Agon, Logos, Polis

Agon, Logos, Polis

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  • Author: Jóhann Páll Árnason
  • Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag
  • ISBN: 9783515077477
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 260

Ten papers, from a conference held at Ohio State University in 1997, reconsider Greek experience and its lessons for later cultures from a variety of perspectives. The contributions reflect in particular the central role of politics and the `Polis', so distinctively and uniquely Greek, in the development of Greek culture. The papers also consider Greek philosophy, drama and the Greek view of the natural and divine world around them and demonstrate the continuing influence of Hellenism by discussing modern adaptations of Greek models. Contributors include Johann Arnason, Cornelius Castoriadis, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Christian Meier, Oswyn Murray, Peter Murphy, Kurt Raaflaub, Louis Ruprecht, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet.


Christ Child

Christ Child

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  • Author: Stephen J. Davis
  • Publisher: Yale University Press
  • ISBN: 030014945X
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 429

Little is known about the early childhood of Jesus Christ. But in the decades after his death, stories began circulating about his origins. One collection of such tales was the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, known in antiquity as the Paidika or “Childhood Deeds” of Jesus. In it, Jesus not only performs miracles while at play (such as turning clay birds into live sparrows) but also gets enmeshed in a series of interpersonal conflicts and curses to death children and teachers who rub him the wrong way. How would early readers have made sense of this young Jesus? In this highly innovative book, Stephen Davis draws on current theories about how human communities construe the past to answer this question. He explores how ancient readers would have used texts, images, places, and other key reference points from their own social world to understand the Christ child’s curious actions. He then shows how the figure of a young Jesus was later picked up and exploited in the context of medieval Jewish-Christian and Christian-Muslim encounters. Challenging many scholarly assumptions, Davis adds a crucial dimension to the story of how Christian history was created.


European Modernity

European Modernity

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  • Author: Bo Stråth
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1350007099
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 264

It is often taken for granted that modernity emerged in Europe and diffused from there across the world. This book questions that assumption and re-examines the question of European modernity in the light of world history. Bo Stråth and Peter Wagner re-position Europe in the global context of the 19th and 20th centuries. They show that Europe is less modern than has been assumed, and modernity less European and thus decentre Europe in a way that makes room for a wider historical perspective. Adopting a thematic structure, the authors reconceive the idea of European modernity in relation to key topics such as democracy, capitalism and market society, individual autonomy, religion and politics. European Modernity is an important addition to the literature that will be of interest to all students and scholars of modern European history.


Polis

Polis

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  • Author: John Ma
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN: 0691255482
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 736

A definitive new history of the origins, evolution, and scope of the ancient Greek city-state The Greek polis, or city-state, was a resilient and adaptable political institution founded on the principles of citizenship, freedom, and equality. Emerging around 650 BCE and enduring to 350 CE, it offered a means for collaboration among fellow city-states and social bargaining between a community and its elites—but at what cost? Polis proposes a panoramic account of the ancient Greek city-state, its diverse forms, and enduring characteristics over the span of a millennium. In this landmark book, John Ma provides a new history of the polis, charting its spread and development into a common denominator for hundreds of communities from the Black Sea to North Africa and from the Near East to Italy. He explores its remarkable achievements as a political form offering community, autonomy, prosperity, public goods, and spaces of social justice for its members. He also reminds us that behind the successes of civic ideology and institutions lie entanglements with domination, empire, and enslavement. Ma’s sweeping and multifaceted narrative draws widely on a rich store of historical evidence while weighing in on lively scholarly debates and offering new readings of Aristotle as the great theoretician of the polis. A monumental work of scholarship, Polis transforms our understanding of antiquity while challenging us to grapple with the moral legacy of an idea whose very success centered on the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others.


The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy

The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy

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  • Author: Johann P. Arnason
  • Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
  • ISBN: 1118561678
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 437

The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy presents a series of essays that trace the Greeks’ path to democracy and examine the connection between the Greek polis as a citizen state and democracy as well as the interaction between democracy and various forms of cultural expression from a comparative historical perspective and with special attention to the place of Greek democracy in political thought and debates about democracy throughout the centuries. Presents an original combination of a close synchronic and long diachronic examination of the Greek polis - city-states that gave rise to the first democratic system of government Offers a detailed study of the close interactionbetween democracy, society, and the arts in ancient Greece Places the invention of democracy in fifth-century bce Athens both in its broad social and cultural context and in the context of the re-emergence of democracy in the modern world Reveals the role Greek democracy played in the political and intellectual traditions that shaped modern democracy, and in the debates about democracy in modern social, political, and philosophical thought Written collaboratively by an international team of leading scholars in classics, ancient history, sociology, and political science


Critical Theory and the Classical World

Critical Theory and the Classical World

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  • Author: Martyn Hudson
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 0429996462
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 202

This book radically re-examines Europe’s imaginaries of its origin in the ancient Greek world. Extracting central concepts of critical theory in its widest sense - beyond the Frankfurt School - like the human, force, spirit and domination, it allies them to characters, mythologies and motifs in ancient thought. Just as the stories of Achilles, Helen and Odysseus have become central to our modes of self-understanding, so we can also examine the roots and routes of the concepts of social theory out of the ancient earth and its myths. An important book for scholars and students of critical theory, social theory, aesthetic theory and the history of the human sciences, it alerts us to the catastrophe that we are facing in the 21st century - a catastrophe of domination and ecological collapse that has its origins in the ancient world and the ways in which it began to define a certain sense of humanness. Considering the artistic production of the ancient world in relation to the thought of Adorno, Critical Theory and the Classical World argues that it is only by understanding the persistence of the haunted motifs of the past into the present that we can begin to re-forge our critical theory of society and re-found our social formations on a new basis.


