Suchergebnisse

As a contribution to the study of empire and imperial ambition, the present study considers the greatest analysis—Xenophon'sThe Education of Cyrus—of one of the greatest empires of antiquity—the Persian. Xenophon's lively and engaging account permits us to watch Cyrus as he builds a transnational empire, at once vast and stable. Yet Xenophon is ultimately highly critical of Cyrus, because he lacks the self-knowledge requisite to happiness, and of the empire, whose stability is purchased at the price of freedom. Cyrus finally appears as a kind of divinity who strives to supply the reward for moral excellence that the gods evidently do not. Xenophon implies that any truly global empire would have to present itself as a universal providential power capable of bestowing on human beings a blessed happiness that as such transcends our very mortality.

"Ich werde versuchen, gleichsam hinter die Moderne zurückzublicken, auf eine Sicht der angemessenen Beziehung zwischen Religion und Politik, die uns, wie man mit Grund behaupten kann, im größten Zeugnis der vormodernen politischen Wissenschaft überliefert ist, im Werk des Aristoteles. Die klassische politische Wissenschaft des Aristoteles liefert uns keine einfachen Antworten auf die Probleme der Gegenwart, und selbstverständlich kannte Aristoteles den biblischen Gott nicht, obwohl er mit Sicherheit einen Begriff von einer Art Monotheismus hatte. Doch Aristoteles´ Zugang zum moralischen und politischen Leben bietet uns eine gewisse Anleitung, wenn wir über die tiefsten Sehnsüchte der menschlichen Seele nachdenken. Und wir, die wir so sehr vom modernen Denken beeinflußt worden sind, mögen den größten Nutzen daraus ziehen, daß wir einem Denker zuhören, der die wichtigste moderne Prämisse nicht teilte." (Textauszug)

No one can claim to have thought seriously about the question "How ought I to live?", the guiding question of political philosophy, without having confronted the powerful answer to it supplied by hedonism. In thinking about hedonism today, we may begin from that thinker who was both very important to and early in its history: Plato. Of the dialogs that have come down to us as Plato's, only the Philebus takes as its direct aim the examination of pleasure's claim to be the human good. The Philebus culminates in the suggestions that the need for self-awareness or self-knowledge may finally be more fundamental to all human beings (and hence to hedonists) than is even the desire for pleasure, and that the experience of at least some pleasures constitutes a great obstacle to precisely the self-knowledge we seek. The Philebus is important today not only because it contains a searching analysis of hedonism but also because it compels us to raise the crucial question of the precise nature of "the good" with which we are justly most concerned—our own or that of others—a question whose centrality to self-knowledge we are in danger of forgetting.

The study of Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics is useful today in part because it deals with a question—the nature of human happiness—whose relevance is obvious. But in dealing with that question, Book I compels us to raise difficulties for ourselves that, far from being obvious, are in danger of being forgotten. Chief among these difficulties are, first, the true character of our hope for happiness and, ultimately, the necessity of there being a kind of divine providence if that hope is to be realized. Inasmuch as we still long for happiness, we must still undergo the pull of that necessity, however distant it may appear to us to be. In bringing out our deepest concern in this way, the study of the first book of the Ethics also prepares us to become serious students of Aristotle's "philosophy of human matters" as a whole, which is concerned with the reality of providence because it is concerned with the possibility of philosophy as a way of life.

The present essay sketches the outline and the intention of Hesiod's Works and Days. Hesiod's principal task appears to be the identification (and praise) of the best way of life for his wayward brother Perses, but in carrying out this task, Hesiod speaks of justice and its human and divine supports in such a way as to go well beyond what would be of benefit to his brother. For in the course of his analysis of justice, or as a result of it, Hesiod praises also the life of autonomous understanding, the life that appears to be the poet's own. In crucial ways, then, Hesiod explores the chief themes of what was to become political philosophy, and for this reason, among others, he deserves the attention of all those who are also concerned with it.

Bartlett reviews by Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy: The Politics of Expulsion in Ancient Greece by Sara Forsdyke.

This study of Plato's Protagoras seeks not only to advance the understanding of ancient sophistry, a task both important in its own right and essential to the study of the history of political thought, but also to lay a foundation for subsequent inquiries into the connection between ancient sophistry and the relativism characteristic of our age. According to the Protagoras, the chief difference between philosopher and sophist is that the latter wrongly believes himself to be beyond or above the concern for justice as a virtue; the examination of Protagoras' moral teaching, then, proves to be the key to understanding him and therewith the intellectual position he represents.