drive their car full speed without being in a hurry? Or how many people eat more than their energy requirements dictate to? I think there is a solution to that, and that is saffron.
I've been listening to Dr. Michael Sugrue's lectures on Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues, and many of these words tend to come up often. I like his descriptions best. His one on arete would challenge this definition of "excellence of any kind" to be one of a specific kind. He uses an example of a horse trainer striving towards arete to become the best moral "techne"(technician) based on the knowledge they continuously seek.
Specifically:
To make a distinction between technē and arete, the value of technē is the end product while arete values choosing the action that promotes the best moral good.
my favorite of this is Episteme - i spend a lot of time thinking about how we know what we think we know, and wish that more people did as well before mouthing off completely incorrect or unexamined beliefs (esp not understanding when the dependencies under which they are true, are no longer true).
p.s. TIL that Odysseus was forced to be a sex slave for 7 years?
Yes. He was captured by Calypso, and held on an island against his will. It's said he wept bitterly every night at the shore, longing to be back with his wife. He was not in control, he was not happy, he was not free to leave.
The Ancient Greek word “δαίμων” referred to a lesser god linked to a place (like the spirit of the hearth) or a person (like a guardian angel). Latin took this idea into the related word “genius” which in modern Romance languages can mean either an intelligent person or a person’s mood. In Spanish, “estar de mal genio” means “to be in a bad mood”. So then to have “ευδαιμονία” can mean “to be in a good mood” although it’s probably meant to be more permanent than that.
I am reminded of the name of Othello's wife, Desdemona, which shares a similar etymology (in fact they are antonyms of one another). The sense is "ill-fated" [0]
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadwas one i thought would be on there.
And generally speaking most of the Delphic maxims still have their validity despite the thousands of years that separate them from us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphic_maxims
These obligations seemed to be very important to the culture at the time. So much so that it was considered the domain of Zeus (Zeus Xenios) to protect strangers seeking shelter. There are plenty of examples in myth of people breaking the sanctity of xenia and receiving divine punishment for it.
Xenia was such a powerful social norm that for a warrior, in the heat of battle, is perfectly fine to temporarily be nude, exchange your finest armour for a lower grade one, and still be happy about it.
See also their translator's note to their translation
There's a coffee shop near me, attached to and co-operated by a climbing gear store, called arête. The proximity to the climbing store suggests one interpretation, but it is an excellent coffee shop.
The ê before the t is evidence betraying the disappearance of a historic s, which is still present in English cognates:
hôpital -> hospital
forêt -> forest
The word arête means edge, similar to bord.
Not every bord is an arête; only some protruding ridge or sharp edge. It seems to be used for geological ridges, like mountain crests and such, but evidently it can also refer to the blade of a knife or sharp too or such.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/arista#Latin
This is because it's stripping the circumflex accent somewhere. English dictionaries list arête.
According to good old etymonline.com (thank you, Douglas!) the unaccented form exists in English, as well as the separate word of Greek origin:
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=arete
A similar situation exists with the word parity which has two entirely different meanings: "number of pregnancies" (where the word shares etymology with parent and parentage) or equal status, from Latin paritas.
This ultimately traces back to a homonym in Proto Indo-European:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/*pere-
The number-of-pregancies parity traces back to (1) and "even parity; reaching parity" to (2).
One parity traces back
I found his two books very interesting and I had not heard of arete until reading him, even though I had read Homer (in Spanish).
Is there a Greek work for wanting to slam the door on others after your family made it through?
(I expect this thread is getting off-topic, though.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia
> Weakness of will to act against one's own better judgement.
It's everywhere in modern society, and I'd love to see it called out more.
For self control, I feel like it's universal human experience to always find this falling short. Throughout history we do things we know we shouldn't, as in, we agree they're bad for our health or unethical, but we're really good at doing it anyway for whatever reason. Reasons like forgetting in the heat of the moment or dreaming up some unreasonable justification. So, to say there's something new in modern society about this, I don't know if I agree. If anything I think each individual's ability to manage this is under direct attack by increasingly effective mechanisms manipulating our cognitive biases and flaws, such as notification bells and other UX dark/whatever patterns.
As for the changing of presumptive morals, this I feel is quite noticeable in modern society, and I wonder if when someone appears "offended for being called out," what's really happening is a misinterpretation of their morals. In fact they're acting out their morals just fine, and there's a disagreement.
The example of this I most often think about is laziness. I personally feel bad if I spend a day at home watching netflix or whatever. I think I should instead be reading my HUGE backlog of books I want to get through, or work on my personal projects, or go clean the local park, or do literally anything. If you catch me watching netflix, that's a failure to act out my morals.
