The immortality of historical intellectuals and philosophers

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Originally Posted by T-6005

Especially since a lot of these complaints seem rooted in racism, keep in mind that race was understood as having a scientific basis by large segments of even the expert and academic populations - there was no great troubling of that understanding until the eugenics projects' methods came under serious scrutiny in the interwar years. That's not even a hundred years ago.

As far as most of these philosophers were concerned, they were accepting the trusted word of experts in other fields. What else are you supposed to do with the 'expert' opinions of your age? Challenge them? Disprove them, like Galileo, Copernicus or Einstein? These are only problems in retrospect - it has taken significant minds and the most motivated men and women in our modern history to knock down our biggest myths of even the last hundred years.

What impervious myths do we fail to question even today?

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Good point. The bigoted views had a supposed basis in science, which I guess I mostly overlooked. This probably explains a lot of it, but maybe not all of it.

I'm not sure what myths we fail to question today. It seems like almost everything is questioned by at least some segment of society, what with it being the information age and all. Even fringe ideas like the Sandy Hook conspiracy gains traction due to the internet.

Humans are deeply flawed and hypocritical, all of us. We all have ideals we know to be right or true that we fail to live up to on a daily basis, every one of us. Philosophers and great intellectuals are no better.

And Freud isn't discounted because he was an ass, he's discounted because his ideas were stupid. Freud is basically important because of the methodology he invented, not because of the ideas he drew from it.