{"id":69,"date":"2005-08-17T23:54:44","date_gmt":"2005-08-18T03:54:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.3\/~drweevil\/?p=69"},"modified":"2007-09-03T17:05:37","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T21:05:37","slug":"hybris-in-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=69","title":{"rendered":"Hybris In Action"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re going to sneer at a New York Times<\/em> reviewer for his ignorance of Nietzsche and the Greeks, it\u2019s best not to write sentences like this one<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Many figures from antiquity–Thales, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Phyrro–loom large for Nietzsche (as both targets and inspirations), but as every serious student of Nietzsche knows, Aristotle is notable for his almost total absence from the corpus.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately for Prof. Leiter, \u2018Phyrro\u2019 is notable for his complete and total absence from the works of all competent philosophers, since the great Skeptic\u2019s name was Pyrrho, with a pi<\/em>, not a phi<\/em>. (Πυρρων, not Φυρρων — the English forms of names like this one are latinized and drop the final nu<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

The error is oddly common on the web: I get 10 Google hits each for \u2018Nietzsche + Phyrro\u2019 and \u2018Nietzsche + Pyrrho\u2019. Similar common errors are easily explained: \u2018Xeno\u2019 for \u2018Zeno\u2019, the name of two important ancient philosophers,* is surely encouraged by subconscious thoughts of Xena the Warrior Princess, and \u2018Hesoid\u2019 for \u2018Hesiod\u2019 makes it look like an adjective from mathematics or the hard sciences. \u2018Phyrro\u2019 for \u2018Pyrrho\u2019 is more puzzling: perhaps the writers who make this particular mistake are thinking of Furries.<\/p>\n

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –<\/p>\n

*Zeno of Citium was the founder of Stoicism, while Zeno’s Paradox, also known as Achilles and the Tortoise, is named after Zeno of Elea.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> (twelve hours later)<\/p>\n

Leiter has silently corrected his error. The original is still in the Google cache: it’s a Googlewhack for ‘Leiter + Phyrro’.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re going to sneer at a New York Times reviewer for his ignorance of Nietzsche and the Greeks, it\u2019s best not to write sentences like this one: Many figures from antiquity–Thales, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Phyrro–loom large for Nietzsche (as both targets and inspirations), but as every serious student of Nietzsche knows, Aristotle is notable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classics","category-orbilius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}