Religious Competition in the Third Century CE: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World

Religious Competition in the Third Century CE: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World

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  • Author: Jordan D. Rosenblum
  • Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
  • ISBN: 364755068X
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 261

The essays in this work examine issues related to authority, identity, or change in religious and philosophical traditions of the third century CE. This century is of particular interest because of the political and cultural developments and conflicts that occurred during this period, which in turn drastically changed the social and religious landscape of the Roman world. The specific focus of this volume edited by Jordan D. Rosenblum, Lily Vuong, and Nathaniel DesRosiers is to explore these major creative movements and to examine their strategies for developing and designating orthodoxies and orthopraxies.Contributors were encouraged to analyze or construct the intersections between parallel religious and philosophical communities of the third century, including points of contact either between or among Jews, Christians, pagans, and philosophers. As a result, the discussions of the material contained within this volume are both comparative in nature and interdisciplinary in approach, engaging participants who work in the fields of Religious Studies, Philosophy, History and Archaeology. The overall goal was to explore dialogues between individuals or groups that illuminate the mutual competition and influence that was extant among them, and to put forth a general methodological framework for the study of these ancient dialogues. These religious and philosophical dialogues are not only of great interest and import in their own right, but they also can help us to understand how later cultural and religious developments unfolded.


How to Do Things with History

How to Do Things with History

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  • Author: Danielle Allen
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0190649909
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 320

How to Do Things with History is a collection of essays that explores current and future approaches to the study of ancient Greek cultural history. Rather than focus directly on methodology, the essays in this volume demonstrate how some of the most productive and significant methodologies for studying ancient Greece can be employed to illuminate a range of different kinds of subject matter. These essays, which bring together the work of some of the most talented scholars in the field, are based upon papers delivered at a conference held at Cambridge University in September of 2014 in honor of Paul Cartledge's retirement from the post of A. G. Leventis Professor of Ancient Greek Culture. For the better part of four decades, Paul Cartledge has spearheaded intellectual developments in the field of Greek culture in both scholarly and public contexts. His work has combined insightful historical accounts of particular places, periods, and thinkers with a willingness to explore comparative approaches and a keen focus on methodology. Cartledge has throughout his career emphasized the analysis of practice - the study not, for instance, of the history of thought but of thinking in action and through action. The assembled essays trace the broad horizons charted by Cartledge's work: from studies of political thinking to accounts of legal and cultural practices to politically astute approaches to historiography. The contributors to this volume all take the parameters and contours of Cartledge's work, which has profoundly influenced an entire generation of scholars, as starting points for their own historical and historiographical explorations. Those parameters and contours provide a common thread that runs through and connects all of the essays while also offering sufficient freedom for individual contributors to demonstrate an array of rich and varied approaches to the study of the past.


The Adventure of the Human Intellect

The Adventure of the Human Intellect

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  • Author: Kurt A. Raaflaub
  • Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
  • ISBN: 1119162599
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 280

The Adventure of the Human Intellect presents the latest scholarship on the beginnings of intellectual history on a broad scope, encompassing ten eminent ancient or early civilizations from both the Old and New Worlds. Borrows themes from The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946), updating an old topic with a new approach and up-to-date theoretical underpinning, evidence, and scholarship Provides a broad scope of studies, including discussion of highly developed ancient or early civilizations in China, India, West Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Americas Examines the world view of ten ancient or early societies, reconstructed from their own texts, concerning the place of human beings in society and state, in nature and cosmos, in space and time, in life and death, and in relation to those in power and the world of the divine Considers a diversity of sources representing a wide array of particular responses to differing environments, circumstances, and intellectual challenges Reflects a more inclusive and nuanced historiographical attitude with respect to non-elites, gender, and local variations Brings together leading specialists in the field, and is edited by an internationally renowned scholar


Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece

Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece

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  • Author: Kurt A. Raaflaub
  • Publisher: Univ of California Press
  • ISBN: 9780520932173
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 260

This book presents a state-of-the-art debate about the origins of Athenian democracy by five eminent scholars. The result is a stimulating, critical exploration and interpretation of the extant evidence on this intriguing and important topic. The authors address such questions as: Why was democracy first realized in ancient Greece? Was democracy "invented" or did it evolve over a long period of time? What were the conditions for democracy, the social and political foundations that made this development possible? And what factors turned the possibility of democracy into necessity and reality? The authors first examine the conditions in early Greek society that encouraged equality and "people’s power." They then scrutinize, in their social and political contexts, three crucial points in the evolution of democracy: the reforms connected with the names of Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes in the early and late sixth and mid-fifth century. Finally, an ancient historian and a political scientist review the arguments presented in the previous chapters and add their own perspectives, asking what lessons we can draw today from the ancient democratic experience. Designed for a general readership as well as students and scholars, the book intends to provoke discussion by presenting side by side the evidence and arguments that support various explanations of the origins of democracy, thus enabling readers to join in the debate and draw their own conclusions.