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Originally Posted by Suave
Without Socrates, there would not have been an Aristotle! Woohah!
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Yes, and there would have been no Plato without Socrates, no Aristotle without Plato. If you read the question that way, then the question is fairly meaningless. "The first organism on Planet Earth!" would seem to be the best answer if that's how you frame the question.
When I said that Aristotle build the foundation upon which other people's work rested, I meant just that: he built an incredible intellectual foundation that put Plato's (or any predecessor, for that matter) to shame. It was for this reason that I said Aristotle is the most influential.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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