Contemporary Athletics & Ancient Greek Ideals

Contemporary Athletics & Ancient Greek Ideals PDF

Author: Daniel A. Dombrowski

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 0226155498

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Despite their influence in our culture, sports inspire dramatically less philosophical consideration than such ostensibly weightier topics as religion, politics, or science. Arguing that athletic playfulness coexists with serious underpinnings, and that both demand more substantive attention, Daniel Dombrowski harnesses the insights of ancient Greek thinkers to illuminate contemporary athletics. Dombrowski contends that the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus shed important light on issues—such as the pursuit of excellence, the concept of play, and the power of accepting physical limitations while also improving one’s body—that remain just as relevant in our sports-obsessed age as they were in ancient Greece. Bringing these concepts to bear on contemporary concerns, Dombrowski considers such questions as whether athletic competition can be a moral substitute for war, whether it necessarily constitutes war by other means, and whether it encourages fascist tendencies or ethical virtue. The first volume to philosophically explore twenty-first-century sport in the context of its ancient predecessor, Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals reveals that their relationship has great and previously untapped potential to inform our understanding of human nature.

Greek Ideals and Modern Life

Greek Ideals and Modern Life PDF

Author: Sir R. W. Livingstone

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 1787202577

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This book represents a collection of lectures delivered between October 1-4, 1934 by the author, Sir Richard Winn Livingstone, on the Charles Martin Foundation at Oberlin College, Ohio. The book was first published a year later in 1935. Sir Livingstone was then President of Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford. “The title of these lectures is Greek Ideals and Modern Life. They are a plea for Greek studies—not as a field of scholarship, not as a mental discipline, not even as the key to one of the two greatest literatures of Europe, but as indispensable to the spiritual life of our civilization. They are based on three assumptions: first, that Huxley was right in his belief that ‘no human being, and no society composed of human beings, ever did, or ever will, come to much, unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal’; second, that the chief weakness of this age is a vague mind and a feeble grasp, so far as ethical ideals are concerned; and third, that Greece offers us a corrective of our errors and a guide in our uncertainties.”

Imagining Men

Imagining Men PDF

Author: Thomas Van Nortwick

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2008-08-30

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 031305519X

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Exploring models for masculinity as they appear in major works of Greek literature, this book combines literary, historical, and psychological insights to examine how the ancient Greeks understood the meaning of a man's life. The thoughts and actions of Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus, and other enduring characters from Greek literature reflect the imperatives that the ancient Greeks saw as governing a man's life as he moved from childhood to adult maturity to old age. Because the Greeks believed that men (as opposed to women) were by nature the proper agents of human civilization within the larger order of the universe, examining how the Greeks thought that a man ought to live his life prompts exploration of the place of human life in a world governed by transcendent forces, nature, fate, and the gods. While focusing on the experience of men in ancient Greece, the discussion also offers an analysis of the society in which they lived, addressing questions still vital in our own time, such as how the members of a society should govern themselves, distribute resources, form relationships with others, weigh the needs of the individual against the larger good of the community, and establish right relations with divine forces beyond their knowledge or control. Suggestions for further reading offer the reader the chance to explore the ideas in the book.

Not the Classical Ideal

Not the Classical Ideal PDF

Author: Beth Cohen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-11-22

Total Pages: 575

ISBN-13: 9004493743

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A vision of reality in which a pre-eminent human type was defined in opposition to non-ideal 'Others' characterized ancient Greece. In democratic Athens the social structure privileged male citizens, and women, resident aliens, and slaves were marginalized. The Persian Wars polarized the opposition of Greeks and Barbarians. This anthology provides the first investigation of the delineation of otherness across a broad spectrum of the imagery of Greek art. An international cast of authors, with methodologies ranging from traditional to avant-garde, examines manifestations of the Other in Late Archaic and Classical Greek representations that particularly interest them. The 17 chapters develop a nuanced picture of the visual criteria that denoted otherness in regard to gender, class, and ethnicity and also reveal the social and political functions of this remarkable Greek imagery. Also available in paperback (ISBN 9789004117129)

Beauty

Beauty PDF

Author: David Konstan

Publisher: Onassis Hellenic Culture

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 019992726X

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Those who study the nature of beauty are at once plagued by a singular issue: what does it mean to say something is beautiful? On the one hand, beauty is associated with erotic attraction; on the other, it is the primary category in aesthetics, and it is widely supposed that the proper response to a work of art is one of disinterested contemplation. At its core, then, beauty is a contested concept, and both sides feel comfortable appealing to the authority of Plato, and via him, to the ancient Greeks generally. So, who is right--if either? Beauty offers an elegant investigation of ancient Greek notions of beauty and, in the process, sheds light on modern aesthetics and how we ought to appreciate the artistic achievements of the classical world itself. The book begins by reexamining the commonly held notion that the ancient Greeks possessed no term that can be unambiguously defined as "beauty" or "beautiful." Author David Konstan discusses a number of Greek approximations before positioning the heretofore unexamined term kállos as the key to bridging the gap between beauty and desire, and tracing its evolution as applied to physical beauty, art, literature, and more. Throughout, the discussion is enlivened with thought-provoking stories taken from Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch, and others. The book then examines corresponding terms in ancient Latin literature to highlight the survival of Greek ideas in the Latin West. The final chapter will compare the ancient Greek conception of beauty with modern notions of beauty and aesthetics. In particular, the book will focus on the reception of classical Greek art in the Renaissance and how Vasari and his contemporaries borrowed from Plato the sense that the beauty in art was transcendental, but left out the erotic dimension of viewing. A study of the ancient Greek idea of beauty shows that, even if Greece was the inspiration for modern aesthetic ideals, the Greek view of the relationship between beauty and desire was surprisingly consistent--and different from our own. Through this magisterial narrative, it is possible to identify how the Greeks thought of beauty, and what it was that attracted them. Their perceptions still have something important to tell us about art, love, desire--and beauty.

German Freedom and the Greek Ideal

German Freedom and the Greek Ideal PDF

Author: W. McGrath

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-12-18

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 1137369485

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This book traces this German idea of freedom from the late Enlightenment through the early twentieth century. McGrath shows how German intellectual and artists invoked the ancient Greeks in order to inspire Germans to cultural renewal and to enrich their understanding of freedom as something deeper and more urgent that political life could offer.

Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture: Volume I. Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens

Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture: Volume I. Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens PDF

Author: Werner Jaeger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1986-10-23

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 9780195004250

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Werner Jaeger's classic three-volume work, originally published in 1939, is now available in paperback. Paideia, the shaping of Greek character through a union of civilization, tradition, literature, and philosophy is the basis for Jaeger's evaluation of Hellenic culture. Volume I describes the foundation, growth, and crisis of Greek culture during the archaic and classical epochs, ending with the collapse of the Athenian empire. The second and third volumes of the work deal with the intellectual history of ancient Greece in the Age of Plato, the 4th century B.C.--the age in which Greece lost everything that is valued in this world--state, power, liberty--but still clung to the concept of paideia. As its last great poet, Menander summarized the primary role of this ideal in Greek culture when he said: "The possession which no one can take away from man is paideia."

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