Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography

Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography
Author: Jonas Grethlein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2013-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107435447

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The past is narrated in retrospect. Historians can either capitalize on the benefit of hindsight and give their narratives a strongly teleological design or they may try to render the past as it was experienced by historical agents and contemporaries. This book explores the fundamental tension between experience and teleology in major works of Greek and Roman historiography, biography and autobiography. The combination of theoretical reflections with close readings yields a new, often surprising assessment of the history of ancient historiography as well as a deeper understanding of such authors as Thucydides, Tacitus and Augustine. While much recent work has focused on how ancient historians use emplotment to generate historical meaning, Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography offers a new approach to narrative form as a mode of coming to grips with time.

Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography

Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography
Author: Jonas Grethlein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2013-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107040280

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This book explores the tension in ancient historiography between teleological design and narrating the past as it was experienced by historical characters.

Reconciling Ancient and Modern Philosophies of History

Reconciling Ancient and Modern Philosophies of History
Author: Aaron Turner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110627469

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The distinction between ancient and modern modes of historical thought is characterized by the growing complexity of the discipline of history in modernity. Consequently, the epistemological and methodological standard of ancient historiography is typically held as inferior against the modern ideal. This book serves to address this apparent deficit. Its scope is three-fold. Firstly, it aims at encountering ancient modes of historical and historiographical thought within the province of their own horizon. Secondly, this book considers the possibility of a dialogue between ancient and modern philosophies of history concerning the influence of ancient historical thought on the development of modern philosophy of history and the utility of modern philosophy of history in the interpretation of ancient historiography. Thirdly, this book explores the continuities and discontinuities in historical method and thought from antiquity to modernity. Ultimately, this volume demonstrates the necessity of re-evaluating our assumptions about the relation of ancient and modern historical thought and lays the groundwork for a more fruitful dialogue in the future.

Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech

Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech
Author: Ellen O'Gorman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2020-09-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350095516

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This study examines how Tacitus' representation of speech determines the roles of speakers within the political sphere, and explores the possibility of politically effective speech in the principate. It argues against the traditional scholarly view that Tacitus refuses to offer a positive view of senatorial power in the principate: while senators did experience limitations and changes to what they could achieve in public life, they could aim to create a dimension of political power and efficacy through speeches intended to create and sustain relations which would in turn determine the roles played by both senators or an emperor. Ellen O'Gorman traces Tacitus' own charting of these modes of speech, from flattery and aggression to advice, praise, and censure, and explores how different modes of speech in his histories should be evaluated: not according to how they conform to pre-existing political stances, but as they engender different political worlds in the present and future. The volume goes beyond literary analysis of the texts to create a new framework for studying this essential period in ancient Roman history, much in the same way that Tacitus himself recasts the political authority and presence of senatorial speakers as narrative and historical analysis.

Historical Experience

Historical Experience
Author: David Carr
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000370267

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This volume brings together a collection of recent essays on the philosophy and theory of history. This is a field of lively interdisciplinary discussion and research, to which historians, philosophers and theorists of culture and literature have contributed. The author is a philosopher by training, and his inspiration comes primarily from the continental-phenomenological tradition. Thus the influence of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur can be discerned here. This background opens up a unique perspective on the issues under discussion. Phenomenology differs from other philosophical approaches, like metaphysics and epistemology. Phenomenology asks, of anything that exists or may exist: how is it given, how does it enter our experience, what is our experience of it like? Very broadly we can say: phenomenology is about experience. At first glance, this approach may seem ill-suited to history. In our language, “history” usually means either 1) what happened, i.e. past events, or 2) our knowledge of what happened. We can’t experience past events, and whatever knowledge we have of them must come from other sources—memory, testimony, physical traces. But the author maintains that we actually do experience historical events, and these essays explain how this is so. Sitting at the intersection of philosophy and history, and divided into three parts—Historicity, Narrative, and Time, Teleology and History, and Embodiment and Experience—this is the ideal volume for those interested in experience from a philosophical and historical perspective.

Xenophon: Anabasis Book III

Xenophon: Anabasis Book III
Author: Xenophon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107079233

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First comprehensive commentary on a section of Anabasis in English for a century, reflecting scholarly advances for students and scholars.

The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides

The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides
Author: Ryan Balot
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 801
Release: 2017-02-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199340390

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The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides contains newly commissioned essays on Thucydides as an historian, thinker, and writer. It also features chapters on Thucydides' intellectual context and ancient reception. The creative juxtaposition of historical, literary, philosophical, and reception studies allows for a better grasp of Thucydides' complex project and its intellectual context, while at the same time providing a comprehensive introduction to the author's ideas. The volume is organized into four sections of papers: History, Historiography, Political Theory, and Context and Reception. It therefore bridges traditionally divided disciplines. The authors engaged to write the forty chapters for this volume include both well-known scholars and less well-known innovators, who bring fresh ideas and new points of view. Articles avoid technical jargon and long footnotes, and are written in an accessible style. Finally, the volume includes a thorough introduction prefacing each paper, as well as several maps and an up-to-date bibliography that will enable further study. The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides offers a comprehensive introduction to a thinker and writer whose simultaneous depth and innovativeness have been the focus of intense literary and philosophical study since ancient times.

Mirages of the Selfe

Mirages of the Selfe
Author: Timothy J. Reiss
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 652
Release: 2003
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780804745659

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Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a person—to experience who-ness—in other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions. The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes.

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Science

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Science
Author: Liba Taub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2020-01-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107092485

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Provides a broad framework for engaging with ideas relevant to ancient Greek and Roman science, medicine and technology.