Talk:Standing on the shoulders of giants

message: The page says "see below" with regards to Newton's quote, but doesn't have anything below referring to it.
Why not just get rid of the Latin and put the actual English quotation there?
Bradridder (talk) 14:35, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

message: Newton says, in his letter to Hooke: "if I have seen further..."; thus he is, in the style of the age, modestly portraying himself as the dwarf (note: rhetorically, as the expression has always been meant, and not physcically) who extends the concepts by building on the work of others whom he praises with the use of giants. The falling-out with Hooke came later. There is nothing in this quotation which can been seen as a slight to Hooke.
NAFC 2012-01-01
----  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.231.128.68 (talk) 17:46, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Newton's use of the phrase 

message: what about Lucan now? We cannot say "it can be traced to Lucan, except... it can't". Can it or can't it? I have to admit there is nothing of the sort in  Pharsalia 2.10, Edward Ridley (1896) has:
:Matter unformed to his subduing hand,
:And realms unbalanced, fix by stern decree
and the original :
:Se quoque lege tenens, et saecula iussa ferentem
:Fatorum immoto divisit limite mundum:
nothing about pygmies or shoulders indeed. Searching the entire text of the translation for "shoulder", "giant", "titan" or "pygmy" yields  no result either. I will remove Lucan for now, but it will be interesting to see how the attribution came about. dab (ᛏ) 14:19, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I figured it out, from :de:. dab (ᛏ) 14:39, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Lucan or no Lucan

message: Note that there is a book titled "On the Shoulders of Giants" compiled by Steven Hawking. It has original works of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein.
There is nothing in this article about the book nor an article for the book.Gagueci 22:12, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Book 

message: What if someone calls Abelson or confirms this in person; how do you cite that?  --Alan Au 06:05, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You don't - it's not a reliable source. Thanks/wangi 08:58, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

text: I've also got no idea what you're on about, but hey... /wangi 09:00, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Abelson's roommate 

message: Regarding this:
:The thirteenth-century stained glass of Chartres Cathedral's south transept may also be influenced by the metaphor. The tall windows under the Rose Window show four major Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel as gigantic figures and the four New Testament evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as sitting on their shoulders. The evangelists, though smaller, "see more" than the larger Old Testament prophets in that they see the Messiah about whom the prophets spoke.
As far as I know this is original research. The Chartres Cathedral's rose window is an instance of theological typology (see also medieval allegory), prevalent throughout the Middle Ages, in which the Old Testament is seen as pre-figuring (analogy) of the life of Christ and the events of the New Testament. I do have a source for this if anyone is interested - but as far as I know, the original "shoulder of giants" phrase was in relation to the pagan authors (Aristotle and Plato etc) while the rose window is a typological pre-figurement. Also, showing the Apostles as "dwarfs" might have even been heretical - medieval iconography commonly re-sized things to different proportions to give the viewer a sense of importance. If someone can show there was in fact a direct connection between the rose window and the phrase, but otherwise I think its a loose analogy of modern origin.  -- Stbalbach 16:20, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rose window 

message: Which of the above is right? The article states gigantium whereas there seems to be enough books that used gigantum. Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 14:59, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gigantum or gigantium? 

message: File:Orion aveugle cherchant le soleil.jpg
 because the current picture seems like more sitting than standing :-( ----Erkan Yilmaz 18:03, 25 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Note that John of Salisbury actually uses the word insidentes, which means "sitting (on)", not "standing (on)". This implies that he conceived of the size disparity between the giants and dwarfs as much less extreme than modern people might imagine it to be; if the eyes of a dwarf are situated higher than those of a giant on whose shoulders the dwarf is seated, this means that the dwarf's upper body is (at least) about as large as the giant's head. This is much more in line with the differences between extremely tall and extremely short real humans, rather than creatures of pure imagination. Think of a child sitting on the shoulders of an adult: this is a situation where even in real life the child will have a considerably higher point of view than the adult. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:29, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: I liked this picture better

message: Why have an inline ref to a translation of John's quote when the article provides a different translation? That's pretty silly.
I think, however, that both translations are inaccurate regarding magnitudine gigantea: as the original has no pronoun, where does the "their" come from? The phrase should be simply translated as "by giant size" or "by gigantic size", or more idiomatically "by the size/height of giants". --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:37, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Translation of John of Salisbury quote 

message: On two occasions an IP editor has added "This statement is derived from ‘Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants see farther ahead than the giants.’ the saying made famous by Pascal..." to the start of this article. Does anyone have a source for this? I can't even find a source attributing it Pascal, let alone it being made famous by him. shellac (talk) 13:14, 5 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pascal addition 

