ENGL 1101 Class6

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Brooklyn College, CUNY *

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1101

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Arts Humanities

Date

Oct 30, 2023

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docx

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Uploaded by CoachIronRaven25

Recently, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has triggered in-depth thinking about Western civilization and has become a hot topic among people. Professor Jin Canrong, a well-known anti-public intellectual pioneer from Renmin University of China, also put forward a point of view: "Much of Western history is pseudo-history. Maybe Aristotle, the ancient Greek sage, didn’t exist.” The reason given by Professor Jin Canrong seems to be very sufficient. He said that according to current Western theory, Aristotle in ancient Greece wrote more than 10 million words of works more than 2,300 years ago, and more than 3 million words have been handed down to the world. This is impossible, because in the classical period, Western writing was written on sheepskin, and at that time there were not enough sheepskins in all ancient Greece for him. In addition, Jin Canrong also said that no one had ever mentioned such a person in the historical works handed down in the West before the 13th century. Regarding Aristotle, what Chinese people may have heard the most is his famous saying, "I love my teacher, and I love the truth even more." According to Western rumors, he was a sage from ancient Greece, and he probably lived at the same time as the Chinese sub-sage Mencius. He, Socrates, and Plato are known as the Three Sages of Ancient Greece. One of his famous students was Alexander the Great, who destroyed the ancient Persian Empire and established the world's first empire spanning Asia, Europe, and Africa. Of course, there are also The theory is that Alexander the Great died suddenly and Aristotle was involved. So does Aristotle really not exist, as Professor Jin Canrong said? In the historical development history of Western civilization constructed by modern Westerners, ancient Greece → ancient Rome → the Middle Ages → the modern West, ancient Greece is the starting point of Western civilization. However, among them, the ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, and modern Europeans all had complex ethnic and even racial compositions, mixed with complex relationships. Moreover, the West is not like our Chinese nation, which has been in the same vein since ancient times, has a clear context, and has a tradition of writing historical biographies.

Therefore, the historical memory of the West has always been either religious records, or records written by scholars out of hobby, and their records do not even include chronological records!

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