So says this news report. Does this have any significance?
(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)
I completely agree with both Professor Sagar’s diagnosis and treatment. Students who abuse LLMs in order to merely obtain grades…
7 responses to “Aristotle’s tomb found?”
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I like a romantic story as much as the rest of you, and the Greek economy could certainly use a new tourist attraction, but the only evidence that this is Aristotle's tomb is that some medieval sources claim he was buried somewhere in Stagira.
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Well, nothing in this report about why they think it's Aristotle's tomb. If they found his putative ashes and discovered that they were composed of earth, air, fire, and water, well that would indeed point to the Stagirite.
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Certainly newsworthy if more hitherto lost or unknown writings from Aristotle's corpus are discovered, such as On Trolling (ably translated by Rachel Barney). Perhaps "On Trigger Warnings" will be next, which ought to be mandatory reading for all Oberlin faculty and students.
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Tank you Michael Cain.
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I think the question is not put in the most fortunate way. This is an archeological discovery of a tomb for which, given its age and location and supporting epigraphical and other evidence, it is, based on the standards of the field, not unreasonable to claim to be of Aristotle (ancient stagiros did not survive much after the time of Aristotle and he was its most "tomb worthy person at the time. If you do not care about archeology, sure, not a significant discovery. But then, what is the significance of a new interpretation of what Hegel said or of a new analysis of intentional action? I dare to say, it will not bring an emotional reaction for people in 2400 years…
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Some healthy skepticism about the veracity of this "discovery" can be found here:
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The post at Forbes referred to above is weird and unprofessional. It cites "Aristides Baltas, a senior aide to the culture minister": Baltas is in fact the culture minister. (This seems to come from misconstruing a phrase in a Guardian story, "a senior aide to the minister, Aristides Baltas".) The post makes much of David Meadows' saying that he couldn't, in a bit of searching on the web, find the relevant information, e.g. about the transfer of Aristotle's remains from Chalkis to Stageira, or a place and a festival there named after Aristotle, in ancient biographical sources. But the information (whether true or false) is in the Vita Aristotelis Marciana 17-18, as any specialist could have told Meadows or Killgrove if asked. The evidence for the ancient lives of Aristotle is collected in Ingmar Düring, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition, Göteborg 1957; the Vita Aristotelis Marciana is also available on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae website. Whether this structure in Stageira really is Aristotle's tomb, I have no idea. People who were at the Aristotle congress in Thessaloniki last week should be able to tell us more.
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