Download or read book Ancient Greeks on the Human Condition written by Matthew Sims and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the writings of four ancient Greeks-Homer, Thucydides, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Each of these four individuals represents a different approach toward the human condition, ranging from the heroic and tragic to the comic and absurd. This book focuses on how the human condition can best be understood within the framework of these four perspectives by examining the major contributions of these Greek writers, whether in the form of epic (Homer's Iliad), history (Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War), or drama (the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes). These various perceptions of Greek thought illuminate our understanding of what it means to be fully human. By focusing on the concepts of the heroic, tragic, comic, and absurd, we can see how these ancient Greek authors still provide key insights for us today as they clarify those timeless features that define the human condition.
Download or read book The Science of Man in Ancient Greece written by Maria Michela Sassi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thus, because women were assumed to have pale skin from staying indoors too much, Greek biology and medicine sought to explain this feature as an indication of the "cold" nature of women, as opposed to the "hot" constitution of men.".
Download or read book Archery and the Human Condition in Lacan the Greeks and Nietzsche written by Matthew P. Meyer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-10-18 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archery and the Human Condition in Lacan, the Greeks, and Nietzsche showcases archery as a metaphor for the fundamental tension at the heart of the human condition. Matthew Meyer develops a theory of subjectivity that incorporates elements from psychoanalysis, Greek literature, philosophy, and Zen archery, bringing together allusions to the bow and archery made by Sophocles, Homer, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Lacan, Nietzsche, and Awa Kenzo. The book weaves together a psychoanalytic account of infant development, the obstacles faced by Greek heroes, and virtue theory to explore the tension between the forces inside and outside of the human that subject the human beingit to conditions beyond its control. Meyer develops this side of the tension through Jacques Lacan’s theory of human drive, illustrating the three parts of drive theory through application to three works in Greek literature and philosophy. He The second part of the text describes the other side of this fundamental tension--the ability to control drive impulses—through Aristotle’s use of the archer as a metaphor in his virtue theory. The book illustrates the productive nature of this tension through an analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas about drives and sublimation, especially his contention that the “highest” types are like “the bow with the greatest tension.”
Download or read book The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks written by David Konstan and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2007-12-22 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is generally assumed that whatever else has changed about the human condition since the dawn of civilization, basic human emotions - love, fear, anger, envy, shame - have remained constant. David Konstan, however, argues that the emotions of the ancient Greeks were in some significant respects different from our own, and that recognizing these differences is important to understanding ancient Greek literature and culture. With The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, Konstan reexamines the traditional assumption that the Greek terms designating the emotions correspond more or less to those of today. Beneath the similarities, there are striking discrepancies. References to Greek 'anger' or 'love' or 'envy,' for example, commonly neglect the fact that the Greeks themselves did not use these terms, but rather words in their own language, such as orgê and philia and phthonos, which do not translate neatly into our modern emotional vocabulary. Konstan argues that classical representations and analyses of the emotions correspond to a world of intense competition for status, and focused on the attitudes, motives, and actions of others rather than on chance or natural events as the elicitors of emotion. Konstan makes use of Greek emotional concepts to interpret various works of classical literature, including epic, drama, history, and oratory. Moreover, he illustrates how the Greeks' conception of emotions has something to tell us about our own views, whether about the nature of particular emotions or of the category of emotion itself.
Download or read book Human and Animal in Ancient Greece written by Tua Korhonen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals were omnipresent in the everyday life and the visual arts of classical Greece. In literature, too, they had significant functions.This book discusses the role of animals - both domestic and wild - and mythological hybrid creatures in ancient Greek literature. Challenging the traditional view of the Greek anthropocentrism, the authors provide a nuanced interpretation of the classical relationship to animals. Through a close textual analysis, they highlight the emergence of the perspective of animals in Greek literature. Central to the book's enquiry is the question of empathy: investigating the ways in which ancient Greek authors invited their readers to empathise with non-human counterparts. The book presents case studies on the animal similes in the Iliad, the addresses to animals and nature in Sophocles' Philoctetes, the human-bird hybrids in The Birds by Aristophanes and the animal protagonists of Anyte's epigrams. Throughout, the authors develop an innovative methodology that combines philological and historical analysis with a philosophy of embodiment, or phenomenology of the body. Shedding new light on how animals were regarded in ancient Greek society, the book will be of interest to classicists, historians, philosophers, literary scholars and all those studying empathy and the human-animal relationship.
