I'm just messing around a little bit. But now, I'm heading out to a certain spot. Maybe you could try to guess—based purely on my nonverbal cues—which one...
We can be surrounded by anything we desire—but if we don't possess something within ourselves, then truly, we don't have it at all.
Aristotle argues that the soul doesn't actually arrive until the 40th or perhaps even the 80th day. According to this view, a fetus simply doesn't possess a soul before that window passes. I’ve added my own thought to this—that souls might carry a specific gender—but I suppose that's just a side note. Where exactly am I stepping outside the bounds of his theory?
The soul and the body are inseparable, yet that doesn't mean a child possesses a soul the very moment conception occurs. The soul, it seems, arrives a bit later.
I think I’ll just focus my response on the second part of your question.
Up until about the 40th day, there isn't really any soul present in the fetus. Neither male nor female.
That is when the male soul arrives. The physical bodies that those male souls don't choose to inhabit simply remain empty—they develop without any real direction, I suppose. It's almost capricious... sort of aimless, if you can call it that. Then, after roughly 80 days of that emptiness, a female soul arrives and occupies the body.
And, yes—the soul does have a gender.
Otherwise, how else could we explain women who find themselves trapped in male bodies?
Generally speaking, the male soul tends to occupy the body first.
The female soul stays preoccupied—I suppose—while deciding on things like fashion sense, color coordination, makeup styles, cooking skills, or even her level of idealism.
I’m not really focusing too much on the main topic here.
To me, it’s a bit like road signs.
They're just suggestions.
A conversation feels much more natural when it isn't strictly tethered to one single area, but instead wanders through a few related ones—it’s almost inevitable, I suppose. Limiting a discussion to just one specific subject feels a bit like clinical dissection. It's as if we were trying to spend years analyzing a tree—trying to figure out its exact age, what its branches looked like, how tall it grew, who cut it down and when, all of that.
It just doesn't work that way. In my view, if you want to have an honest conversation about something, you have to be willing to look at the bigger picture.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately—and I say this with all due respect to the academics—but I truly don't believe philosophy should be classified as a science. It just doesn't fit the mold, does it? While science relies on empirical data and repeatable experiments to reach a conclusion, philosophy seems to operate in a much more abstract, speculative realm—perhaps even something more akin to a deeply rigorous form of inquiry, but without that hard, measurable proof we expect from the natural sciences. It’s a different kind of pursuit altogether, I guess.
I suppose even philosophers don't necessarily have to be scientists—not by any strict definition, at least.
It seems a bit unlikely—if I'm being honest—that the core subjects of philosophy, specifically the investigation of the soul, could ever truly be tackled through standard scientific methods. I mean, how would you even begin to measure or classify something like that? It just doesn't seem to fit into the usual framework of empirical data and categorization, I guess. Aristotle tried his hand at it—and, well, you can see exactly how that turned out.
We have no way of knowing what kind of soul they possess.
Sure, we can identify certain biological traits of a fetus at specific weeks of pregnancy, but as for its actual soul—that is something entirely beyond our understanding. It’s just as impossible to know exactly when that happens.
Aristotle argues that men are the first to receive theirs.
I suppose if this had been written by a woman living in a matriarchy, she might have argued that women receive theirs first.
Since I am a man living in a patriarchy, I find myself agreeing with Aristotle. 😁 And well, if anyone dares to disagree with us, we might just have to settle things quite physically.
*_spike said:Where? Show me the proof. (error fundamentalis)
It isn't indeterminate. It’s female. 😢
It was Aristotle who argued that the soul exists, not me.
So, I suppose one should read his arguments—and then try to dismantle them.
As for the fetus, I'll admit it's female. But I never actually claimed it wasn't sexed. My point was more about it being indeterminate regarding the soul. In other words, if it's male, there's no soul until day 40; if it's female, it's day 80.
Basically, a male fetus is defined by the soul after just 40 days. A female one isn't quite there yet—the soul enters later. (I guess since it's female, she probably just took a little longer to get ready.)
Maybe the concept of a fetus doesn't even exist as we define it. But then again, there is the soul. And my thought is—that soul enters this undefined state 😉 😉 into what eventually turns out to be a male embryo after about 40 days, or a female one after 80.
I would argue that we can't. I mean, just look at how much the female psyche has shifted between the turn of the 20th century and the start of the 21st.
Things that might seem perfectly normal to you—things your dear grandmother would likely consider utterly scandalous—just don't fly anymore.
For instance, the simple fact that a woman might not address a man with formal titles or that level of traditional deference. Or something along those lines—not that it really matters right now.
Essentially, you can see the massive gulf between a modern girl who uses the internet, knows how to read, picks up books that aren't just romance novels, and stays out past midnight, versus an old-fashioned lady. You and your grandmother grew up in two entirely different worlds. Now, just imagine how different the worlds were for you and a Socratic wife.
