Smith's Fallacies

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Sydney Smith’s review of the The Book of Fallacies by Jeremy Bentham states that he does not believe that our ancestors are wiser than today’s generations. Smith claims that the people alive today are the most ingenious because they have the most experience in what has happened in the world. This statement goes against the mainstream thought that ancestors are the wisest and should be looked up to for knowledge. I believe that Smith is correct in saying this because although our ancestors were born in an earlier time frame than us, we have knowledge of all of their experiences and our experiences combined. As Smith states in his review, yes, I believe that among the living the older are generally wiser than the young because they have more human experience. People have to reach an age to where they …show more content…

He remarks that people now are wiser than ever before. Take this into thought; he is saying that the citizens of Earth now are more knowledgeable than the citizens of Earth in 1916. This is unquestionably true considering people of today have a hundred years more knowledge of life than the people of 1916. There have been infinite new discoveries and ideas taken place over the past hundred years that were never even thought possible until now. As the years pass by, knowledge is also more easily accessible. The school curriculum is constantly changing to keep up with the amount of information that children are expected to know by adulthood. Smith’s proclamation even holds true short term. Looking back only a few decades, students were not expected to take many of the class courses required to graduate now. A large amount of adults cannot help their sixteen and seventeen year old children with their math homework because they never had to take the courses. Human knowledge is constantly expanding, therefore how is it even thought possible for our ancestors to hold as much knowledge as us

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