The Tyranny of Reason in the World of the Polis

1988 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 1261-1275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
Keyword(s):  
Physical World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actor ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The City

The modern language of tyranny has distorted the significance of the Greek term tyrannos. In ancient Greek the term was accorded to the new ruler in the city, one whose legitimacy did not reside in his bonds to the ancient rulers and ancient families. Tyranny thus suggested a freedom from the past. Reason, as the Greeks understood it, also entailed a breaking away from the physical world. Reason and tyranny thus work together as expressions of freedom, but it is a freedom that in its transcendence of boundaries leads to tragedy. An examination of Sophocles' Oedipus draws out both the glory and the failure of the individual attempt of the political actor to rise above the historical particular and the mere body to build a world where reason alone is power.

scholarly journals Ancient Greek and Byzantine Political Ethics

2018 ◽  
pp. 249-258
Author(s):  
Michail Mantzanas
Keyword(s):  
Political Community ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Political Morality ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The City

The political morality that Plato and Aristotle supported was governed by various anthropological and social determinants, which means that they focused on man understood as a citizen and interpreted through the dialectic as well as through the prospects of the city’s happiness, since for both of them man was a social animal. The political ethics of Plato and Aristotle does not endanger the political community with political bankruptcy. This political morality does not start from intransigent principles to reach a compromise that has already been surpassed by the previous negative dynamics. The Byzantine political morality oscillates between the individual and the totality. It is not governed by individualism but rather by communitarianism, which entails that it confirms the dynamics of unity within the city. The Byzantine political morals is imbued with an anticipation of the political crisis, it seeks to identify any negative developments and strives to avoid the political marginalization of the citizens who are likely to rebel against any autocratic government. The Byzantine political morality is, thus, not an idle and selfish political introversion, concerned merely with political crises, conflict scenarios and conspiracy theories, as it strives to come up with various solutions that should guarantee political balance.

Citizenship For Sale?

2017 ◽  
pp. 788-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayelet Shachar
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Net Worth ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

“There are some things that money can’t buy.” Is citizenship among them? This chapter explores this question by highlighting the core legal and ethical puzzles associated with the surge in cash-for-passport programs. The spread of these new programs is one of the most significant developments in citizenship practice in the past few decades. It tests our deepest intuitions about the meaning and attributes of the relationship between the individual and the political community to which she belongs. This chapter identifies the main strategies employed by a growing number of states putting their visas and passports “for sale,” selectively opening their otherwise bolted gates of admission to the high-net-worth individuals of the world. Moving from the positive to the normative, the discussion then elaborates the main arguments in favor of, as well as against, citizenship-for-sale. The discussion draws attention to the distributive and political implications of these developments, both locally and globally, and identifies the deeper forces at work that contribute to the perpetual testing, blurring, and erosion of the state-market boundary regulating access to membership.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

pARTiCI[TY]pate?!

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
Judith Laister ◽  
Anna Lipphardt
Keyword(s):  
Academic Research ◽  
Research Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
Qualitative Empirical Research ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
Urban Planning And Design ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The City ◽  
Practice Fields

Over the past decades, ‘participation’ has evolved as a key concept in a multitude of practice fields and discursive arenas, ranging from diverse political and economic contexts, through academic research, education and social work, urban planning and design, to arts institutions and artistic projects. While participation originally is a political concept and practice, it has long set out as a ‘travelling concept’ (Bal 2002). This special issue focuses on its travels between three fields of practice: the city, the arts and qualitative empirical research. Each of these practice fields over the past decades has yielded distinct understandings, objectives and methods in respect to participations, yet they also increasingly intersect, overlap and fuse with each other within specific practice contexts. What is more, many of the individual actors engaging in these initiatives on behalf of the city – from temporary projects to long-term collaborations – are not situated in one practice field only. Along with Jana König and Elisabeth Scheffel we understand them as ‘double agents’ (König and Scheffel 2013: 272–3) or even ‘multiple agents’, with simultaneous entanglements and commitments in more than one practice field.

scholarly journals Young People: Between Literature and Advanced Technologies

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Ahmad Idris Asmaradhani
Keyword(s):  
Life Choices ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Human Essence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The World ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Ideal

In the eyes of literature, existentialist thinkers focus on the question of concrete human existence and the conditions of this existence rather than hypothesizing a human essence, stressing that the human essence is determined through life choices. The ideal, however, is that humans exist in a state of distance from the world that they nonetheless remain in the midst of. This distance is what enables humans to project meaning into the disinterested world of in-itselfs. This projected meaning remains fragile, constantly facing breakdown for any reason— from a tragedy to a particularly insightful moment. In such a breakdown, humans are put face to face with the naked meaninglessness of the world, and the results can be devastating. It is porposed that literature and the media combined have a powerful impact on those who wish to truly realize and understand their message. By studying, reading, learning, experiencing, and knowing the culture of the present and those cultures of the past then one can understand the ideas of life and how the two work together to help us better understand each other and ourselves. In what ways our present culture, our technological advances, and the media shape who we are as individuals is not a simple question. The answer seems to elusively hide in a world filled with cultural complexities. But, it is no secret to find that literature is a source of power. It does influence, guide, and shape the human become as they continue their journey through life. Hence, since human are never without the influence of literature, they will always have factors working to modify the human being. However, it is their choice as to how they internalize what they are exposed to, and in turn, it is up to them to determine the individual that ultimately prevails.

scholarly journals Understanding Urban Growth in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region over the Past 100 Years Using Old Maps and Landsat Data