That said, I don't have the strongest argument for my morals. After all, what's all that wrong with spending a lifetime sitting at home watching netflix? Honestly? Do we need to have massive expectations for all the billions of humans? Maybe we do, and maybe the person works really hard during the day, and that's good enough? Or maybe our technology has advanced to the point where perhaps it's just fine for us to relax and float on the river of life. In fact maybe technology has nothing to do with it, maybe it was always ok to do nothing. In Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway," there's a subset of the culture that exclusively do nothing, contribute nothing, so as to lessen the guilt of hardworkers when it's time for them to take a break: "Relax, there's no way you can be lazier than us after all!"
What examples of people being offended, for being called out for what, did you have in mind?
Just very simple things, like if you were to suggest to someone evidently overweight to perhaps move around a little more or watch their diet, they (or other people for that matter) are likely to call you judgemental and be offended.
It’s one thing to state that collectively, people are more obese these days than in the past, and that certain proscriptions (food intake type and quantity, activity type and quantity) are called for. In most cases such statements would be unremarkable and get broad agreement. But you don’t know me or what I’ve been doing/trying etc, so on what basis do you think you can make a comment like that about me and expect me not to be offended? I find that expectation quite remarkable. It’s not that people are more offended these days as much as it is people find it perfectly acceptable to do and say what in the old days would be considered “rude” or “impolite”. Civility has been upended by “truth telling”. Can’t say I’m a huge fan tbh.
1. Nobody has a right to judge others. 2. I judge everybody who disagrees with me to be dicks.
Either your own rulebook applies to everyone except you (hypocrisy) or your premise is false (selfcontradction). If you hold that people should not pretend they have the right to think at others, then you should stop doing so yourself. Or is it not the freedom of thinking but the freedom of speech you dislike? Of course because you yourself enjoy your right to judge others (and have done so here) it follows that your premise is false. Thus, everyone has a right to judge others. QED
The opposite claim is less wrong: nobody has a right to be free of judgement from others. To argue otherwise reduces to: I don't like shame, so I deny its validity by blaming others. Being shameless is some kind of behavior disorder predicate, not a virtue! For example here is some random guy in Arkansas who writes about these topics:
"when disturbed characters do perceive that someone is judging them in a negative manner, they easily think that it’s the other person who has the problem."
Source: https://www.drgeorgesimon.com/shameless-and-guiltless-thinki...
The social implications topic came up centuries ago in the Federalist v Antifederalist debate. Where IIRC there was a line of reasoning that the new USA didn't need certain organs of power (law enforcement?) because the 'coercive force of shame' within communities was sufficient to self regulate. I haven't read this stuff for decades but as I recall the counter argument went like: yeah maybe for you guys up north but that only works in your homogeneous post-puritan monoculture... down here in the south we have slave revolts to suppress, er property rights to enforce.
On a lighter note, this whole topic reminds me of:"oh you strenuously object?" from A Few Good Men:
https://youtu.be/bOnRHAyXqYY
I suppose you could argue about the health and longevity benefits of being low bodyfat, restricting calories, regular cardiovascular activities, these are scientifically documented... however, allow me to assume for a second that you haven't maximized these to their utmost. Do you, personally, fast to the maximum recommended amount, do cardiovascular to the maximum recommended amount, maintain a super cut bodyfat %, etc? Maybe you do quite well, but do you do it perfectly? Never drink alcohol (increased risk of cancer for even 1 drink a week)? Apply sunscreen in all cases you're in the sun (melanoma)? Avoid eating meats (cancer, cardiovascular disease)?
I'm going to assume no, because, what a life, right? You probably make some sacrifices to your longevity, for a life that's a little more chaotic and fun. So now the question is just, to what degree? I think that degree of variability is high, and I think it's perfectly normal to be fat and rational. I'm an example, lol, because I was once 15% bodyfat, 2pl8 lifter, 5k every other day kind of guy, and now I'm 10kg overweight. The upside is I get to eat cake, which I am obsessed with, and sleep in. I found a balance I'm happy with. I fluctuate towards and away 10kg overweight, never over, and have a life I like.
So when you see me fat, are you going to say I've lost control of my life? I think I have things under control. I think my ethics are in line with my actions.
That's part 1 of my thoughts, part 2 is a challenge to you to take some of my values that I'm more than happy to defend vigorously as ethical, and ask yourself (and tell us if you're open to it, I'm curious) what you'd feel if I asked you these questions:
1. If you live in a place that has elections, have you voted in every single election for which you've been capable, after spending a decent amount of time researching candidates first?
2. Do you prioritize taking public transit? Or, bicycling and walking, or similar?
3. The times you drive a private vehicle, do you rigorously give right of way to pedestrians and bicycles, even if it's not strictly legally required to do so?
4. You don't ever litter, right?
5. You regularly attend civil rights protests, right?
6. You write your representative about civil rights and other issues frequently, don't you?
7. You push for open-sourcing any code you write with stakeholders, yeah? And you open source all your personal project code?
