Well I wouldn't look at Aristotle with quite a modern lens as that...Whether he wanted women to be inferior I don't think is what scholars would view it as.
My post was mischievous in nature, and not meant in the context of taking yours as a serious philosophical argument. I wouldn't recommend anyone use Plato and Aristotle as their jumpoff point for a debate about women's place in society to begin with (as opposed to a study of the history of ideas on said topic in Western thought); the basic conceptual foundations you'd be starting from are simply too remote.
On the other hand Plato's idealism of the perfect state looked like an ancient version of communism where babies are taken from the womb and sent away from the mother to be nursed by other lactating women to break the familial bonds. Most people (including liberals) would support mostly a basic family especially with all the child murderers and sex perverts out there that would have an easier time with a government/family situation to prey on.
Oh dear.
Forcibly removing children from their parents isn't a "Communist" idea, and the practice has often been employed on a wide scale throughout human history in contexts of forced assimilation into some new polity, tribe, nation, or other such community. For instance, as you probably know, in both the US and Canada in the 19th century, Native American/Aboriginal children were forcibly separated from their parents en masse and removed to 'Indian boarding schools' where they were assigned new names, forbidden to speak their native languages, required to attend church services, and made to work on local farms and factories during breaks, in the name of properly equipping and 'civilizing' them to become productive citizens of their countries.
At any rate, in the
Republic, Plato recommends the sharing of children (and wives, and property) for the elite 'guardian' class only, to reinforce their sense of community as a collective devoted entirely to serving the greater good of the polis' other inhabitants, who of course play no role in political decision-making as they would in a democracy--which he explicitly disdains as the nightmare of what 'rule by the poor' would look like: "And then democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power".
When it comes to religion conservatives could see how it could be a force to teach the population self-discipline. The problem though was that much of this relates to philosophy as opposed to a scientific view of the universe that was provable. In fact the problem we have now is that people abandoned most religions (because they are scientifically unproven or plainly proven wrong on their view of the origin of the universe and our place in it) but where is a secular code of conduct that all people can agree on to create self-discipline? This is why many people revert to hedonism, narcissism, nihlism, or they continue traditional religions to get what they feel they need.
...the necessity of Noble Lies, another ostensibly 'conservative' idea associated with Plato.
(again, I'm largely being facetious here)
I would also like to add that in ancient times the kind of work that men had to do made it more likely that women would gather and raise children than do what the men did on most occasions. Now that we have much more technology to save labor women have many more opportunities now for employment that wouldn't have been available at the time of Aristotle. And with women earning a living they can own capital and have much more of a stake and influence in politics than just relying on men for income.
Such as? Are you referring to agricultural work? (classical Greece being primarily an agricultural society, even in prosperous city-states like Athens) In traditional agricultural societies, women (free or otherwise) are generally out working the fields all day right alongside the men; their workplaces and homes are one and the same. Domestic technology advancements and the emergence of paid childcare systems and universal schooling (despite shrinking families, which mean fewer hands to help with childcare at home) likely have as much or more to do with increased employment oportunities for women as changes in the job market per se.
In any case, women in classical Athens (and classical Greece in general) lacked property rights and other contractual rights which might have allowed them to personally directly profit from their labor. Most actual citizens of classical Athens were landholding men, and field slaves were the backbone of their labor force; free artisans and merchants obviously existed too, though this type of work was stigmatized.
Yeah and how did people get convinced? Evidence showed that women and blacks could be as intelligent as men. It was demonstratable. We shouldn't change things because we feel we should. We should change things because it can be proven.
This simply isn't true; the Civil Rights Movement wasn't a public education campaign, and scientific studies on the intelligence of African-Americans weren't pivotal at all to its progress. The Atlantic slave trade wasn't based on 'scientific' arguments either, nor even on 'traditional' views about the nature of Africans, as there really weren't any to speak of until financial opportunity came knocking. You're equating moral-philosophical problems with scientific ones, and that just doesn't work; some questions simply can't be answered in a laboratory, and vice versa.
Is induction, or reason better? Philosophical ideas can build on themselves as well.
