Aristotle to an extent. He deserves credit for being so (relatively) systematic, prolific and comprehensive, but his conclusions are mostly wrong and his writing is very awkward. — Terrapin Station

I am troubled with iconic image of Aristotle, especially with the wisdom of his “whole before its parts”.
It started with a famous paradox put forward by Zeno in which he states that a distance of any length could be divided into an infinite number of shorter segments and therefore traversing an infinite amount of segments would take an infinite amount of time.
Aristotle, reflecting the thinking of that time didn’t have coherent understanding of infinity and thought that the infinite is imperfect, unfinished and unthinkable rejecting infinite numbers as unnecessary nonsense. Apparently Aristotle’s didn’t have a good answer to Zeno and responded (as I am concerned) with unintelligible response like - "a length was first and foremost a whole. True, this whole might be divided into an infinite number of parts—nevertheless, the whole was fundamentally irreducible to those parts. In fact, it was only because a distance was a 'whole before its parts' that it could be traversed."

Would be an accurate assessment that this response was just a blunder and not an example of wisdom?

Would be an accurate assessment that this response was just a blunder and not an example of wisdom? — miosim

So you think the wisdom of modern maths is that infinity is just another number? And not something more that that? X-)

You start counting and tell me when you get there.

So you think the wisdom of modern maths is that infinity is just another number? And not something more that that? — apokrisis

Every middle school student, who pay attention to math, know that 'any length is equal to the sum of its infinite number of shorter segments.
However I am not sure if my judgment (I am a layman) about Aristotle' response is 'way out of the chart', resulted from misunderstanding of Aristotle, or could be considered as plausible.

prophet muhammed

I said Rand too.

Almost every time a philosopher struck me as overrated, my opinion changed when I gained more background information or re-read them.

Probably the most overrated one to me at the moment is Singer, but I haven't read that much of his stuff.