8. You support strikers by not buying goods from companies undergoing a strike, and not crossing a picket line, right?
9. You are a vocal LGBT ally, right? And you challenge family and friends when they voice bigoted ideas?
10. If you are a founder or similar, do you follow the principles of fairness in labor by either profit sharing, or incorporating as a co-op?
11. You don't buy from companies that engage in slavery, wage theft, exploitative labor practices, or extreme environmental harm, right? Generally speaking, you check into this before buying from these companies? And you only shop local businesses, rather than monopolizing companies like Walmart?
If you find these questions surprising, tiresome, offensive, annoying, stupid, or ridiculous, can you see how someone might feel the same if you suggested they reprioritize their life around weight loss? Because it's not just a question of ethics and capability of self control for implementing ethics, it's also a question of prioritizing certain ethics.
Furthermore: your questions are about ethics, which mine may differ from yours. I wouldn't be offended by such questions and in fact I could quite vividly debate all of them.
However I may be concerned over someone's weight especially if they are close to me, for the objectively indisputable reason of health.
Sure, but will you engage the first part of my comment then, regarding degrees of healthiness, and the health choices you may not be making?
I'm basically arguing both that it's not as indisputable as you seem to say, and, that you may be missing the full picture here.
That would be normal mutual care.
From the wiki article ""lacking command" or "weakness", occasionally transliterated as acrasia or Anglicised as acrasy or acracy) is a lack of self-control, or acting against one's better judgment."
============= This is Latin, not Greek, but ===========
Supposedly "Cicero" was pronounced "KICK-er-oo"
I don't care. I'm going to keep saying SISS-er-oh.
Evidently (since it's the family name) it's because his ancestors farmed chickpeas, but I still like to imagine it as a personal nickname instead.
>Ou is the negative adverb for facts and statements, negating both single words and sentences. Mê is the negative used in prohibitions and expressions of doubt meaning "not" and "no." As ou negates fact and statement; mê rejects, οu denies; mê is relative, ou absolute; mê subjective, ou objective.
The particles are found in the two words for "nothing" you mentioned, ouden/meden. Meden is usually found in imperatives, oaths, i.e. something you want to never happen, while ouden simply states that something never happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophrosyne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophrosyne?wprov=sfti1
From your link - "such as temperance, moderation, prudence, purity, decorum, and self-control."
> From Ancient Greek ἐγχειρίδιον (enkheirídion), from ἐν (en, “in”) + χείρ (kheír, “hand”) + a neuter suffix.
And given how news, media, entertainment and politics always gravitates towards the least common denominator of knowledge and education forcing the rest of us to deal with both demagogues and TV shows about wealthy housewives, "ochlocracy" (mob rule) is another that needs a revival.
> From Middle French ochlocratie, from Ancient Greek ὀχλοκρατία (okhlokratía), from ὄχλος (ókhlos, “multitude, crowd”) + κράτος (krátos, “power”).
Less seriously, a grammatical construction I wish we had in English is the Latin future passive participle, typically ending in -ndus, -nda, -ndum. It means that something needs/ought to be done.
For instance "Amanda" is "she who must be loved."
So if someone asks you why your feature isn't in production yet, you can say the pull request is reviewandum.
Or you can tell the kids that the trash is emptianda, or the dog is walkandus.
These are kind of lame examples, but once you get the idea you can find places where it'd be convenient several times a day.
> agenda
I see what you did there.
This is probably a joke but it still is an absurd category to think about.
How can anyone be compelled (by what force?) to love someone else?
You can interpret it as implying an obligation or compulsion; but I don't think obligation or compulsion are direct meanings of this verb-form.
And as you say, they’re really like gesture words, which make so much sense, especially as text is now read/written without any human speaking behaviour at all.
Arguably emojis fill this need, but I’m unconvinced.
But there's also the meaning of "this and that", so you might be right.
...
> It means that something needs/ought to be done.
> something needs/ought to be done.
> "she who must be loved."
All of your examples are in the present tense.
Or at least that's how I reason it. English is rather hard to analyze sometimes.
"I am having a party next week." That's a present continuous sentence referring to a future activity.
Some argue that English doesn't even have a future tense. For these things it certainly is lacking, along with German it seems.
What about "I will have a party next week" or "there will be a party next week"?
> Some argue that English doesn't even have a future tense.
I learned this as: There's no language feature that denotes future tense (like a suffix), but it's done via grammar (and context).
I have to acknowledge that I'm not the right person to be debating this. Like most native speakers, my grasp of the rules often boils down to whether something "sounds" right.
Ought and should express objective and subjective opinion respectively.
You can create 9 combinations from these simple shapes (or 18 of you count passives), and if you draw them on a time-line they will correspond to distinct sub-sets.
There also some participles like "amanda/amindo/amenda" but I have simply forgotten what they each mean. I think one of them mean "worthy of being loved", another meaning "should be loved".
