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The Introduction pursues the theme of identity by considering the varieties of ‘family’ in the plays. The grounding of civilization is investigated by means of the dichotomy of orality and literature, as well as the polarity between Thebes and Athens. To develop this analysis, the profile and potential of Oedipus and Antigone in Western and African philosophical traditions is examined. The book's argument about cultural transmission contends that the African-descended adaptations of Oedipus and Antigone indict colonial culture for the infliction of oedipal violence, while themselves enacting an oedipal bind as they simultaneously embrace and resist those cultures. Above and beyond this bind, the plays offer more benign models of transmission constituted within the African continent and diaspora. The Introduction recasts the arguments of Freud and Bloom by a focus on Fanon, and advocates a specific theoretical re-orientation of reception studies to equip it to do postcolonial analysis.

The study of history with the aim to understand the human past with some sense of detachment is a recent intellectual trend. In the past, a knowledge of history was aimed at ascertaining within history some hidden meaning: cosmic significance, general direction, or providential purpose. This chapter gives an overview of both the religious and secular philosophy of history including looking at Jewish, Christian, Hegelian, and Marxist ideas, and Idealism and Realism. The belief in historical development conceived as a philosophical history provides substantial material for conceptual elaboration and examination. The chapter evaluates the attitude of continental and analytical philosophical traditions toward the concept of grand historical narrative. The combination of the continental and analytical techniques for the purpose of philosophical history is still rare.

Education is the basic activity through which civilizations assure their continuation. It presupposes educators and pupils who are able to communicate with one another. Belonging to historical communities similar enough to permit mutual understanding, they transmit a specific culture from generation to generation. The process of transmission has been called paradosis, traditio, tradition, giving or passing on to others what first has been received. Teaching philosophy is only one example of transmission, but an elementary analysis of it, especially if its historical dimension is not obscured, can show a temporal structure that, mutatis mutandis, recurs in all or most other examples. To be a teacher is to be involved in the transition of a past, through the present of teaching and learning, into a future in which the past continues its life, thanks to its renewal. This chapter discusses the role played by the philosophical tradition in today's education of philosophers. It examines tradition as memory and history as memory.

In the last ten years, investigators worldwide have focused on the connections between the philosophy of classical figures in American pragmatism (e.g., William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey) and the Hispanic world. This book documents the results of this new and thriving area of research while also functioning as a primer that can guide and provoke further inquiry. The chapters, from North American, Spanish, and Latin American scholars, aim to fill a void in the humanities. They question gaps that never existed and instead build new bridges. The book hopes to provide the connections for a twenty-first-century dialogue between two great philosophical traditions.

Certain methodological debates regarding behavioral economics seem to involve, more often than not, the notion of revealed preferences. As part of philosophical tradition, the principle of revealed preference entails how restrictions are handled when practiced professionally. This principle came about during a time when choice was not the only relevant factor in selecting a consumption bundle from a budget set. This principle implies that an economist's view is valid only when the utility functions are distinguishable from a pool of choices that are essential in taking on a policy issue. As one can observe that economists' attitudes appear to influence their views and opinions on paternalistic policies and how they evaluate specific economic models, this chapter takes a closer look at this linkage through examining its other aspects.

This chapter shows how Plato, through the Symposium, gives philosophical attention to the question of traditionality and makes his case for the philosophical tradition as the best means of education. Grounded in friendship or philia, this tradition owes its genesis to its adversarial relation with poetry and sophistry. Prevailing over poet and sophist, Plato's philosopher, as characterized in this dialogue, passes on to his students not just an education but an educated way of life. The value of this way of life, the philosopher's role in passing it on and its compatibility with philosophia Christi echo throughout the Adages. In the 1508 Prolegomena to the Adages, Erasmus argues for the closest possible alignment between philosophy and proverbial statement. There he singles out Plato as not only the greatest philosopher but one without peer in the use of proverbs. Plato is, in Erasmus's words, paroimiodesteros—the master of proverbs.

