Order and History

Front Cover
University of Missouri Press, 2000 - Bible - 150 pages
"This second volume of Voegelin's magisterial Order and History, The World of the Polis, explores the ancient Greek symbolization of human reality. Taking us from the origins of Greek culture in the Pre-Homeric Cretan civilizations, through the Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod, and the rise of philosophy with the Pre-Socratics Parmenides and Heraclitus, this masterful work concludes with the historians of the classical period. In The World of the Polis, Voegelin traces the emergence of the forms of the city-state and of philosophy from the ancient symbolism of myth. He maintains that the limits and ultimate goals of human nature are constant and that the central problem of every society is the same--"to create an order that will endow the fact of its existence with meaning in terms of ends divine and human". Thus, Voegelin shows how "the meaning of existence" achieved concrete expression in the typical political, social, and religious institutions of Greece and in the productions of its poets and thinkers. He deals with more than fifty Greek writers in the course of his analysis of the rise of myth and its representation of the divine order of the cosmos as the first great symbolic form of order, one later supplanted by the leap in being reflected in the emergence of philosophy.The book is a tour de force, a virtuoso performance by a scholar and philosopher of great power, learning, and imagination that places its subject matter in a new light. The editor's critical introduction places The World of the Polis in the broader context of Voegelin's philosophy of history. Scholars and students of political science, philosophy, and the history of ideas will find this work invaluable". --
 

Contents

Editors Introduction
1
Preface
53
Mankind and History
67
Part One Cretans Achaeans and Hellenes
91
Hellas and History
93
2 The Hellenic Consciousness of History
99
The Cretan and Achaean Societies
120
Homer and Mycenae
135
But I say unto you
270
Parmenides
274
Doxa
285
Heraclitus
292
The Philosophy of Order
301
Conclusions
311
Part Three The Athenian Century
315
Tragedy
317

2 Order and Disorder
144
Part Two From Myth to Philosophy
179
The Hellenic Polis
181
Sympoliteia
189
Hesiod
195
The Works and Days Invocation and Exhortation
206
The Ages of the World
213
The Apocalypse
223
The Break with the Myth
234
2 Xenophanes Attack on the Myth
240
The Aretai and the Polis
254
The Eunomia of Solon
264
Tragedy and History
327
The End of Tragedy
338
The Sophists
341
2 Plato on the Sophists Hippias
351
3 Platos Protagoras
359
4 The Fragments of Primary Sources
365
Power and History
406
2 The Old Oligarch
418
Formulations
443
Index
449
Copyright

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Page 453 - Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first...
Page 19 - My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower,* the other becomes the object known.

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