Birth of the symbol Struck, Peter T
2004., 20090209, 2009, 2004, c2004., 2004-01-01
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Nearly all of us have studied poetry and been taught to look for the symbolic as well as literal meaning of the text. Is this the way the ancients saw poetry? In Birth of the Symbol, Peter Struck ...explores the ancient Greek literary critics and theorists who invented the idea of the poetic "symbol." The book notes that Aristotle and his followers did not discuss the use of poetic symbolism. Rather, a different group of Greek thinkers--the allegorists--were the first to develop the notion. Struck extensively revisits the work of the great allegorists, which has been underappreciated. He links their interest in symbolism to the importance of divination and magic in ancient times, and he demonstrates how important symbolism became when they thought about religion and philosophy. "They see the whole of great poetic language as deeply figurative," he writes, "with the potential always, even in the most mundane details, to be freighted with hidden messages."
Divination and Human Nature casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination--the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical ...antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. In this book, Peter Struck reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact--that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights--and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, Struck demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, Struck notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, Divination and Human Nature illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.
Ancient Greeks drew advice from oracles, dreams, entrails, the movements of birds, sneezes, and myriad other sources for divination. Classicists typically study such phenomena as examples of occult ...religion, or for their use as a social mechanism for managing dissent and forging consensus. Ancient philosophical accounts by contrast go a longer way toward considering them seriously, on their own terms. They take them as an invitation into developing speculative accounts of non-standard epistemological schemes. Plato is examined as a case study of a more general Greek philosophical tendency to treat divination as something akin to what we might call intuition.
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The challenges currently facing classicists are not so different from those our profession has faced for the last one hundred and fifty years, and with each challenge, a discipline sometimes imagined ...by outsiders to be slow to embrace the new has shown itself naturally disposed to experimentation. The discipline's agility derives from the unique degree of variegation in the modes of thinking required to thrive in it: from interpretive, to quantitative, to those relying on knowledge of culture and context. As the value of education is increasingly judged in terms of workforce development, we stand our best chance to thrive by sticking to our strengths, and anchoring our curricular goals and messages to the value of the liberal arts as a whole, as well as the intellectual dexterity that it fosters.
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For many years, thede Mysteriisof the Late Antique Neoplatonist, Iamblichus (ca. 245-ca. 325 C.E.), languished under the stem judgments of philologists, who found his knotted prose tiresome, and ...historians of philosophy, who saw it as a final break with the promise of reason that had marked Greek philosophy from the classical age through the Stoics to Plotinus. While such judgments are fair enough, they are hardly the last word to be said on this pivotal tract. Running ten books, of which the first is excerpted here, thede Mysteriisstands as our most extensive extant tract devoted to
Mantikê Johnston, Sarah Iles; Struck, Peter T
2005, Volume:
155
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This book is a collection of studies by scholars Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and early Christian religions on the topic of divination. Its topics range from necromancy to dice rolling, free-lance ...diviners to Delphi, and includes treatments from the Archaic period to Late Antiquity.
INTRODUCTION Struck, Peter
Divination and Human Nature,
07/2016
Book Chapter
From all corners of the ancient Mediterranean, people that had run up against the limits of their own knowledge brought their remaining questions to a frail, illiterate woman housed in a massive ...stone temple at Delphi. She was Apollo’s human embodiment on earth and the most revered source of wisdom in the classical world. As they prepared for their consultation with the mysterious Pythia, seekers would have read an enigmatic, deceptively simple two-word sentence cut into the temple wall, “Know yourself.”¹ No one could remember where the saying came from or what exactly it was supposed to mean, but this
In his most vivid narrative of his hero’s life story, Plato has Socrates center his autobiography on an act of divination. TheApologyshows a man driven by a provocative pronouncement from the Delphic ...oracle to devote his life to solving its riddle. Pleading his own defense before an Athenian jury, Socrates presents a carefully constructed speech, rich in mythological allusions. He compares himself to Achilles (28c) and likens his life’s work to a Herculean labor (22a).¹ A more subtle and also more powerful point of reference is another figure, the Theban hero Oedipus, whose life was as profoundly shaped
In contrast to Plato, the surviving portion of Aristotle’s corpus is made up of his esoteric works—lectures, essays, and sometimes apparently just notes, meant for an audience already at the advanced ...stage. One salutary aspect is immediately apparent. Aristotle has little use for dramatic irony and deals with issues more directly and systematically than Plato does. On the other hand, the particular challenges for Aristotle’s readers are apparent as well. Whereas Plato could be said to present sometimes too many words, elaborating long and intricate lines of argument in which his investment remains indeterminate, Aristotle nearly always presents too
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