This chapter reviews a book, entitled But Over Wisdom, Evil Can Never Triumph, dedicated to the thirty-six philosophers and students of philosophy who were murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War. The book has three parts. The first consists of remarks by eminent Polish philosophers on the Jewish philosophers in Poland who were murdered during the Nazi occupation. These remarks are followed by essays by Jacek J. Jadacki, R. Jadczak, and Barbara Markiewiecz devoted to the thirty-six commemorated by Polish philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbiński. The essays focus on the relationship of the students to their teacher and the Polish Jewish philosophical tradition. The second part contains ten philosophical discourses written by some of those to whom the book is dedicated. The final twenty pages consist of short biographies of the thirty-six.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of reasonable disagreement, which is an idea that can seem paradoxical because of the philosophical tradition that leads inevitably to the convergence of opinion. It analyzes the conception of political legitimacy that follows the fundamental principles of political society as they are coercive in nature. It discusses liberalism that is seen more clearly than past conceptions about the true task of political philosophy due to the reflective culture imbued with historical self-awareness. The chapter also provides a clear view of the fundamental problems confronting political society. It reviews political liberalism, which is understood as a form of liberal theory that is different from classical liberalism and becomes a vigorous area of philosophical reflection.

This book concludes by showing that, although the occult has always been with us, it has always experienced change and has not remained the same. Within England and Scotland, this can be understood in two principal, and very dynamic, ways. First, the occult related to a philosophical tradition constructed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from Neoplatonic and Hermetic thought, which informed the theory and practice of alchemy, astrology, and ritual magic. While the occult philosophical tradition remained relevant to early nineteenth-century Romantic writers, it had begun to fragment into its component parts, which might be combined in startlingly unconventional ways. Since that point, the Renaissance occult tradition has been primarily a focus of scholarly interest rather than a starting point for new intellectual or religious movements. Second, the occult can be understood in more practical terms as a way of harnessing supernatural power or divine knowledge for human objectives.

This chapter provides an overview of the way Spinoza has been received by various philosophical traditions. It starts by observing the great conflict in the interpretation of Spinoza, namely, that Spinoza has been viewed either as an atheist or as a mystic, either as a materialist or as a spiritualist. Tracing some aspects of this variegated history, the chapter argues that its latest incarnation divides an interpretation of Spinoza between analytic and continental philosophers. Spinoza’s radically monist understanding of body and mind or world and mind offers by far the most effective counterinstance to the whole way of thinking and its hold on philosophers from Descartes down. Thus, his work has very often been taken up by radicals or dissidents.

This chapter examines Athens in terms of the proliferation of Homer's epics. Homer, in a sense, was the educator of Greece, according to Plato, who was not only inspired by him, but tried to go beyond him as well. The chapter notes, however, how the Homeric epic material has roots in common with other major epic emerging in the Middle East—particularly that of the patriarchs and Moses in the Hebrew Bible. Because of Homer's enormous talent, epics like those of Beowulf and Gilgamesh cannot compete. Furthermore, Greek culture furthered his epics by using them to engage in developing a Greek philosophical tradition that existed long before Plato—one which has been called the “pre-Socratics.” This chapter examines the heroic phase in Greek culture, particularly in Athens, comparing it and analysing its similarities with the epic of Moses.

In his Metaphysics Zeta, Aristotle attempts to define (primary) substance, where the substances are the basic entities on which the reality of objects in the sublunary world must be based. The bulk of Zeta is concerned with characterizations of substance from the philosophical tradition, filtered in part through Aristotle’s own writings in other works. But the most striking “alien presence” is that of Plato, who appears sometimes as friend, but more often as foe. The notion of “levels” marks the divide between Aristotle’s discussion of “received” views, and the development of his own views, which are surprisingly recessive in this text. Why so much attention to the tradition, and so little exposition of his own considered theory of Aristotelian form and matter? Finally, the proper conclusion to Zeta is not that Aristotle’s forms are the primary substances, but rather the definition of substance that makes this so.

In this chapter, Daya Krishna reflects on comparative philosophy. In particular, he identifies a problem that is at the core of all comparative studies—that what passes for a transcultural or universal standard as the basis for all comparison is usually in fact a parochial, and indeed a Western standard. Krishna was interested not only in the comparison of East with West; he was also concerned with intra-Asian and even intra-Indian comparison. In the case of Indian philosophy, the first and foremost question that has engaged all those who have been seriously concerned with the country's so-called “philosophical” tradition relates to the issue as to how it can be regarded as “philosophy” proper when it is supposed to be primarily concerned with moksa, or liberation from the very possibility of suffering.