Download or read book Greek Gods Human Lives written by Mary R. Lefkowitz and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insightful and fun, this new guide to an ancient mythology explains why the Greek gods and goddesses are still so captivating to us, revisiting the work of Homer, Ovid, Virgil, and Shakespeare in search of the essence of these stories. (Mythology & Folklore)
Download or read book Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks written by Robert Garland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Greece comes alive in this exploration of the daily lives of ordinary people-men and women, children and the elderly, slaves and foreigners, rich and poor. With new information drawn from the most current research, this volume presents a wealth of information on every aspect of ancient Greek life. Discover why it was more desirable to be a slave than a day laborer. Examine cooking methods and rules of ancient warfare. Uncover Greek mythology. Learn how Greeks foretold the future. Understand what life was like for women, and what prevailing attitudes were toward sexuality, marriage, and divorce. This volume brings ancient Greek life home to readers through a variety of anecdotes and primary source passages from contemporary authors, allowing comparison between the ancient world and modern life. A multitude of resources will engage students and interested readers, including a Making Connections feature which offers interactive and fun ideas for research assignments. The concluding chapter places the ancient world in the present, covering new interpretations like the movie 300, the founding of modern Greece, and the ways in which classical culture still affects our own. With over 60 illustrations, a timeline of events, a glossary of terms, and an extensive print and nonprint bibliography, this volume offers a unique and descriptive look at one of the most influential eras in human history.
Download or read book Classical Greece and the Birth of Western Art written by Andrew Stewart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses the 'Classical Revolution' in Greek art, its contexts, aims, achievements, and impact.
Download or read book The Human Condition written by Stefan Wurm and published by ATICE LLC. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a very short period, only a few hundred years, our understanding of the cosmos, our planet Earth, the evolution of life on it, and the beginnings of our very own human endeavor have radically changed. These revolutions in science and technology have dramatically altered our societies in many ways. For quite some time it seemed as if our planets resources were unlimited. Today we know that this is not the case. Human civilizations are shaping our planets future in ways that have profound consequences for all other life on Earth as well as for us. We need to reflect broadly on what defines our human condition if we wish our societies to be successful in navigating a future that cannot be just ours but must include the broad diversity of life on Earth without which humankind will not survive. This book tells the story of how we discovered the universe, how we learned about our planet and the life evolving on it, how humanity emerged from pre-history, and what some of the future of our civilizations could hold.
Download or read book How to Survive in Ancient Greece written by Robert Garland and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2020-05-30 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would it be like if you were transported back to Athens 420 BCE? This time-traveler’s guide is a fascinating way to find out . . . Imagine you were transported back in time to Ancient Greece and you had to start a new life there. What would you see? How would the people around you think and believe? How would you fit in? Where would you live? What would you eat? What work would be available, and what help could you get if you got sick? All these questions, and many more, are answered in this engaging blend of self-help and survival guide that plunges you into this historical environment—and explains the many problems and strange new experiences you would face if you were there.
Download or read book Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece written by Dennis D. Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numerous ancient texts describe human sacrifices and other forms of ritual killing: in 480 BC Themistocles sacrifices three Persian captives to Dionysus; human scapegoats called pharmakoi are expelled yearly from Greek cities, and according to some authors they are killed; Locrin girls are hunted down and slain by the Trojans; on Mt Lykaion children are sacrificed and consumed by the worshippers; and many other texts report human sacrifices performed regularly in the cult of the gods or during emergencies such as war and plague. Archaeologists have frequently proposed human sacrifice as an explanation for their discoveries: from Minoan Crete children's bones with knife-cut marks, the skeleton of a youth lying on a platform with a bronze blade resting on his chest, skeletons, sometimes bound, in the dromoi of Mycenaean and Cypriot chamber tombs; and dual man-woman burials, where it is suggested that the woman was slain or took her own life at the man's funeral. If the archaeologists' interpretations and the claims in the ancient sources are accepted, they present a bloody and violent picture of the religious life of the ancient Greeks, from the Bronze Age well into historical times. But the author expresses caution. In many cases alternative, if less sensational, explanations of the archaeological are possible; and it can often be shown that human sacrifices in the literary texts are mythical or that late authors confused mythical details with actual practices.Whether the evidence is accepted or not, this study offers a fascinating glimpse into the religious thought of the ancient Greeks and into changing modern conceptions of their religious behaviour.
