Quote of the Day

[timelets]

“youths and men of such a temper who would calmly suppress their own reflections and opinions in which original thought is so impatient to manifest itself, such listeners attentive to the facts as Plato portrayed them, could hardly be imagined in a modern dialogue; and even less could one count on readers of similar disposition”

-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Science of Logic.

Our youth and men are no different than those of two hundred years ago. I suspect Plato's patient listeners were to a greater degree imagined rather than real. In short, we can formulate the following law of impatience conservation: in a philosophical discourse, the difference between patience of the audience and patience required by the author is less than zero over duration of the discourse. dp/dt < 0.