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replies: text: I marked the check as "failed" as the Wayback link does not include the image from the collection. I will remove the external link. Thank you.   SchreiberBike | ⌨  01:28, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The title should be "dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants". The latin expression "nanos gigantum humeris insidentes" contains "nanos" which means dwarfs. Also the general metaphor usually refers to "Dwarfs".--PunGNU (talk) 11:19, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move page: Dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants 

message: "According to medieval historian Richard William Southern . . ." States the current article.
I do not think so, did Southern live in c13? Compare Wikipedia description of, eg, Froissart.
Southern was English, lived in c20, was a historian, was a historian of the Mediaeval period in Western Europe.
Thucydides was a Greek. Thucydides was a historian. Thucydides was a historian of Greek History.
Polybius was a Greek Historian. But not a historian of Greece.
"According Richard William Southern, a c20 English historian specialising in Medieval European history, . . ." Better?
"According to RW Southern . . ." Then anyone interested in RW's Christian names or his life can follow the link. Better still? AnnaComnemna (talk) 20:12, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pedant with too much spare time. 

message: I'm surprised that Robert K. Merton's great book 'On the Shoulders of Giants' doesn't get a standalone bullet in this article, although it is used to bolster the Chartres quote. Comments, before I add it? Bellagio99 (talk) 15:22, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  More prominence for Robert K. Merton 

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thread_title:  External links modified (January 2018) 

message: an erroneous interpretation of some tested and valid theory  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:2149:8767:B900:A557:363B:8541:94C1 (talk) 11:39, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  feet of clay standing on the shoulders of giants 

message: To complicated!!!!  This article doesn't even have a proper definition!!!!
Standing on the shoulders of giants is a metaphor which means "Using the understanding gained by major thinkers who have gone before in order to make intellectual progress".The meaning and origin of the expression: Standing on the shoulders of giants, The Phrase Finder.
Moscowdreams (talk) 05:09, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: To complicated!!!!! 

message: The article gave the date of the first edition (1621) of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as the source for the quotation, but it doesn't appear until the second edition (1624). I've changed the article to reflect it. 
There is a full-text version of the first edition available publicly through the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership.
Images only, and not a full text, are available for the second edition, behind a paywall on ProQuest/Chadwyck Healey's Early English Books Online, and the relevant text is on p.7: "a dwarfe standing on the shoulders of a Giant, may see farther then a Giant himselfe".  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.124.181.159 (talk) 17:52, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy 

message: Can we get a translation of Marin Mersenne's and Blaise Pascal's quotes from French to English and use them in the article? 2601:547:500:6940:C129:6A82:732A:ACFF (talk) 16:12, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Translate French quotes to English 

message: Thought the text below may help fill a gap -
‘twere a shame for these later ages to rest our selves meerly on the labours of our forefathers, as if they had informed us of all things to be knowne, and when we set ourselves upon their shoulders, not to see further than they themselves did. ‘Twere a superstitious, a lazie opinion to think Aristotles works the bounds and limits of all humane invention, beyond which there could be no possibility of reaching. Certainely there are yet many things left to discovery, and it can be no inconvenience for us, to maintain a new truth or rectifie an ancient errour (John Wilkins 1638). From "Newton's Apple" by Peter Aughton 92.18.124.236 (talk) 14:09, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  John Wilkins 

message: The picture shows the servant being carried on the shoulders of the giant, indeed. But is it the best depiction of the meaning of the phrase. The servant is not seeing farther, rather it is the blind giant who is benefiting. Is this the best picture that we have? But I suggest that we keep it, until a better picture is found. But I won't object any further if it is just removed. TomS TDotO (talk) 14:16, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  The picture of being carried on the giant - is that appropriate 

message: In the REM song King of Birds, the Choruses start with Standing on the shoulders of Giants 2601:182:1:6340:680E:FB7B:9752:145B (talk) 02:30, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another contemporary example