Letters

31 May 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Seek the reason why

Sir: I greatly enjoyed Peter Jones’s excellent article on Ancient Roman globalisation (‘For real globalisation, look at Ancient Rome’, 24 May). I respectfully disagree with one paragraph, however, in which he describes Greek philosophers as having ‘proceeded from hypotheses, which they never tested’. It is true, of course, that the Greeks were incapable of testing certain things, such as the nature of the elemental constituents of matter. Nevertheless, in what was within their power to observe, they often proceeded, not from hypotheses, but from the empirical study of natures. The pre-eminent example of this approach is the extant work of Aristotle. About 25 per cent of his work consists of zoological writings for which he is honoured, along with his colleague Theophrastus, as the inventor of biology. Furthermore, Aristotle explicitly establishes as a general principle of scientific inquiry that first we must seek the fact, then we seek the reason why (Posterior Analytics, II, 1, 89b 29-31).

Dr Andrew Pinsent
Sunningdale, Berkshire

Airhead

Sir: Reading Matthew Parris’s account of his time in a Ryanair queue (Another Voice, 24 May) reminded me of a conversation I over-heard some years ago as I was crossing London Bridge at rush hour.

First girl: ‘We had a smashing time in Ibiza.’

Second girl: ‘Is that in Spain?’

First girl: ‘Dunno. We went by air.’

Michael Nicholson
Grayswood, Surrey

Lost plot

Sir: While Marianne Macdonald’s article (‘Sex and the City is a myth’, 24 May) was an entertaining read, its central thesis — that the airbrushed on-screen portrayal of the four female leads in Sex and the City is fundamentally detached from real life — was hardly revelatory. Even I, as a straight, male, sometime fan of the series, managed to spot within a matter of an episode or two that the four characters were intended to represent four overlapping aspects of the female psyche, rather than being a gritty reflection of everyday distaff New York life.

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