Tagged: Greece

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Tuscan Histories II: The Etruscan Legacy

If Christianity is difficult to conceive without the Old Testament, then Christendom is an impossibility without the legacy of Greeks and Romans, and the Etruscans made no small contribution to the character and culture of Rome, though very little of the Etruscan legacy is obvious.  

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Ancient Vengeance

It is a main thrust of philosophical Liberalism (and of ancient Stoicism) that human beings have a duty to rise above not only animal but parochial and sectarian passions.  Any attempt to justify revenge must therefore represent a step back toward the jungle from which we escaped all too recently.

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Civilization, by Dr. James Patrick

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By way of prologue it is important to understand the relation and the difference Civilization and culture, for both are used to describe the complex of ideas and actions that define the life of a particular people in a particular place at a certain time

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The Autodidact: Homer

The Homeric Mind: Introduction In this series, I want you to do your best to forget what have been told to believe.  We are going to concentrate more on what the Greeks said about themselves, and, more than that, we are going to compare what they said with how they lived.  In other words, we are going to do something like what an anthropologist does when he goes to visit an alien and primitive culture.  We must set aside our preconceptions, interview the subjects, and observe their behavior.  What we find may be shocking, but we shall report the truth,...

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The Autodidact on Aristotle

The one figure who defines modern thought is Aristotle, not of course because modern thinkers have followed him, but because since Galileo and Descartes and Bacon, scientists and philosophers have defined themselves by their opposition to Aristotle

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The Life of an Autodidact

This is a revised version of a piece first published in 2014. Once upon a time I decided to learn Japanese.  I had none of the usual practical reasons: no business interests that would take me to Japan nor even an academic project comparing Noh plays with Attic tragedy.  I knew next to nothing of Japan, though as a child my imagination had been stirred by the Mikado, and later, when a college friend persuaded me to read the Tale of Genjii, my mind was haunted by images of beautiful men and women spending languorous evenings composing allusive verses to...

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The Autodidact on Aristotle

The one figure who defines modern thought is Aristotle, not of course because modern thinkers have followed him, but because since Galileo and Descartes and Bacon, scientists and philosophers have defined themselves by their opposition to Aristotle.  That is my first introductory point, as obvious as it is true.  Let me add a second point, no less true but more controversial: In all that is most important, Aristotle is more often right than wrong, and consistently right on those points where he has been most attacked. Life Aristotle was born in 384, an Ionian Greek in Stagira in Chalcidice. His...