Plato's Academy, formally organized as a religious guild, had the aura of a great spirit reaching out to all listeners. But Aristotle's legacy was a … - Daniel J. Boorstin

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Plato's Academy, formally organized as a religious guild, had the aura of a great spirit reaching out to all listeners. But Aristotle's legacy was a body of knowledge, marking the path of modern learning-accumulating the facts of the world and human experience with an explanation of causes. Aristotle's legacy, then, was not the power of a charismatic personality of grand poetic gifts, but rather the accumulation of a lifetime of scholarly observation. And before Aristotle's writings were recovered by Andronicus, there were centuries of opportunity for his ideas to be distorted. Plato's was an unbroken tradition, Aristotle's was a series of renaissances.

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About Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin (1 October 1914 – 28 February 2004) was an American historian, professor, attorney, and author. He served as the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 1969-1973 and was the Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987. His book trilogy, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, The National Experience, and The Democratic Experience received the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Francis Parkman Prize. In 1989, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was bestowed upon him.

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Also Known As

Native Name: Daniel Joseph Boorstin
Alternative Names: Daniel Boorstin
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The first literary work in prose was history. And we call Herodotus (c.480–c.425 B.C.) the Father of History because his is the earliest surviving work in Greek prose that aimed to give literary form to an extended narrative of the past. The Greek historie means “inquiry” or the search for truth. Herodotus might also perhaps be called the Father of Prose, for until his time verse was still the normal vehicle for narratives of great events and heroes of the past.

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Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.

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