Alexander's ὑπομνήματα and the ‘World-Kingdom’

1921 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. W. Tarn

So far as authority goes, Kaerst founded his theory of Alexander's worldkingdom on two passages in Diodorus and on nothing else. The first, 17, 93, 4, alludes to Ammon having conceded to Alexander the power over the whole world, τὴν ἁπάσης τῆς γῆς γῆς ἐξουσίαν the reference is to 17, 51, 2, where Alexander says to the priest of Ammon, εἶπέ μοι εἴ μοι δίδως τὴνἁπάσης <τῆς> γῆς ἄρχην and the priest replies that the god grants this. The second passage is 18, 4, 4, the story of Alexander's supposed plan to conquer Carthage, etc., and go to the Pillars, from his alleged ὑπομνήματα Every one will agree with Kaerst when he says that the political information in the Arrian tradition is imperfect, and that it is very desirable to supplement it; but the real question, which has to be faced, is, are we in a position to supplement it? It is no good using unsound material as a supplement; it is better to say we do not know, if it comes to that. My object here is to examine the Diodorus passages and see what kind of material they offer.

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 17-29
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Grasso ◽  

Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City takes its place alongside James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars as one of the two truly indispensable books on today’s Culture Wars. It advances our understanding of today’s conflict by situating it historically and focusing our attention on its religious dimension. Smith argues that today’s conflict is the latest episode in a longstanding conflict between immanent forms of religiosity which locate the sacred in the world of space and time, and transcendent forms of religiosity which locate the divine beyond space and time. As compelling as it is, the volume’s argument would have been strengthened by a more sustained treatment of the nature of the political community and the essential role played within it by the truths held in common by the members concerning God, man, nature, and history.


1997 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 41-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sedley

Among that select band of philosophers who have managed to change the world, and not just to interpret it, it would be hard to find a pair with a higher public profile than Brutus and Cassius — brothers-in-law, fellow-assassins, and Shakespearian heroes. Yet curiously little is understood of the connection, if any, between the fact that they were philosophers and their joint decision to form the conspiracy against Caesar. It may not even be widely known that they were philosophers.What work has been done on this question has been focused on Cassius' Epicureanism, thanks above all to a famous review published by Momigliano in 1941 which included a seminal survey of the evidence for politicized Epicureans. I shall myself have less to say on that topic than on the richer, and less explored, evidence for Brutus. For the present, we may note that at the time of the assassination, March 44 B.C., Cassius had been an Epicurean for just three or four years; that he had already prior to that been actively engaged in philosophy; but that his previous allegiance is unknown. His conversion to Epicureanism seems to have been timed to reflect his decision in 48 B.C. to withdraw from the republican struggle and to acquiesce in Caesar's rule, expressing his hopes for peace and his revulsion from civil bloodshed. This sounds in tune with a familiar Epicurean policy: minimal political involvement, along with approval of any form of government that provides peaceful conditions. We may, therefore, plausibly link Cassius' withdrawal to his new-found Epicureanism. In which case it becomes less likely that his subsequent resumption of the political initiative in fomenting conspiracy against Caesar was itself dictated purely by his Epicureanism. Yet he did remain an Epicurean to the end.6 At its weakest then, the question which we must address might simply be how, when he became convinced that Caesar must be eliminated, he managed to reconcile that decision with his Epicureanism. I shall have a suggestion to make about Cassius' Epicurean justification, but it will emerge incidentally during the examination of the evidence for Brutus, who is the real hero of this paper.


Author(s):  
Tadeusz Miczka

"WE LIVE IN THE WORLD LACKING IDEA ON ITSELF: KRZYSZTOF KIEŚLOWSKI's ART OF FILM" OUR "little stabilization" -- this ironic phrase by Tadeusz Różewicz, the poet and playwright, rightly characterized the low living standards of Poles and the state of apathy of the society in the 1960s. It also reflected well the situation of the Polish culture which, at that time, was put under strong political pressure and, except for very few instances, half- truths and newspeak replaced the clear dichotomy of truth and falsity. However, it finds its strongest expression if seen against the background of the Polish cinema of that time, since the cinema was, so to say, the "light in the eyes" of the Workers' Party activists devoutly building the 'real socialism' state. After the period of the political thaw which, among other things, brought to life artistically courageous works of the 'Polish film school', the...


