thomrainierskies:i took a philosophy class my first year at community college, and it was the funnes

thomrainierskies:i took a philosophy class my first year at community college, and it was the funnest shit ever - prof gave us a powerpoint and told us to fight with him when we disagreed so we could have discussions, then gave us his steam username so we could play racing games together. one time, he told us this story about a prof he had in grad school - guy was tenured, and apparently a great teacher. but he had this time built into his schedule where other profs would be in labs, experimenting, doing research, where he stood in his empty classroom with a warm cup of tea and stared out the window. for these 1.5 hour schedule blocks. and the administration would come to him and be like “dude, we’re not paying you to stare out the window, why aren’t you working?” and he’d say, “i am working. i’m a philosopher, it’s my job to contemplate the world and life and that’s what I’m doing,” and they couldn’t do shit cause he was tenured. and then every handful of years he’d pop out a book that blew everybody’s tits off and they’d get a surge of new philosophy grads come to study with him and make the school a lot of money.So yeah, i think that’s still what being a philosopher is likeMost of them were aristocrats. They could afford to sit around all day talking and drinking because they either inherited wealth or married into it, and had both slaves and competent wives&daughters(later Greek writers would portray Socrates’s wife Xanthippe, specifically, in particularly offensive terms for the crimes of running a productive household and raising three good sons) to manage their household/businesses for them. Of course they also presented themselves as “teachers” to other rich men in the hopes they’d then pay them to let their sons hang around with them all day to learn how to argue well, which was an important political skill. I’ve never studied them enough to know the details of their finances but, given how these things tended to work in that place in that era, they PROBABLY either had inherited title to land within the city, long built upon, from which they collected rents, or(and this is why romanticized pastoral poetry is such a big part of our records of the era) they owned what were effectively plantations outside the city, and made their money selling agricultural goods(including livestock; wool was a big ag commodity) to ppl IN the city. You got to remember about this period: none of those rural villagers we’re accustomed to seeing in portrayals of it would have owned or profited from any of the things they produced, cuz THEY THEMSELVES were enslaved by rich aristos like Plato and Socrates, who sat around in the cities having keggers and arguing all day.  And, of course, being the primary ppl in the Cities with any money/easily movable goods on hand, they also often acted as bankers/loan sharks. For instance: there’s a story of Socrates, specifically, being given control of a woman’s finances after her husband died. Or maybe she was his second wife. Or maybe it’s all made up. None of the gossip-mongers who passed for historians back then bothered too much about accuracy or running down sources beyond “this guy said THIS guy wrote this down about THIS guy 100 years ago”. I’d imagine some of them came from a commercial background –trade, freight, and piracy were a big part of the Greek economy for a long time, and contrary to how surviving records present things Money spoke just as loud as Blood to them– but Socrates and Plato, specifically, probably didn’t? From everything I’ve read they seemed to be Old Money.Of course, then you have Diogenes. He was the son of a banker/minter, likely worked with him, and was exiled from his home island due to a counterfeiting/coinage-debasing(using less % of precious metal in it) scandal. In Athens he made a point to live in poverty as a beggar and piss everyone off by explaining to them all the time precisely how big a bunch of amoral shitheads they all were. He claimed he did this in the model of Heracles. Probably just to piss people off even more, but the idea that there are stories of Heracles, since lost, sleeping in the agora naked and shaking down passerbys while implacably detailing their moral failings to them is kind of funny :p -- source link

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