Ancient Greek Thinkers Research Articles

Kautilya on Public Goods and Taxation

Joseph Schumpeter (1954) offered a very unflattering view of the contributions of ancient Chinese and Greek thinkers to economic analysis. It is apparent by now that he committed many errors of omission and commission. For example, Young Back Choi (1989) points out that Schumpeter discussed the contributions only of Chinese moral philosophers and omitted the contributions of the legalist Han Feitzu (280–233 BCE), who advanced many modern ideas related to “public choice variety.” Similarly, the pioneering work of S. Todd Lowry (1987) has refuted the judgments of Schumpeter regarding the contributions of the Greeks and also has challenged his views on the methodology and scope of economics, such as his exclusion of ethical and administrative issues from economics.1

Self-Intellection and its Epistemological Origins in Ancient Greek Thought (review)

Self-Intellection and its Epistemological Origins in Ancient Greek Thought (review)

Beyond the Gates of the Polis

In recent sociological debates, the concept of ‘society’, understood as a delimited, bounded entity, has come under much critical scrutiny, especially as it seems increasingly inadequate as a frame of analytical reference in an age characterized by ‘global’ flows and processes beyond national boundaries. In this article, we suggest that this understanding of ‘society’ is analogous to, and was in part generated by, the conception of the city-state ( polis) favoured by ancient Greek thinkers of the 4th century BC, most notably Plato and Aristotle. Standard accounts of the history of sociology see the roots of the discipline as originating in this type of Greek political theory, for it provided many of the bases of the social analyses of ‘classical’ sociologists such as Durkheim. The development of forms of sociological thought that can grasp phenomena that exist in certain senses beyond ‘society’ requires not only a reconsideration of the relations that can or should pertain between present-day sociologists and the ‘classical’ 19th-century thinkers, but also a rethinking of the connections between these two groups and their ancient predecessors. We suggest that it is today fruitful to reconfigure our understanding of the nature of the history of sociological thought, such that thinkers of a later, Hellenistic, period in Greek history, especially the historiographer Polybius, are recognized as important predecessors in the search for analytic categories that are not restricted to the study of particular bounded social entities. Thinkers of the Hellenistic period rejected the polis as the central analytic category in favour of the study of the whole ‘inhabited world’ ( oikoumene). The ways in which Polybius in particular transformed the nature of historiography should be seen as important precursors of modern notions of ‘global sociology’. A recognition of the importance of this Hellenistic revolution in analytic orientation compels us to rethink what texts we take to be ‘classical’ vis-á-vis contemporary sociological endeavours to grasp the ‘global’.

Self-Intellection & Its Epistemological Origin in Ancient Greek Thought, by Ian Crystal

Self-Intellection & Its Epistemological Origin in Ancient Greek Thought, by Ian Crystal

Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought

Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought

My brain's running slow today – The preference for “things ontologies” in research and everyday discourse on human thinking

The focus of the article is toreflect on the tendency of research traditionsin the areas of human learning, development,and communication, to use metaphors andanalogies that construe human mental activitiesand resources in terms of physical objects.This is evident, for instance, in moderncognitive science where computer metaphors(information processing and informationstorage) have been foundational for thediscipline. However, this tendency to reifyhuman activities can be found in many othertraditions, and it goes back to ancient Greekthinking. It is argued that the consequences ofthis tradition of reification are significantfor the human sciences. One important elementof these types of metaphors is that theydescribe people and their capacities in static,rather than developmental, terms.

Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought

Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought

R. J. Hankinson, Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, cloth £48.00. ISBN: 0 19 823745 6.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewR. J. Hankinson, Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, cloth £48.00. ISBN: 0 19 823745 6.Raphael WoolfRaphael Woolf Department of Philosophy, Harvard University, USA Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Volume 51, Number 3September 2000 Society: The British Society for the Philosophy of Science Views: 1Total views on this site Views: 1Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/51.3.545 Views: 1Total views on this site © 2000 by The Author. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought

Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought

The Unity of Declarative Sentence

The problem of the unity of the sentence is to explain how a sentence manages to say something, to ‘make a move in the language-game’. In the particular case of the declarative sentence, which is characterized essentially by its ability to say something true or false (cf. Aristotle De Int. ch. 4), the challenge is to explain how the sentence as a whole manages to attract this property, given that its components do not have it. In his book Language, Thought and Falsehood in Ancient Greek Thought, Nicholas Denyer implicitly commits himself to two conflicting accounts of what this unity consists in. The conflict is illuminating because it can be seen as giving expression to two attractive but apparently opposed thoughts on the nature of the sentence: the thought that all significant components of a sentence must have reference, or semantic role (a position which in the writings of Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett is truistic), and the thought that the semantically significant components of the sentence cannot all be names, since then the sentence would lose its peculiar unity — its ability to say something (true or false) — and degenerate into a mere list. In this paper I shall try, using Denyer's text as my point of departure, to resolve the conflict by suggesting how a unified sentence can, after all, be composed of names.The first account which Denyer gives of the unity of the sentence is not offered as such, but it emerges from his discussion of the differences between three primitive kinds of language, which he calls Agglomerative (A), Orthographic (O) and Sentential (S). The three languages have in common that their basic ‘sentences’ all consist of linear strings of unambiguous names of primary elements, themselves arranged linearly. Thereafter they diverge in the following respects. In A and O, these basic ‘sentences’ are, according to Denyer, only by courtesy so called, for they are really complex names; but whereas in A the order in which the names are listed is insignificant, in O it is significant. Thus ‘ab’, for example, would in A merely designate a complex object composed of the simple objects designated by ‘a’ and ‘b’, and is not semantically distinguishable from ‘ba’; in O, on the other hand, these two composite names additionally signify two different ways in which the complex consisting of a and b may be composed, for example, that a is to the left of b, and that b is to the left of a, respectively. In S, by contrast with both A and O, the basic ‘sentences’ are said to be genuine sentences: they are not merely lists of names, but are suitable for the making of assertions. In S, a symbol such as ‘ab’ says that (for example) a is to the left of b.

Diversity and Ancient Democracy

W HAT CAN ONE LEARN about democracy from fifth and fourth century practice of and theory about Athenian democratic institutions? Joel Schwartz's review of my book Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought (1992) in November 1994 Political Theory (vol. 22, pp. 685-8) implicitly raises this question. While issue was at best subsidiary in a book that focused primarily on ancient theorists' explorations of political consequences of an epistemological search for an unseen, underlying unity, question of how ancient democracy can help us understand most common modern political regime is an important one and worthy of more consideration than I can offer in these brief comments on Schwartz's review of my book. Ours is a world in which democracies constantly have to address demands for unity, ethnic or otherwise, as well as demands for an openness to diverse populations. Our ability to accept the other, to acknowledge difference at same time that we recognize need for a unity based on some set of similarities, is central to preservation and successful functioning of democratic institutions. Schwartz reads argument of my book as turning demos into totalizing modernist, unable to accept differences that derive from particular bodies of individual members of community, and as suggesting that aristoi become champion of diversity (1994, 686). The former point deserves primary consideration; latter is simply a misreading of argument, but in itself indicates difficulties we often have with acknowledging tensions within democratic regimes between a need for a unity based on identity of members as opposed to a unity that can incorporate and build from differences. To approach this as a conflict between aristocracy and democracy with all normative baggage that accompanies those words is to ignore that those tensions plague democracies and is to limit possibility

Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought

This wide-ranging book locates the origin of political science in the everyday world of ancient Greek life, thought, and culture. Arlene Saxonhouse contends that the Greeks, confronted by the puzzling diversity of the physical world, sought a force that would unify, constrain, and explain it. This drive toward unity did more than value the mind over the senses: it led the Greeks to play down the very real complexities-particularly regarding women, the family, and sexuality-in both their political and personal lives. Saxonhouse opens up fresh understandings of such issues as the Greeks' fear of the feminine and their attempts to ignore the demands that gender, reproduction, and the family inevitably make on the individual.

Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought

Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought

Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought.Arlene W. Saxonhouse

<i>Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought.</i>Arlene W. Saxonhouse

The musical image: a theory of content

Introduction and Theory Archetypal Criticism, or an Alternate Poetics of Music The Archetypal Model Music in Ritual and Education: Ethos Dialectic between Ethos and Pathos in Ancient Greek Thought Ethos of the Christian Liturgy Ethos of Courtly Love Classical Humanism: Pathos Reawakening of Pathos Emotional Music, or the Rhetorical Variety of Pathos The Pastoral Mode, I The Pastoral Mode, II The Epic/Heroic Mode The Satiric Mode The Many Faces of Classicism Transcendental Humanism ... and Beyond: Logos Romanticism and Melodrama Innigkeit, the Romantic Alternative Age of Irony: Modernist Music Formalist Alterations of the Archetypes Epilogue Analysis and Culture Bibliography Subject Index Music Index

Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought. By Arlene W. Saxonhouse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 253p. $29.95. - Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” By Charles Taylor. With Commentary by Amy Gutmann, editor, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, Susan Wolf. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. 112p. $14.95.

Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought. By Arlene W. Saxonhouse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 253p. $29.95. - Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” By Charles Taylor. With Commentary by Amy Gutmann, editor, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, Susan Wolf. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. 112p. $14.95.

Aristotle and Diversity - Arlene W. Saxonhouse: Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pp. xiv, 253. $29.95.)

Aristotle and Diversity - Arlene W. Saxonhouse: Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pp. xiv, 253. $29.95.)

Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s (review)

BOOK REVIEWS i47 served by Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy. It veers with unnerving speed between the assumption that the reader knows nothing--it is explained at length that Hamburg is an important port 09)--and the assumption that the reader knows a great deal--as when it is flatly stated in a single sentence that there exists a connection between Romanticism and the origins of the term 'nihilism' 029). Inasmuch as the latter is a matter of some considerable import for a nuanced understanding of Schopenhauer , it is a pity to see it mentioned only in passing. With respect to the translation, a certain sympathy with the task Ewald Osers must have faced is unavoidable; indeed, Safranski's style is at once so passionate and so idiosyncratic as to remind one of Hegel's comment about Hamann: "he does not have a style, he /s style." Safranski's besetting sin is an apparently incurable fondness for cumberson metaphorical castles in the air, as when he repeatedly compares Kant's categories of the understanding to a rococo music-box, or when he speaks of "Kant's rococo-like eye-winking epicureanism" (lo5). In fairness it must be remarked that more passion than idiosyncrasy comes through, which is surely to Osers's credit. The most glaring omission in Safranski's book is any mention (either in the text or in the bibliography) of Arthur Hiibscher's Denker gegen den Strom (recently translated as Thinker Against the T/de).4 And with respect to the important philosophical issues, such as the understanding of Romanticism, an appreciation of the philosophical significance of Schopenhauer's contemporaries, especially Fichte and Schelling, and the knowledge of Schopenhauer's philosophical evolution, Hiibscher is indisputably superior. JAMEs SNOW Millsaps College DALE SNOW Loyola Collegein Baltimore Daniel Breazeale, ed. and trans. Philosophyand Truth: Selectionsfrom Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 187os. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 199o. Pp. lxv + x65. Paper, $15.oo. In view of the fact that Nietzsche's "non-book," The Will to Power, has for a long time been the only easily accessible version of Nietzsche's Nachlass in English translation, the issuing in paperback of these notes from the early 187os is a welcome event. The translation is excellent, and the translator's introduction and explanatory notes intelligent and informative. In particular, Professor Breazeale relates the selected notes to the circumstances of Nietzsche's life and thinking at the time in a way that will be very helpful for readers unfamiliar with the relevant biographical details. His philological skill in dealing with the problems attending the editing of Nietzsche's notes is as effective as it is impressive. The translator's introduction characterizes the selections of Nietzsche's Nachlass that follow as pertaifiing primarily to issues in epistemology, as well as giving us a good idea of Nietzsche's early thinking about the relation of the philosopher to culture--to 4 Trans. J. T. Baer and D. E. Cartwright (Lewistown, NY, 1989). 148 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30: I JANUARY i99~ art in particular--and to the ancient Greek thinkers. It thus provides a perfect orientation for the sometimes cryptic notes that form the main body of the volume, and is marred only by a few typographical errors that are unexpected in a revised edition. Malwida yon Meysenbug, for example, whose surname often gains an additional "r," in this case loses the "n"; and through inheriting a cedilla, Foucault's name as printed makes him sound--with unfortunate irony--both mad and idiotic. Of the six major sections in the volume, the one that comes closest to being a finished essay is the best known: "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (personally I'd prefer to retain the singular of the German "lie"). Aside from the shorter "On the Pathos of Truth," which Nietzsche dedicated to Cosima Wagner, the other main sections are collections of disjointed notes. Even though "On Truth and Lies" has been" so gushed over by would-be deconstructionists and DeManiacs in recent years that it threatens to "disappear under the interpretations," it is still a thought-provoking essay and contains some vintage...

Psyche in ancient Greek thought.

Psyche in ancient Greek thought.

The Evolution of Mechanical Ideas in Ancient Greek Thought

The Evolution of Mechanical Ideas in Ancient Greek Thought