Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The drama of logos
- 2 The language of appropriation
- 3 The city of words
- 4 Relations and relationships
- 5 Sexuality and difference
- 6 Text and tradition
- 7 Mind and madness
- 8 Blindness and insight
- 9 Sophistry, philosophy, rhetoric
- 10 Genre and transgression
- 11 Performance and performability
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Blindness and insight
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The drama of logos
- 2 The language of appropriation
- 3 The city of words
- 4 Relations and relationships
- 5 Sexuality and difference
- 6 Text and tradition
- 7 Mind and madness
- 8 Blindness and insight
- 9 Sophistry, philosophy, rhetoric
- 10 Genre and transgression
- 11 Performance and performability
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Der Frevel des Wissens.
HEGELThroughout the fifth century, Athens provided a focal point for the discussion, dissemination and development of the ideas that make up what has been called the fifth-century enlightenment. Travelling sophists, rhapsodes and teachers and artists of all sorts gravitated to Athens, whose self-proclaimed hegemony was cultural as well as political, and whose society offered the most extensive opportunities for intellectual pursuits. ‘To sum up’ says Pericles in Thucydides, ‘I declare our city is an education to Greece’ – a paradigm and a school – and throughout Thucydides' history the Athenians are explicitly distinguished by their allies and enemies alike for their intellectual originality and precociousness. For Herodotus, it is a commonplace that the Athenians are renowned for their intelligence; Athens is the prytaneion, the ‘council-chamber’, of the wisdom of Greece – the meeting-place for ideas and debate.
The intellectual revolutions of the fifth-century enlightenment are a highly complex subject which will be considered in the next chapter, but it will prove necessary for the argument of this chapter to mention briefly some specific factors that I intend to discuss in greater depth later. Now Guthrie argues that one of the distinguishing differences between fifth-century and earlier philosophers is the increased ‘concentration on human affairs’. Although early writers certainly show considerable interest in human society and behaviour, and indeed the presocratic philosophers, for example, also investigate such topics as the reliability of the sense perceptions, none the less, argues Guthrie, the extended political, ethical and legal debates that dominate so much of the fifth-century enquiry constitute a major shift in the paradigms of intellectual activity, a new focus on the interactions of human intercourse.
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- Reading Greek Tragedy , pp. 199 - 221Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986
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