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Re:How to Disagree by Alex3917 on Friday March 28, 2008 @11:15PM (#149131)
I wish more people wrote stuff like this. There are a million writing books on grammar and style, but god forbid someone ever write something about what makes good ideas...
Re:How to Disagree by wanorris on Friday March 28, 2008 @11:20PM (#149136)
As mascarenhas already posted, Aristotle spent quite a bit of time on the topic, and his ideas are still studied, though perhaps not as widely as they should be.
Re:How to Disagree by Alex3917 on Friday March 28, 2008 @11:55PM (#149164)
The way I read it, the PG essay was meant less as a statement about the absolute nature of reality and more as an attempt to get people to suck less. Even if Aristotle came up with some superset of these ideas 2400 years ago, I think there is still some value here.
Re:How to Disagree by wanorris on Saturday March 29, 2008 @12:19AM (#149190)
I thought the essay was quite good. I wasn't trying to say that I thought pg was being redundant.

My point was merely that there has been plenty already written on the subjects of rhetoric and logic as ways of expressing ideas, and that the topic isn't as neglected as you seemed to believe in the post I responded to. If you're looking for more resources on the topic, they're out there.

Re:How to Disagree by mejohnsn on Sunday March 30, 2008 @06:45PM (#150476)
Yet Whitehead says that even Aristotle's writings are mere "footnotes to Plato". So perhaps we should be spending more time with Plato's instead.