How would you rate the most influential people in history? This question is behind an ongoing study run by MIT’s Media Lab. A while back the folks at MIT reported that the most influential person in history was the Greek philosopher Aristotle. In second place was Plato, third was Jesus, and fourth was Socrates. Alexander the Great ranked fifth. Why does this matter? It matters because four of the five most influential people in history believed that women are inferior to men. And those four men had a profound influence on the way the church views women. An incubator for sexual discrimination The city of Athens gave us the most influential philosophers of western civilization. Men like Socrates, Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle laid the foundations for much of what we believe about women. Which is a crying shame. Socrates was relatively progressive in his beliefs that women should be educated, but he also said that women were inferior to men. In his Republic he opined that “all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man.” Plato and his student Aristotle both taught that women were inferior to [...]![]()
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