334. Chance Encounters: Reviving Hellenistic Philosophy

Just an observation, the all episodes page is not up to date with these renaissance episodes though the new african philosophy episodes are up to date.

Thank you again for yet another charming episode. 

This theme of rediscovery is just mind-boggling, since it mixes the improbably contingent with the world-historically influential. Whether it's the Aristotelean corpus rediscovered by a book collector in a cellar in Asia Minor in the 1st century BC and brought to Rome by lucky old general Sulla in the midst of his war campaigns, or Lucretius rediscovered also by a book collector in a musty library in Germany 15 centuries after it was written, you can only wonder how different our intellectual heritage would have looked if these texts had been left to disintegrate as many others had. A luckily surviving text is not like a luckily surviving person, even a very important person. A text encapsulates a worldview, which can propagate through the ages and literally become part of how members of subsequent generations think. 

What lesson can we learn from this about our heritage? I think it means that since it is subject to so much chance, it itself is much less a product of human agency than is usually portrayed. Fortuna and virtu are at play not only on people physically, but on entire collective mentalities. 

So now I'll definitely get myself acquainted with al-Kindi! (hmmm...where should I begin? Oh I know! There's this podcast series, you may have heard of it, it's called the history of philosophy without all those gaps, or something like that...). 

Anyway, I accept your point that printing changed the world, and after that le deluge, as we know. However, I would say that Fortuna has not disappeared but merely changed shape. Some philosophical works, even of high quality, are not lost in the physical sense, but rather go unnoticed, or if noticed, forgotten quickly. There is too much circulating, and some authors and their works don't happen to be in the right place at the right time (or in the right language). I can't give you a concrete example, because that would undermine my statement that such works were unnoticed or forgotten. But let's just imagine a Russian-writing philosopher, as good as any English-writing philosopher, publishing a masterpiece of liberal political philosophy. Let's call him Lockeyevsky. I would not be surprised if there was such a man, especially if you look over a few centuries, say beginning whenever Russia had a printing press. But it doesn't matter, because unfortunately for Lockeyevsky, the center of gravity of the Russian intellectual heritage never came close to liberalism. His work went unnoticed and didn't change anything. To argue as you say, "that it is quality, not chance, that determines what survives and is read," I would have to argue that a Lockeyevsky is impossible. But I think he is possible. 

Since converting to Judaism and being encouraged by my rabbi to make notes in the Torah itself, I've switched to taking extensive notes in my books - including the margins of your books. I don't think they're of much scholarly value (many of them are jokes or opinions in response to the text) but hey, not everything is made for posterity.