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 3264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuang Li ◽  
Zhongqiu Sun ◽  
Yafei Wang ◽  
Yuxia Wang
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Urban Area ◽  
Spatial Data ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Remote Sensing Images ◽  
The Past ◽  
Old Maps ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Studying urban expansion from a longer-term perspective is of great significance to obtain an in-depth understanding of the process of urbanization. Remote sensing data are mostly selected to investigate the long-term expansion of cities. In this study, we selected the world-class urban agglomeration of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) as the study area, and then discussed how to make full use of multi-source, multi-category, and multi-temporal spatial data (old maps and remote sensing images) to study long-term urbanization. Through this study, we addressed three questions: (1) How much has the urban area in BTH expanded in the past 100 years? (2) How did the urban area expand in the past century? (3) What factors or important historical events have changed the development of cities with different functions? By comprehensively using urban spatial data, such as old maps and remote sensing images, geo-referencing them, and extracting built-up area information, a long-term series of urban built-up areas in the BTH region can be obtained. Results show the following: (1) There was clear evidence of dramatic urban expansion in this area, and the total built-up area had increased by 55.585 times, from 126.181 km2 to 7013.832 km2. (2) Continuous outward expansion has always been the main trend, while the compactness of the built-up land within the city is constantly decreasing and the complexity of the city boundary is increasing. (3) Cities in BTH were mostly formed through the construction of city walls during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and the expansion process was mostly highly related to important political events, traffic development, and other factors. In summary, the BTH area, similarly to China and most regions of the world, has experienced rapid urbanization and the history of such ancient cities should be further preserved with the combined use of old maps.

Haile Selassie's Imperial Modernity: Expatriate Architects and the Shaping of Addis Ababa

2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayala Levin
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Addis Ababa ◽  
African Unity ◽  
United Nations Economic Commission ◽  
The Past ◽  
Economic Commission ◽  
Organization Of African Unity ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The City

In the 1960s, Addis Ababa experienced a construction boom, spurred by its new international stature as the seat of both the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the Organization of African Unity. Working closely with Emperor Haile Selassie, expatriate architects played a major role in shaping the Ethiopian capital as a symbol of an African modernity in continuity with tradition. Haile Selassie's Imperial Modernity: Expatriate Architects and the Shaping of Addis Ababa examines how a distinct Ethiopian modernity was negotiated through various borrowings from the past, including Italian colonial planning, both at the scale of the individual building and at the scale of the city. Focusing on public buildings designed by Italian Eritrean Arturo Mezzedimi, French Henri Chomette, and the partnership of Israeli Zalman Enav and Ethiopian Michael Tedros, Ayala Levin critically explores how international architects confronted the challenges of mediating Haile Selassie's vision of an imperial modernity.

scholarly journals Machiavelli e la lezione di Lucrezio

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Centanni
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
The World ◽  
Vita Activa ◽  
The Individual

Machiavelli’s knowledge of Lucretius’ text had been proven thanks to a very relevant discovery by Sergio Bertelli, who in 1961 published an article in which he recognized Machiavelli’s handwriting in the Vatican codex Rossianus 884. This paper analyses the possible repercussions of De rerum natura with respect to the political potential that Lucretius’ thought could had transmitted to Machiavelli, in view of his return to the vita activa. In particular, the notes posted by Machiavelli in the marginalia of the Lucretius’ text he transcribed, prove his reflection on the “clinamen theory”. In the various profiles of the world generated by the vital trigger that the clinamen causes, lies a possibility for us of having a libera mens: the possibility of intercepting and correcting, by our own virtue, the twists and turns of Fate, opposes the individual liberty to the whims of Fortuna, but also to the idea of an ineffable Divine Providence with its mysterious and intractable designs.

scholarly journals Three Mothers (2006) by Dina Zvi-Riklis: The Repressed Israeli Trauma of Immigration

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Yael Munk
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Outstanding Achievement ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Complex Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Jewish Religion

This article relates to the complex approach of Dina Zvi-Riklis’ film Three Mothers (2006) to immigration, an issue that is central to both the Jewish religion and Israeli identity. While for both, reaching the land of Israel means arriving in the promised land, they are quite dissimilar, in that one is a religious command, while the other is an ideological imperative. Both instruct the individual to opt for the obliteration of his past. However, this system does not apply to the protagonists of Three Mothers, a film which follows the extraordinary trajectory of triplet sisters, born to a rich Jewish family in Alexandria, who are forced to leave Egypt after King Farouk’s abdication and immigrate to Israel. This article will demonstrate that Three Mothers represents an outstanding achievement, because it dares to deal with its protagonists’ longing for the world left behind and the complexity of integrating the past into the present. Following Nicholas Bourriaud’s radicant theory, designating an organism that grows roots and adds new ones as it advances, this article will argue that, although the protagonists of Three Mothers never avow their longing for Egypt, the film’s narrative succeeds in revealing a subversive démarche, through which the sisters succeed in integrating Egypt into their present.

scholarly journals The Return of the Sacral King

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Paul R. DeHart ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The World ◽  
Ancient Christianity ◽  
The City

In Pagans & Christians in the City, Steven D. Smith argues that in contrast to ancient Rome, ancient Christianity, following Judaism, located the sacred outside the world, desacralizing the cosmos and everything in it—including the political order. It thereby introduced a political dualism and potentially contending allegiances. Although Smith’s argument is right so far as it goes, it underplays the role of Christianity’s immanent dimension in subverting the Roman empire and the sacral pattern of antiquity. This division of authority not only undermined the Roman empire and antique sacral political order more generally—it also subverts the modern state, which, in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, sought to remarry what Western Christianity divorced.

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