User talk:Mal4mac

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Welcome!

Hello, Mal4mac, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  RJFJR 15:32, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Aristotle as Polymath

Hello User:Mal4mac and thanks for your note on my talk page. You're quite right that the "poly" in "polymath" means "many," not "every" and that, strictly speaking, "universal polymath" is not redundant. It is, however, an odd turn of phrase and it caught my eye as inappropriate. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that Aristotle should not be called a universal polymath since there are some areas of learning and achievement in which we have no evidence that he excelled, although he may have been interested in them. It is, for example, not clear how much medical knowledge he had or how much he really knew about literature or music or other Mediterranean cultures. As for ranking polymaths (distinguishing "ordinary" ones from really superior polymaths), I'm not up to that. But if you really want to put the word "universal" back into the article, I'll leave it alone.

If you want to respond, just do it here on your talk page, below this message. I'll keep your talk page on my watchlist for a while. Regards. -- WikiPedant 19:32, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm happy to leave it out, as hyperbole is a dangerous tool (Oops! Now I'm using hyperbole for describing the term hyperbole. All this hyperbole is gonna kill me.)
Check out the Poetics - his work on literature defined the notion of tragedy that is still incredibly important today. Unfortunately we only have his lecture notes. I remember someone (Cicero?) describing his lost dialogues as a "river of gold", so there are claims to him being a great literary figure like Plato. A quick Google brought up: "His treatises on human anatomy are lost, but his many works on animals advocate direct observation and anatomical comparisons between species through dissection." Aristotle discussed music in the politics, and its impact on education. How much do you have to "really know" to excel in an area of knowledge?
Yes, mostly we are stuck with the lecture notes of Aristotle's students. (That's a pretty scary thought for any university professor -- to have one's ideas represented to future generations only through student notes!) But some of them must have been pretty good students. Anyhow, on top of that it's difficult to give much weight to what for us are only the hearsay accounts of Romans and others, insisting that he was one of the all-time greatest in this area or that, if only we had what he wrote about this or that. I once had a fairly distinguished prof who liked to suggest that Aristotle was a B+ student of Plato. I'd probably go a little farther and give him an and A or A- (compared to Plato's A+). Nice chatting with you. I've been rummaging around as a very sporadic Wikipedia editor for about a year and do enjoy it. I hope your experience is similar. -- WikiPedant 17:19, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
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Thanks Mal4mac 14:12, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
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