Wednesday, November 30, 2011

reading for today

The story begins like this:

Socrates: Very well. I heard, then, that at Naucratis in Egypt there lived one of the very old gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis; and the name of the divinity was Theuth. It was he who first invented numbers and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing (grammata). Now the king of Egypt at that time was Thamus who lived in the great city of the upper region which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes; the god himself they call Ammon. Theuth came to him and exhibited his arts and declared that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. And Thamus questioned him about the usefulness of each one; and as Theuth enumerated, the King blamed or praised what he thought were the good or bad points in the explanation. Now Thamus is said to have had a good deal to remark on both sides of the question about every single art (it would take too long to repeat it here); but when it came to writing, Theuth said, "This discipline (to mathema), my King, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories (sophoterous kai mnemonikouterous): my invention is is a recipe (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom." But the King said...

(Plato's Phaedrus, quoted in Dissemination)

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