I, for one, find myself wishing for the destruction of Phoenician cities multiple times a day[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est
- The pull request needs reviewed
- The trash needs emptied
- The dog needs walked
Just one(ish) extra syllable!
(There are some fairly ordinary English words derived from this construction. The agenda is those things that need to be done. The legend (of a map, graph, etc.) is the stuff you need to read.)
I coined the term "Xenoserver" back in 1999, for a paper in IEEE HotOS proposing an architecture for allowing systems in core networks to safely accept and execute code from untrusted users (for a fee, of course!): https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/1999-hoto...
I was inspired by the word "xenos" (meaning both stranger and guest, or in combination a stranger who you invited into your home) rather than the word "xenia" for the general concept of hospitality extended to such a stranger [EDIT: since I wasn't familiar with the word "xenia"].
The Xenoserver project at Cambridge University developed this idea, and eventually focused around the hypervisor, which took on the name Xen.
It's why we have the two sayings "Man is a political animal" and "Man is a social creature." They are different translations of the idea that "Man is a creature of the polis."
Consider "polity".
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=polity
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police
I also would think they are pronounced differently, but a quick Google isn't clarifying how polis is pronounced and my two classes of classical Greek taken eons ago aren't sufficient background for me to be confident about my pronunciation of the word.
If anyone could cast light on the pronunciation of polis, that would be cool.
I also thought this means the second syllable should be a short i, consistent with how we pronounce metropolis.
Because police stresses the second syllable, it sounds like ee not a short i. So I didn't readily make the connection between the two words in part because they are spelled different and in part because I don't think they sound alike.
The more we study chimps the more we realize that we, as their descendants, are pretty vicious as well. Education by our parents, schools and social circles play a big role, to keep in check that viciousness. How much is any ones guess!
In my opinion we are gonna solve many of the psychological problems of humans in single digit years in the near future. Dr. Daniel Amen, have stated that after examining a hundred thousand brain scans of humans, every single psychological problem people have, is observed in brain scans, as reduced electrical signals in the brain. Problems like suicidal thoughts, depression you name it. Every one of them, means the brain do not fire enough electrical signals.
The best natural substance in the world, which we produce here in Greece from the ancient times, to solve that problem, is saffron. It is on par with the best synthetic anti-depressants, and probably better. Dr. Amen eats saffron every day, and i do as well.
So there is a solution for every person on the planet to be genius 1000x or a 1.000.000x, never suffer psychological ailments, and that is to eat a lot of saffron every day. Then most of the virtues in that list, will come natural to humans.
we are not descended from chimps
Edit: I'm realizing this could be a language barrier. "Descendent" is the inverse of "ancestor". A descendent is directly downward in lineage from an ancestor.
I strongly recommend "You're Basically The Hagfish of Reptiles..." [1]. It will make your head spin.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_pvKbtWd8
Cool! I hope we can learn from this rich vocabulary the Greeks have developed to describe and to understand our common nature.
> "So there is a solution for every person on the planet to be genius 1000x or a 1.000.000x, never suffer psychological ailments, and that is to eat a lot of saffron every day."
wait what
I have written an article recently, in which i renamed Tor -> Pandiodos, Torrent -> Logothece, Bitcoin -> Drattergon,
/google emporas lichess blog/ it is somewhere there.
https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/77/8/557/5...
But if this was really significant, you'd expect saffron-producing/eating countries to stand out. Iran is #1, are they really all 1,000,000x happy geniuses?
Some of the virtues of the article, are a state of mind anyway, that's why i mention saffron. Many people are eating too much, only to feel better. Food has certainly the ability to alter our state of mind, which in some cases ends up in obesity.
Virtues in the article, like apatheia, ataraxia, eudaimonia include in their meaning, not indulging in every pleasure in excess, and food is one of them. Well, that can be automated by producing more saffron and lowering it's price.
The dose is the poison - take care with spices.
My friend died young of liver failure due to eating comfrey as a vegetable.
Saffron is toxic at that dose, very likely lethal. Please stay safe.
[edit]I would love to see PG coming back, programming a new Common Lisp by hand, and writing a 1000 page manual just by himself, if he gets a supercharged brain. GPT and Artificial intelligence will be left back in the dust.
superstition in Latin
Just... not too sure how we ended up here considering the topic of OP.
How many people drive their car full speed without being in a hurry? Or how many people eat more than their energy requirements dictate to? I think there is a solution to that, and that is saffron.
Specifically:
To make a distinction between technē and arete, the value of technē is the end product while arete values choosing the action that promotes the best moral good.
p.s. TIL that Odysseus was forced to be a sex slave for 7 years?
So yeah, forced seems right.
See:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/δαίμων#Ancient_Greek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_(mythology)
0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Desdemona
https://rentry.co/12theses