thoughts, experiments, and projects
Compliled by Al Boroto
CADE century-sliced models covering six hundred years of ancient Greek writing show that φύσις never rises as an association of βάρβαρος at any point from the archaic period through the Hellenistic. What does shift is the geographic reference of the term, the strength of the Greek/Barbarian dyad, and the philosophical content of φύσις itself.
Hall argues that Greek tragedy invented the Barbarian as a coherent ideological construct serving Athenian democratic self-definition. Saïd argues that Euripides spent his career dismantling that same construct. Both are reading the same corpus. The disagreement is productive.
This is an interesting book which primarily focuses on Hellenistic and Roman texts. It also detaches the concept of race from phenotypical appearance distancing itself from current usages of the concept. The two issues pose a clear problem. First, focusing on two imperial periods without looking at what preceded allows the writer to overlook the relationship between empire and forms of ethnic discrimination. Second, by detaching race from forms of discrimination based on perceptions of phenotypes, the book closes the door to the examination of other forms of identity building through contrast with others which do not use the social construct of race.
In Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy, Kōjin Karatani offers a powerful corrective to Athenocentric narratives of philosophy’s birth by relocating its emergence within the distinct social structures of the Ionian polis. His central claim—that philosophy arose in tandem with the political condition of isonomia (equality without rule)—grounds intellectual history in material social forms, particularly the dissolution of tribal affiliation and the rise of voluntary association in colonial settlements.