I am collecting lapses of philosophy and philosophers. Do you know any?
Here is my contribution, how Aristotle never bothered to look into the mouths of women to know that women and men have the same number of teeth.
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I came across this lapse of Aristotle on a reference from Bertrand Russell, and I checked it up and excerpted the quote.
Susma Rio Sep
No citations handy, but David Hume postulated that human beings could never know that the sun would rise in the morning because previous empirical observation of other sunrises did not necessarily mean that the process would repeat itself in the future. Later, however, he declared that miracles were impossible because by definition they contradicted the weight of all other existing empirical evidence. Okay, David, you wouldn’t consider it just a little bit out of the ordinary if the sun didn’t rise?
Rene Descartes was rather inconsistent in the way he applied methodological skepticism. He was fine with it up until he got to cogito ergo sum, but suddenly he starts throwing out WAGs left and right about types of ideas and how they could and could not be created. His proof of God is particularly specious: after basing his philosophy on the idea that he initially knows nothing, Descartes simply assumes that there are no other possible explanations for the existence of the Idea of God than the paltry few he is able to come up with. His reasoning is akin to someone realizing that their house has been broken into and, because they can’t think of anyone who would do such a thing, determining that the culprits must be rogue circus clowns.
I wonder how many Judeo-Christian philosophers over the centuries have believed that all men are missing a rib. All they had to do was count.
Aristotle, when discussing why some objects float and others do not, said that an iron needle will not float in water and suggested that its shape had something to do with it.
This was accepted by scholars until Galileo addressed the same problem. He put an iron needle in a container of water and found that it floated.
This belongs in MPSIMS. I’ll move it for you.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
Well I guess just about everything Sartre said, he contradicted later on. But he was proud of contradicting himself.
To give Aristotle his due, I believe it used to be common for women to lose a few teeth early in life from calcium deficiency, often beginning with the first pregnancy. And I’m guessing that most ancient Greek women married early and became pregnant before their wisdom teeth came in. It’s entirely possible that few of them ever had a full set of 32 teeth.