By Aristotlean I do not mean a follower of Aristotle's philosophy although, since Aquinas, we are all pretty much in his school. I mean by the term to imply a comprehensive full immersion database brainstorm exercise such as he obviously successfully completed.
Nobody will ever approach his encyclopedic thought again. Our library is too incomprehensibly large and the ideas in it too complex for any one mind to input much less process as John Nash found out. However, as children of a lesser god, we can stake out a portion of that library as specialists or cover maximum amounts of material superficially as generalists, the infamous mile wide, inch deep body of knowledge. The key concept in the Aristotlean paradigm is processing all this material into a coherent brain mass in order to generate legitimate original ideas.
Not everybody is Aristotlean. There are huge numbers of cut and paste people with fragmented databases of incoherent structure. It is a vocation and, requiring specific personality traits, not for everyone. It requires extraordinary learning skills and information overload coping skills. One is forever processing books that are bigger than one's head and that has a physiological cost in the central nervous system.
I am proud of my diligent pursuit of constantly greater amounts of information constantly integrated in constantly greater ideas of some coherence but I do not recommend this course of intellectual curiosity to anyone, the sacrifices too large, the outcome too doubtful.
Do Well and Be Well.
Kindle Vella
Civilizado, a story series.
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