[PDF] Ancient Greek Cosmogony eBook

Author : Andrew Gregory
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 22,49 MB
Release : 2008-01-03
Category : History
ISBN : 1849667926

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Ancient Greek Cosmogony is the first detailed, comprehensive account of ancient Greek theories of the origins of the world. It covers the period from 800 BC to 600 AD, beginning with myths concerning the creation of the world; the cosmogonies of all the major Greek and Roman thinkers; and the debate between Greek philosophical cosmogony and early Christian views. It argues that Greeks formulated many of the perennial problems of philosophical cosmogony and produced philosophically and scientifically interesting answers. The atomists argued that our world was one among many worlds, and came about by chance. Plato argued that it is unique, and the product of design. Empedocles and the Stoics, in quite different ways, argued that there was an unending cycle whereby the world is generated, destroyed and generated again. Aristotle on the other hand argued that there was no such thing as cosmogony, and the world has always existed. Reactions to, and developments of, these ideas are traced through Hellenistic philosophy and the debates in early Christianity on whether God created the world from nothing or from some pre-existing chaos. The book examines issues of the origins of life and the elements for the ancient Greeks, and how the cosmos will come to an end. It argues that there were several interesting debates between Greek philosophers on the fundamental principles of cosmogony, and that these debates were influential on the development of Greek philosophy and science.

Author : Carolina López-Ruiz
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 22,86 MB
Release : 2010-06-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674049468

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"With admirable erudition, Lopez-Ruiz brings to life intimacies and exchanges between the ancient Greeks and their Northwest Semitic neighbors, portraying the ancient Mediterranean as a fluid, dynamic contact zone. She explains networks of circulation, shows creative uses of traditional material by peoples in motion, and radically transforms our understanding of ancient cosmogonies."---Page duBois, author of Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks --

Author : Fiona Mitchell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 16,80 MB
Release : 2021-05-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1000392597

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Monsters in Greek literature are often thought of as creatures which exist in mythological narratives, however, as this book shows, they appear in a much broader range of ancient sources and are used in creation narratives, ethnographic texts, and biology to explore the limits of the human body and of the human world. This book provides an in-depth examination of the role of monstrosity in ancient Greek literature. In the past, monsters in this context have largely been treated as unimportant or analysed on an individual basis. By focusing on genres rather than single creatures, the book provides a greater understanding of how monstrosity and abnormal bodies are used in ancient sources. Very often ideas about monstrosity are used as a contrast against which to examine the nature of what it is to be human, both physically and behaviourally. This book focuses on creation narratives, ethnographic writing, and biological texts. These three genres address the origins of the human world, its spatial limits, and the nature of the human body; by examining monstrosity in these genres we can see the ways in which Greek texts construct the space and time in which people exist and the nature of our bodies. This book is aimed primarily at scholars and students undertaking research, not only those with an interest in monstrosity, but also scholars exploring cultural representations of time (especially the primordial and mythological past), ancient geography and ethnography, and ancient philosophy and science. As the representation of monsters in antiquity was strongly influential on medieval, renaissance, and early modern images and texts, this book will also be relevant to people researching these areas.

Author : Ricardo Salles
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 11,88 MB
Release : 2021-06-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1108836577

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Explores ancient biology and cosmology as two sciences that shed light on one another in their goals and methods.

Author : Phillip Sidney Horky
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 44,77 MB
Release : 2019-07-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1108423647

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Traces the concept of kosmos as order, arrangement, and ornament in ancient philosophy, literature, and aesthetics.

Author : Gerard Naddaf
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 31,56 MB
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0791483673

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In The Greek Concept of Nature, Gerard Naddaf utilizes historical, mythological, and linguistic perspectives to reconstruct the origin and evolution of the Greek concept of phusis. Usually translated as nature, phusis has been decisive both for the early history of philosophy and for its subsequent development. However, there is a considerable amount of controversy on what the earliest philosophers—Anaximander, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus—actually had in mind when they spoke of phusis or nature. Naddaf demonstrates that the fundamental and etymological meaning of the word refers to the whole process of birth to maturity. He argues that the use of phusis in the famous expression Peri phuseos or historia peri phuseos refers to the origin and the growth of the universe from beginning to end. Naddaf's bold and original theory for the genesis of Greek philosophy demonstrates that archaic and mythological schemes were at the origin of the philosophical representations, but also that cosmogony, anthropogony, and politogony were never totally separated in early Greek philosophy.

Author : Menelaos Christopoulos
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 13,7 MB
Release : 2010-09-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0739139010

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Light and Darkness in Ancient Greek Myth and Religion is a ground-breaking volume dedicated to a thorough examination of the well known empirical categories of light and darkness as it relates to modes of thought, beliefs and social behavior in Greek culture. With a systematic and multi-disciplinary approach, the book elucidates the light/darkness dichotomy in color semantics, appearance and concealment of divinities and creatures of darkness, the eye sight and the insight vision, and the role of the mystic or cultic.

Author : MIHAIL-GEORGE HÂNCU
Publisher : Editura Universității din București - Bucharest University Press
Page : 396 pages
File Size : 33,91 MB
Release : 2019-01-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 6061611307

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Volumul de față își propune să demonstreze că orice discuție privitoare la cosmogoniile presocratice trebuie să se refere atât la teogonii, cât și la cosmogoniile de factură filosofică, de vreme ce procesele lingvistice folosite în descrierea începutului universului rămân, totuși, aceleași. Primele încercări de a crea termeni specifici se pot găsi chiar la autori timpurii precum Homer sau orficii; pe de altă parte, procesul de hipocogniție funcționează la fel de bine și la autorii de teogonii, și la filosofi, care plăsmuiesc nenumărate variante ale metaforei nașterii sau chiar creează metafore complet originale, toate având același scop: să le facă teoriile cât mai limpezi cu putință. Dreptatea cosmică a lui Anaximandru, tichia de pâslă a lui Anaximene, flacăra lui Heraclit, răscrucea lui Parmenide, versurile lui Empedocle și semințele lui Anaxagora – fiecare dintre ele reprezintă câte un pas important în lunga călătorie de la nașterea zeilor până la întrebarea metafizică „oare cum se poate naște ceva?”.

Author : Claude Calame
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 199 pages
File Size : 24,39 MB
Release : 2003-07-22
Category : History
ISBN : 0691114587

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Surely the ancient Greeks would have been baffled to see what we consider their "mythology." Here, Claude Calame mounts a powerful critique of modern-day misconceptions on this front and the lax methodology that has allowed them to prevail. He argues that the Greeks viewed their abundance of narratives not as a single mythology but as an "archaeology." They speculated symbolically on key historical events so that a community of believing citizens could access them efficiently, through ritual means. Central to the book is Calame's rigorous and fruitful analysis of various accounts of the foundation of that most "mythical" of the Greek colonies--Cyrene, in eastern Libya. Calame opens with a magisterial historical survey demonstrating today's misapplication of the terms "myth" and "mythology." Next, he examines the Greeks' symbolic discourse to show that these modern concepts arose much later than commonly believed. Having established this interpretive framework, Calame undertakes a comparative analysis of six accounts of Cyrene's foundation: three by Pindar and one each by Herodotus (in two different versions), Callimachus, and Apollonius of Rhodes. We see how the underlying narrative was shaped in each into a poetically sophisticated, distinctive form by the respective medium, a particular poetical genre, and the specific socio-historical circumstances. Calame concludes by arguing in favor of the Greeks' symbolic approach to the past and by examining the relation of mythos to poetry and music.