This book is next on my audible reading list.

The truth is, the philosophical line allegedly starting with Socrates and ending with Aristotle via Plato was an Establishment ass-kissing, slavery-loving, largely anti-empirical one, filled with paens to obedience and a rather cultlike devotion to leaders with forensics talents vs. scientific ones.

The Pre-Socratics were better than Socrates by miles – much more modern, for one thing. Plato’s contemporaries were also more pragmatic and empirical than him. And its not for nothing that people pointed out Aristotle preferred theory to fact checking, to the point of saying women had fewer teeth without ever looking at the mouths of actual women. At least some of the veneration of Aristotle comes from his status, I would think obviously, as tutor to the son of the dictator Philip of Macedon.

Aristotle is simply NOT more relevant than ever. That’s a bizarre and cultist assertion. Whatever his importance was in his time and place, or even in the Renaissance, is it actually reasonable to assume that it’s become greater than that?

Just reporting that so far these things have always turned out to be academicized conservatism.