How far has the Western intellect come since Homer and the earliest Greek philosophers? Nearly three millennia have passed and in our own eyes we have made enormous progress since those times, especially in the last five centuries. But this, of course, depends on our peculiar way of reading Homer and the first philosophers. We take it for granted that their knowledge of natural science was rudimentary, that it hardly qualified as science. But this book argues that Homer and Parmenides were accomplished astronomers, geographers, physiologists and psychologists. The book bases its argument on...
How far has the Western intellect come since Homer and the earliest Greek philosophers? Nearly three millennia have passed and in our own eyes we have...
What was the purpose of the ancient Greek Olympics? No one really knows. But the first essay in this book examines one early Greek games whose purpose we do know. And that was to cleanse the site of a massacre from a deadly pollution. These games were a periodic ritual to appease the furious dead. And they worked. The second essay looks again at what is due to Caesar. Jesus makes no compromise with the Romans. If the penny was Caesar's, Caesar was Jehovah's. The title essay frames the last thousand years of Western history as a series of political constitutions. We travel backwards in time...
What was the purpose of the ancient Greek Olympics? No one really knows. But the first essay in this book examines one early Greek games whose purpose...
The contentment of innumerable people can be destroyed in a generation by the withering touch of our civilization; the local market is flooded by a production in quantity with which the responsible maker of art cannot complete; the vocational structure of society, with all its guild organization and standards of workmanship, is undermined; the artist is robbed of his art and forced to find himself a job; until finally the ancient society is industrialised and reduced to the level of such societies as ours in which business takes precedence of life. Can one wonder that Western nations are...
The contentment of innumerable people can be destroyed in a generation by the withering touch of our civilization; the local market is flooded by a pr...
The contentment of innumerable people can be destroyed in a generation by the withering touch of our civilization; the local market is flooded by a production in quantity with which the responsible maker of art cannot complete; the vocational structure of society, with all its guild organization and standards of workmanship, is undermined; the artist is robbed of his art and forced to find himself a job; until finally the ancient society is industrialised and reduced to the level of such societies as ours in which business takes precedence of life. Can one wonder that Western nations are...
The contentment of innumerable people can be destroyed in a generation by the withering touch of our civilization; the local market is flooded by a pr...