Download or read book Looking for the Ancient Greeks written by Martha Beck and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a response to Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. Damasio, a prominent neuroscientist, begins by explaining what the latest discoveries in the neurosciences tell us about human psychology. He rejects the two prominent models of human psychology since the Western Enlightenment, the blank slate and dualism. Instead, says Damasio, we now know that the brain and body are completely integrated through a complex system of neural maps. Damasio’s recognition of the complete unity of body, brain and mind leads him to the conclusion that we have to develop ideas and ideas of ideas and use them to reform our neural maps. This book presents Damasio’s own ideas about the most “serious” questions in life that we ought to use to reform ourselves and our societies, including homeostasis; spirituality; feelings; suffering and death; the value of religious traditions; and the value of the philosophical path to God among others. The book presents additional positions on the same serious questions from perspectives that it is hoped Damasio will consider adding to or, in some cases, replacing, his position. Most of the book is a discussion of many aspects of Ancient Greek culture, showing how it developed into a complex cultural system that aimed to create exactly the kind of integrated system of neural maps that Damasio claims is so important for us today. As such, this book strives to contribute to our collective need to reform our system of education based on our new understanding of the nature of the human psyche.
Download or read book Jonah and the Human Condition written by Stuart Lasine and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stuart Lasine examines all aspects of the human situation and condition in Yahweh's cosmos as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. As his starting point Lasine uses the phrase “the human condition”, which has been used to describe features of existence with which every person must cope, in ways which vary according to their culture, their situation within that culture, and their personality. In particular the most consistent factor that is basic to the human condition is mortality and, in the biblical context, the sometimes difficult relationship between the creator God and humankind. An examination of this forms the basis of Lasine's study, which draws analytical tools from several disciplines, including literary theory, psychology and philosophy. In the first part of the book Lasine examines a number of relevant biblical texts which display different aspects of the human condition. Part two engages in a detailed case study of one human life-situation, that of the prophet Jonah. Finally, Lasine draws together his conclusions about life and death in Yahweh's cosmos, both for characters within the world of the scriptural text and for present-day readers of the Hebrew Bible.
Download or read book Lacan s Ethics and Nietzsche s Critique of Platonism written by Tim Themi and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brings Lacan and Nietzsche together as part of a common effort to rethink the tradition of Western ethics. Bringing together Jacques Lacan and Friedrich Nietzsche, Tim Themi focuses on their conceptions of ethics and on their accounts of the history of ethical thinking in the Western tradition. Nietzsche blames Plato for setting in motion a degenerative process that turned ethics away from nature, the body, and its senses, and thus eventually against our capacities for reason, science, and a creative, flourishing life. Dismissing Platos Supreme Good as a mirage, Lacan is very much in sympathy with Nietzsches reading. Following this premise, Themi shows how Lacans ethics might build on Nietzsches work, thus contributing to our understanding of Nietzsche, and also how Nietzsches critique can strengthen our understanding of Lacan.
Download or read book The Symptom and the Subject written by Brooke Holmes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-19 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sôma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature. By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self. The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject.
Download or read book Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy written by M. F. Burnyeat and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-14 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of two volumes collecting the published work of one of the greatest living ancient philosophers, M.F. Burnyeat.
Download or read book Gods and Robots written by Adrienne Mayor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the story of how ancient cultures envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices and human enhancements, sharing insights into how the mythologies of the past related to and shaped ancient machine innovations.
