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The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History

Amazon.com Price: $85.00 (as of 03/05/2019 07:22 PST- Details)

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Description

The Realness of Things Past proposes a new paradigm of historical practice. It questions the way we conventionally historicize the experiences of non-up to date peoples, western and non-western, and makes the case for an alternative. It shows how our standard analytical devices impose up to date, dualist metaphysical conditions upon all non-up to date realities, thereby authorizing us to align those realities with our own up to date ontological commitments, fundamentally altering their contents in the process. The net result is a practice that homogenizes the past’s numerous ways of being human. To produce histories that are more ethically defensible, more philosophically robust, and more historically meaningful, we want to take an ontological turn in our practice. The book works to formulate a non-dualist historicism so they can allow readers to analyse each and every past reality by itself ontological terms, as a roughly autonomous world unto itself.

To make the case for this alternative paradigm, the book engages with currents of thought in numerous intellectual provinces, from anthropology and postcolonial studies to the sociology of science and quantum physics. And to demonstrate how the new paradigm might work in practice, it uses classical Athens as its primary case study.

The Realness of Things Past is divided into three parts. To highlight the limitations of conventional historicist analysis and the need for an alternative, Part I critically scrutinizes our standard up to date accounts of “democratic Athens.” Part II draws on quite a lot of historical, ethnographic, and theoretical literatures to frame ethical and philosophical mandates for the proposed ontological turn. To illustrate the historical benefits of this alternative paradigm, Part III then shows the way it allows us to produce an entirely new and more meaningful account of the Athenian politeia or “way of living.” The book is expressly written to be accessible to a non-specialist, cross-disciplinary readership.

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