Literator ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
H. Eid

This article aims to argue that the distinction in both meaning and social function between “realism” and “modernism” lies in their different positions in the economic system of capitalism. The focus point of the article is “modernism” as the cultural logic of monopoly, imperialist capitalism - a logic that never meant a “break away” from “realism”. The article's dialectical and historical approach to James Joyce's modern text A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man never accepts the internal modernist logic of the text, i.e. the complete autonomy of a work of art.Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s hermeneutics of ideology and Edward Said’s dialectical criticism, the article focuses on the ideological components of A Portrait and will explore its modernity in relation to the political economy of the world that has produced it. Moreover, it will show how A Portrait, as a modernist text, has affiliations with wider fields of power and action.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-332
Author(s):  
Corey P. Cribb

Abstract In screen studies and photography studies, the name of the acclaimed film theorist and critic André Bazin is frequently invoked by scholars seeking to defend the import of analogue media on ontological grounds by citing photography's privileged connection to the real. This article seeks to unsettle Bazin's reputation as the patron saint of analogue recording by exploring the ontological implications of the concept of sense in Bazin's writings on neorealism. Placing Bazin's writings into dialogue with a selection of critiques that find the digital image to be lacking in historicity, negativity, and presence, and flag its potentially authoritarian impulses, this essay seeks to reframe Bazin's ontological project as a question of cinema's sense (rather than its essence) to mobilize a different set of conclusions that may in fact prove to restore faith in the digital image and its rapport with the real. By maintaining that what is often treated as a purely technological problem also harbors aesthetics implications, this article confronts the manifest skepticism that has pervaded the discourse around the digital since the 1990s, seeking an alternative outlook in Jean-Luc Nancy's work on sense, an ontological concept that evidences the political potentials (or potential politics) of Bazin's predilection for images, which are said to ameliorate our love for reality by transmitting the excessive sense of the world in its ambiguity, creativity, and unpredictability.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-63
Author(s):  
Ljiljana Stošić-Mihajlović ◽  
Svetlana Trajković

Rich and powerful people have built a new system in which only risk is common, and profit is exclusively theirs. Neoliberalism is an ideology that is realized in the interest of the rich and powerful. They have enormous financial (and not only financial) power by which they shape the political, media and (quasi) scientific space in order to conduct economic policy and publicly promote the values that suit them. That is why in recent years we have mostly heard that the problem has arisen because people do not live in accordance with the real possibilities and that we must continue to tighten our belts and rationalize our jobs (translated from Orwell's new speech: further dismissals of employees). Much less is said about the problem of inequality, i.e. uneven and unjust distribution and concentration of wealth, and that a solution should be sought there. The latest economic crisis caused by COVID / 19 has shown that not everyone is equally affected by the crisis: the rich have become even richer and the poor have become even poorer. This paper will discuss the unequal consequences caused by the latest pandemic crisis.


EDIS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (5) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
John Rutledge ◽  
Joy C. Jordan ◽  
Dale W. Pracht

 The 4-H Citizenship Project offers the opportunity to help 4-H members relate all of their 4-H projects and experiences to the world around them. The 4-H Citizenship manuals will serve as a guide for 4-H Citizenship experiences. To be truly meaningful to the real-life needs and interests of your group, the contribution of volunteer leaders is essential. Each person, neighborhood, and community has individual needs that you can help your group identify. This 14-page major revision of Unit IV covers the heritage project. Written by John Rutledge, Joy C. Jordan, and Dale Pracht and published by the UF/IFAS Extension 4-H Youth Development program. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/4h019


Author(s):  
Emma Simone

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document