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Socrates conclusion !!!!!

2007-08-02T15:48:34Z

* The unexamined life is not worth living *

Who else but Socrates can conclude ......

Vicky

posted in Greek Philosophy - 14 replies

Major Classical Discovery

2007-08-01T05:29:46Z

Oh my God! This is amazing!

Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the
history of the world
Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing
long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome
By David Keys and Nicholas Pyke

17 April 2005

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in
equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it
could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of
finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed
infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus
Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies,
tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make
a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles,
Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost
for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian
gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the
earliest books of the New Testament.

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump
in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye - decayed,
worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using
the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are
bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it
as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the
number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even
predicting a "second Renaissance".

Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of
Oxford, described the new works as "central texts which scholars have
been speculating about for centuries".

Professor Richard Janko, a leading British scholar, formerly of
University College London, now head of classics at the University of
Michigan, said: "Normally we are lucky to get one such find per
decade." One discovery in particular, a 30-line passage from the poet
Archilocos, of whom only 500 lines survive in total, is described as
"invaluable" by Dr Peter Jones, author and co-founder of the Friends of
Classics campaign.

The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the
Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") in
central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000
fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford's Sackler Library, it is the
biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world.

The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week,
include parts of a long-lost tragedy - the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the
5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the
2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides;
mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work
by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a
7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the
Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles
almost certainly await discovery.

Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists
from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to
increase the number of great literary works fully or partially
surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could
easily double the surviving body of lesser work - the pulp fiction and
sitcoms of the day.

"The Oxyrhynchus collection is of unparalleled importance - especially
now that it can be read fully and relatively quickly," said the Oxford
academic directing the research, Dr Dirk Obbink. "The material will
shed light on virtually every aspect of life in Hellenistic and Roman
Egypt, and, by extension, in the classical world as a whole."

The breakthrough has also caught the imagination of cultural
commentators. Melvyn Bragg, author and presenter, said: "It's the most
fantastic news. There are two things here. The first is how enormously
influential the Greeks were in science and the arts. The second is how
little of their writing we have. The prospect of having more to look at
is wonderful."

Bettany Hughes, historian and broadcaster, who has presented TV series
including Mysteries of the Ancients and The Spartans, said: "Egyptian
rubbish dumps were gold mines. The classical corpus is like a jigsaw
puzzle picked up at a jumble sale - many more pieces missing than are
there. Scholars have always mourned the loss of works of genius - plays
by Sophocles, Sappho's other poems, epics. These discoveries promise to
change the textual map of the golden ages of Greece and Rome."

When it has all been read - mainly in Greek, but sometimes in Latin,
Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Nubian and early Persian - the
new material will probably add up to around five million words. Texts
deciphered over the past few days will be published next month by the
London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which financed the discovery
and owns the collection.

A 21st-century technique reveals antiquity's secrets

Since it was unearthed more than a century ago, the hoard of documents
known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri has fascinated classical scholars.
There are 400,000 fragments, many containing text from the great
writers of antiquity. But only a small proportion have been read so
far. Many were illegible.

Now scientists are using multi-spectral imaging techniques developed
from satellite technology to read the papyri at Oxford University's
Sackler Library. The fragments, preserved between sheets of glass,
respond to the infra-red spectrum - ink invisible to the naked eye can
be seen and photographed.

The fragments form part of a giant "jigsaw puzzle" to be reassembled.
Missing "pieces" can be supplied from quotations by later authors, and
grammatical analysis.

Key words from the master of Greek tragedy

Speaker A: . . . gobbling the whole, sharpening the flashing iron.

Speaker B: And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and
for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise
shuttle's songs, that wakes up those who are asleep.

Speaker A: And he is gluing together the chariot's rail.

These words were written by the Greek dramatist Sophocles, and are the
only known fragment we have of his lost play Epigonoi (literally "The
Progeny"), the story of the siege of Thebes. Until last week's hi-tech
analysis of ancient scripts at Oxford University, no one knew of their
existence, and this is the first time they have been published.

Sophocles (495-405 BC), was a giant of the golden age of Greek
civilisation, a dramatist who work alongside and competed with
Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes.

