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Antiquities Beyond Humanism

Brooke Holmes editor Emanuela Bianchi editor Sara Brill editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:27th Mar '19

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Antiquities Beyond Humanism cover

Greco-Roman antiquity is often presumed to provide the very paradigm of humanism from the Renaissance to the present. This paradigm has been increasingly challenged by new theoretical currents such as posthumanism and the "new materialisms", which point toward entities, forces, and systems that pass through and beyond the human and dislodge it from its primacy as the measure of things. Antiquities beyond Humanismseeks to explode the presumed dichotomy between the ancient tradition and the twenty-first century "turn" by exploring the myriad ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human. Greek philosophy in particular is filled with metaphysical explanations of the cosmos grounded in observations of the natural world, while other areas of ancient humanistic inquiry - poetry, political theory, medicine - extend into the realms of plant, animal, and even stone life, continually throwing into question the ontological status of living and non-living beings. By casting the ancient non-human or more-than-human in a new light in relation to contemporary questions of gender, ecological networks and non-human communities, voice, eros, and the ethics and the politics of posthumanism, the volume demonstrates that encounters with ancient texts, experienced as both familiar and strange, can help forge new understandings of life, whether understood as physical, psychical, divine, or cosmic.

The book is recommended reading for anyone interested in contemporary continental philosophy and the ancient world. It includes thought-provoking and surprising...openings for approaching antiquity from posthuman perspectives. The collection succeeds in showing that ancient texts are blooming with non-human life. * Pieta Päällysaho, University of Jyväskylä, De novis libris iudicia *
Among the volume's many virtues, I am struck in particular by the boldness among all authors in staking out interpretively ambitious stances that offer great potential reward ... the book offers occasion to rethink human positioning in light of the horrific errors regarding self-conception in our own time by returning to the ancient view of the interconnected cosmos in which the human is merely a part, and one materially dependent on the whole. * Colin C. Smith, Bryn Mawr Classical Review *

ISBN: 9780198805670

Dimensions: 219mm x 148mm x 23mm

Weight: 498g

322 pages