In my opinion, it's impossible. And honestly, your claims about knowing exactly what women were like in ancient Greece don't sound all that convincing to me because of that very reason.
As for the elephant comparison, that wasn't exactly a rigorous study. I guess since what one elephant likes varies from elephant to elephant... ...it's the same with women. For example, maybe you prefer intellectuals. While Polyhymnia might go for a certain type of North American guy, and so on. I suppose even Aristotle would be too smart for such broad generalizations.
Can we actually know what elephants were like back then? Or women?
We are jumping to conclusions here...
In that era, men likely preferred the company of other men over women.
Women didn't have the right to vote, nor anything even remotely similar.
So, if we follow that logic, the conclusion might be this: back then, women weren't necessarily the more beautiful sex—and that could truly be the case. Perhaps the Greek woman during that period was quite unattractive. And maybe, just maybe, women weren't all that intelligent at the time, unlike how things are today.😂 We can't really know for sure. It’s all just speculation, I guess.
I agree that perhaps not everything Aristotle wrote is one hundred percent accurate, but he certainly recorded far more truths and conducted many more successful experiments than what seems to be implied by your posts—which, frankly, seem to suggest he would have been better off sticking strictly to philosophy.
madwoman said:it seems like someone is taking it a bit too literally when they suggest philosophers were merely drawing conclusions based on the spirit of their era.
As I mentioned earlier, I think Aristotle wasn't really acting as a philosopher here—more like a natural scientist. And what felt perfectly normal back then just isn't viewed the same way today.
For instance, nowadays, you’d probably find that the best way to soothe an elephant is by gently rubbing its feet with a sponge soaked in lukewarm water. You definitely wouldn't use salt water, since an elephant's feet are incredibly sensitive and often have little abrasions that salt would just irritate.
Now, you won't really find anything like that regarding Plato or Socrates, mostly because Socrates was primarily an ethicist, whereas Plato was more of a pure philosopher. They didn't really dabble in the natural sciences. If I'm off base on that, please feel free to correct me.
Tyler Grant76 said:I just can't stand... well... those types of intellectuals...
I'm not sure how that even relates to what we're discussing here.
We are talking about the controversial findings from Aristotle's empirical studies.
My point—if I can call it that—is simply that we shouldn't view him through the lens of a modern scientist. He was a philosopher from ancient Greece, after all, and he was inevitably limited by the era and the tools available to him. So, while his research results might not have been perfectly accurate by today's standards, I'd argue he remains almost peerless when it comes to pure philosophy and theoretical reasoning.
As for your obsession with intellectuals—well, I hope you realize that most of them aren't worth much of anything.
Tyler Grant76 said:Basically, Aristotle claimed that women had fewer teeth than men—apparently, he just had a wife nearby whom he could easily count them on.
I realize some of you might not appreciate the implication I'm about to make here, but perhaps it's true that women back then really did have fewer teeth than men... simply because their husbands were regularly "counting" them.
No, no. There really isn't any need to turn this discussion into such a heated confrontation.
Besides, you're right about that part.
By contesting that specific point I made—the one you just quoted—you've essentially dismantled my entire argument. It seems to prove that people are often quite willing, perhaps even too quick, to admit when they're feeling insecure or afraid of something. It suggests that, generally speaking, people don't always strive to present themselves in the best possible light, which might be why they tend to stick to the truth most of the time. And it implies that people study body language out of genuine curiosity rather than from a place of their own insecurity.
Anyway, let me clarify one thing. I wasn't suggesting that there isn't some element of curiosity involved—the desire to learn how to read others like an open book to gain a sense of power over them is certainly there—but I was arguing that it's only a smaller portion of the motivation. In my view, the larger part is rooted in insecurity. But, looking at it now, I see that I was mistaken.
Regardless, we've drifted pretty far off-topic here. I truly hope you manage to figure out why your friend can't seem to have a normal conversation with you anymore.
To sounds more like self-deception to me. Why is it that you’re so driven to uncover the things people go out of their way to hide? Is it genuine curiosity—or maybe just a bit of your own insecurity?
In my experience, it’s usually the latter.
I suppose you shouldn't believe everything you're told. No one is ever going to admit that their interest in studying nonverbal communication was actually fueled by their own insecurities. People rarely even admit that much to themselves, let alone to anyone else.
Daniel Diaz6 said:Yeah, I have the perspective of someone who isn't out here trying to flirt.
So, you have the context of someone who—in theory—shouldn't be flirting. but, well, you still end up doing it anyway. Please don't think anyone here is judging you for that.
We're really just trying to suggest that maybe you take a closer look at what you're actually doing—and perhaps consider why he perceives it as flirting in the first place.