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Shame and Necessity (Sather Classical Lectures)

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Description

We have a tendency to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams’s original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. Whilst we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences don’t seem to be to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood are we able to properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery.

The writer is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we will consider Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours.

Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they don’t merely let us know about themselves, but about ourselves. In a new foreword A.A. Long explores the have an effect on of this volume in the context of Williams’s stunning career.


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