Download Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History by Darien Shanske PDF
By Darien Shanske
This publication addresses the query of ways and why heritage starts off with the paintings of Thucydides. The background of the Peloponnesian battle is unique in that it's a prose narrative, intended to be learn instead of played. It specializes in the unfolding of latest nice strength politics to the exclusion of just about all different parts of human lifestyles, together with the divine. the facility of Thucydides' textual content hasn't ever been attributed both to the attraction of its language or to the leisure price of its narrative, or to a couple own characteristic of the writer. during this learn, Darien Shanske analyzes the tough language and constitution of Thucydides' heritage and argues that the textual content has drawn in such a lot of readers into its unique global view accurately due to its kinship to the modern language and constitution of Classical Tragedy. This kinship isn't simply an issue of shared vocabulary or maybe aesthetic sensibility. fairly, it truly is grounded in a shared philosophical place, specifically at the polemical metaphysics of Heraclitus.
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Additional resources for Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History
Sample text
The polemics used to justify the method are one aspect of the polemical world into which the text initiates us. This isomorphism between the structure of the real world of armies and cities, especially Athens, and the more rarefied world of Thucydides defining himself against his predecessors and contemporaries is a crucial way in which we readers of Thucydides find ourselves in his fly-bottle, able to see for millennia in all directions, but limited to a particular perspective nevertheless. The fact that the method itself recedes into the background is necessary if this new world is to be familiar, and thus a world at all.
This is not to say that Thucydides’s statement of method is “mere” rhetoric, that he did not cross-examine witnesses and endeavor to find out what really happened, as we would conventionally understand that to mean. To the contrary, it is assumed that this is exactly what Thucydides did, and so the question is why, given his evident pride in his method, do we not hear more about it? 35 The argument here is that such discussion would obtrude on the clarity that Thucydides creates through his method; the History is not about its own novel method of its composition.
Thucydides describes and justifies his method, and then proceeds with his magisterial narrative and does not return to his method again. In a court case, one’s method is justified to the extent that it wins the day. What is the measure of Thucydides’s method, of his relation to logos, except for the creation of a world, of something worthy of reckoning? This is not to say that Thucydides’s statement of method is “mere” rhetoric, that he did not cross-examine witnesses and endeavor to find out what really happened, as we would conventionally understand that to mean.