His best-known work is Oedipus Rex, the play that later gave its name
to the Freudian theory, in which the hero kills his father and marries
his mother - in a doomed attempt to escape the curse he brings upon
himself. His other masterpieces include Antigone and Electra.

Sophocles was the cultured son of a wealthy Greek merchant, living at
the height of the Greek empire. An accomplished actor, he performed in
many of his own plays. He also served as a priest and sat on the
committee that administered Athens. A great dramatic innovator, he
wrote more than 120 plays, but only seven survive in full.

Last week's remarkable finds also include work by Euripides, Hesiod
and Lucian, plus a large and particularly significant paragraph of text
from the Elegies, by Archilochos, a Greek poet of the 7th century BC.

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/world...sp?story=630165

posted in Greek Philosophy - 1 reply

Plato's Republic

2007-08-01T05:27:00Z

I read Cornford's edition of the Republic about 1.5 years ago. It made a really deep impact on me. In part this was due to the fact that I read most of it while living with a close friends for the first two weeks after he got out of 90 days of rehab for alcholism. He had been a hard-core alcoholic for 15 solid years - it was really like watching someone being born again. That helped me to really connect with the almost insanely optimistic theme that runs just below the surface of the whole damned Republic: we can figure this thing out, not just our own little personal lives, but even how to live together as societies.

Anyway I am now re-reading the Republic - this time using Waterfield's translation as well as Julia Annas' "Introduction"/study guide. I also have some other aids (like Thomas Taylor's translation which includes massive excerpts from Proclus' commentary on the Republic, and also a very interesting little book by Sean Sayers, who provides, and I am not making this up, a Marxist appreciation of Plato's Republic.

I love the Republic for many reasons. I think the portrayal of Socrates is especially compelling in this book, for one thing. For another I was really amazed when I started to understand, at least a little, what Plato was getting at when he spoke of the importance of "the spirited part of the soul." His whole "taxonomy" of the soul is quite fascinating - as is his "taxonomy" of social systems based largely on which part of the soul dominates the leaders of a particular society.

Anyway - I admit that I am cheating and skipping right ahead to some of the later chapters of Annas' book - that deal with Knowledge, the Forms, and the Good........

posted in Greek Philosophy - 5 replies

Law of excluded middle

2007-03-30T21:34:29Z

Aristotle coined the law of excluded middle (LEM). It's usually expressed in modern propositional logic as (P v ~P), P or not-P, using "or" in the exclusive sense. Something cannot both be P and not P (whatever quality P refers to). I think this also implies that something has to be either P or not P, it can't be neither.

I was going to ask whether people think this rule is "valid" but it occurs to me that "valid" usually implies "valid within some system," and that's not quite what I'm trying to get at. Many thinkers (Alfred Korzybski, Hans Reichenbach, Jan Lukasiewicz, Robert Anton Wilson) have developed "non-Aristotelian systems" that deny the law of excluded middle or some other basic Aristotelian assumption. How about a discussion of the general "reasonableness" of LEM? Does this help our thinking or muddle it?

My hunch is that LEM probably confuses us more than it helps, but I'd like to hear other peoples' thoughts on this.

posted in Greek Philosophy - 9 replies

Parmenides

2007-03-02T00:14:47Z

For a long time I've been interested in Zeno and Parmenides. Their arguments are integral to this notion I have about how conceptual thought introduces discrete divisions into a reality that is basically contiguous. It seems to me that the bottom line of Zeno's paradox of motion is that space itself is not divisble; only our metric of space bears division.

That's a pretty core belief of mine, and fundamental to my metaphysics. So I was taken aback when I recently looked at Plato's Parmenides. Socrates takes Zeno's argument and replies that there is no paradox in a thing being both singular and multiple at the same time. Things partake equally of the idea of singularity and the idea of multiplicity.

Now my thinking has been thrown into chaos. I submit to you philosophers, does it make sense to say that the same object is both singular and multiple at the same time?

posted in Greek Philosophy - 19 replies

What are some good books to recommend?

2007-02-13T04:28:10Z

I want to look more into Greek philosophy but I'm not sure where to even start. Can anyone give me recommendations to books and links that will help me?

All is help makes me smile:)

Peace And Blessings

posted in Greek Philosophy - 14 replies