This 1935 book studies the powerful influence exercised by Ancient Greek culture on German writers from the eighteenth century onwards.

In this unique and comprehensive book, George McCarthy examines the influence of Greek philosophy, literature, arts, and politics on the development of twentieth-century German social thought. McCarthy demonstrates that the classical spirit vitalized thinkers such as Weber, Heidegger, Freud, Marcuse, Arendt, Gadamer, and Habermas. With the romancing of antiquity, they transformed their understanding of the modern self, political community, and Enlightenment rationality. By viewing contemporary social theory from the framework of the classical world, McCarthy argues, we are capable of thinking beyond the limits of modernity to new possibilities of human reason, science, beauty, and social justice.

The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century is the first collective critical study of this important period in intellectual history. The volume is divided into four parts. The first part explores individual philosophers, including Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, amongst other great thinkers of the period. The second addresses key philosophical movements: Idealism, Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, and Existentialism. The essays in the third part engage with different areas of philosophy that received particular attention at this time, including philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of history, and hermeneutics. Finally, the contributors turn to discuss central philosophical topics, from skepticism to mat-erialism, from dialectics to ideas of historical and cultural Otherness, and from the reception of antiquity to atheism. Written by a team of leading experts, this Handbook will be an essential resource for anyone working in the area and will lead the direction of future research.

The Greeks are on trial. They have been for generations, if not millennia, from Rome in the First century, to Romanticism in the Nineteenth. We debate the place of the Greeks in the university curriculum, in New World culture - we even debate the place of the Greeks in the European Union. This book notices the lingering and half-hidden presence of the Greeks in some strange places - everywhere from the U.S. Supreme Court to the Modern Olympic Games - and in doing so makes an important new contribution to a very old debate.

This investigation addresses a pressing anxiety of our time – that of homelessness. Tersely stated, the philosophical significance of homelessness in its more modern context can be understood to emerge with Nietzsche and his discourse on nihilism, which signals the loss of the highest values hitherto. Diverging from Nietzsche, Heidegger interprets homelessness as a symptom of the oblivion of being. The purpose of the present enquiry is to rigorously confront humanity’s state of homelessness, and at the same time illumine the extent to which Heidegger’s thought engages with this pervasive phenomenon. In questioning the nature of homelessness, Heidegger’s preoccupations with nihilism and modern technology prove crucial. Moreover, his attempts to overcome or prepare for the overcoming of this state of homelessness are also of great import to the current investigation. Adorno and Lévinas offer scathing critiques of Heidegger’s thought as it relates to the motifs of homelessness, homecoming (Heimkunft) and the German Heimat, for they associate it with provincialism, paganism, and a pernicious form of politics. In providing these critiques they bring to light the risks involved in undertaking a homecoming venture, and they also show how a great thinker can err greatly. While acknowledging the importance of these criticisms, the present study reveals how Heidegger’s various discourses on homelessness and homecoming bear fruitful insights that can contribute not just to a Germanic sense of homecoming but to a sense of homecoming that humanity at large can relate to and be enriched by.

Since 2010 Greece has been experiencing the longest period of austerity and economic downturn in its recent history. Economic changes may be happening more rapidly and be more visible than the cultural effects of the crisis which are likely to take longer to become visible, however in recent times, both at home and abroad, the Greek arts scene has been discussed mainly in terms of the crisis. While there is no shortage of accounts of Greece's economic crisis by financial and political analysts, the cultural impact of austerity has yet to be properly addressed. This book analyses hitherto uncharted cultural aspects of the Greek economic crisis by exploring the connections between austerity and culture. Covering literary, artistic and visual representations of the crisis, it includes a range of chapters focusing on different aspects of the cultural politics of austerity such as the uses of history and archaeology, the brain drain and the Greek diaspora, Greek cinema, museums, music festivals, street art and literature as well as manifestations of how the crisis has led Greeks to rethink or question cultural discourses and conceptions of identity.

This book seeks to show how Karl Marx’s vision of communism was a continuation of Aristotle’s classical humanist philosophy. Challenging the Engelsian distortion of Marx, it presents a negation of previous interpretations of Marx which present him in materialist terms. Engels proposed a picture of the highest stage of communist society as an economic egalitarianism, a vision which became an axiom of Leninist-Stalinist-Soviet Communism. By contrast, here it is shown that Marx embraced the Aristotelian concept of “distributive justice”, of proportionate equality. Spanning the works of Marx, from his university education and doctoral dissertation on the differences between the Democritean and Epicurean philosophy of the atom, to the study of his Rheinische Zeitung period and the persistence of classical humanism in Marx’s defense of the freedom of the press, Levine skillfully reveals the gravitational pull between Marx and Aristotle. Showing how classical humanism is the dominant ethos in the communism of Marx, the book includes chapters on: Hegel as a transition point between Aristotle and Marx The links between Marx’s theory of labor and Aristotle’s idea of the constitutive subject located in The Politics How the local methodologies of Aristotle and Hegel provided Marx with the social methodologies by which to interpret the functioning of capitalism Marx's Resurrection of Aristotle is the culmination of Norman Levine's life-long work to establish the correct placement of Marx and Marx’s communism within the classical humanist tradition.

This book casts new light on the work of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843), and his translations of Greek tragedy. It shows Hölderlin’s poetry is unique within Western literature (and art) as it retrieves the socio-politics of a Dionysiac space-time and language to challenge the estrangement of humans from nature and one other. In this book, author Lucas Murrey presents a new picture of ancient Greece, noting that money emerged and rapidly developed there in the sixth century B.C. This act of monetization brought with it a concept of tragedy: money-tyrants struggling against the forces of earth and community who succumb to individual isolation, blindness and death. As Murrey points out, Hölderlin (unconsciously) retrieves the battle between money, nature and community and creatively applies its lessons to our time. But Hölderlin’s poetry not only adapts tragedy to question the unlimited “machine process” of “a clever race” of money-tyrants. It also draws attention to Greece’s warnings about the mortal danger of the eyes in myth, cult and theatre. This monograph thus introduces an urgently needed vision not only of Hölderlin hymns, but also the relevance of disciplines as diverse as Literary Studies, Philosophy, Psychology (Psychoanalysis) as well as Religious and Visual (Media) Studies to our present predicament, where a dangerous visual culture, through its support of the unlimitedness of money, is harming our relation to nature and one another. “Here triumphs a temperament guided by ancient religion and that excavates, in Hölderlin’s translations, the central god Dionysus of Greek tragedy.” “Lucas Murrey shares with his subject, Hölderlin, a vision of the Greeks as bringing something vitally important into our poor world, a vision of which few classical scholars are now capable.” —Richard Seaford, author of Money and the Early Greek Mind and Dionysus. “Here triumphs a temperament guided by ancient religion and that excavates, in Hölderlin’s translations, the central god Dionysus of Greek tragedy.” —Bernhard Böschenstein, author of “Frucht des Gewitters”. Zu Hölderlins Dionysos als Gott der Revolution and Paul Celan: Der Meridian. “Lucas Murrey takes the god of tragedy, Dionysus, finally serious as a manifestation of the ecstatic scream of liberation and visual strategies of dissolution: he pleasantly portrays Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic poetic sympathy.” —Anton Bierl, author of Der Chor in der Alten Komödie. Ritual and Performativität “Hölderlin most surely deserved such a book.” —Jean-François Kervégan, author of Que faire de Carl Schmitt? “...fascinating material...” —Noam Chomsky, author of Media Control and Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe.

The papers of this volume move from the abstract scheme of an intercultural humanism of the future to concrete cultural expressions of humanism within the Muslim culture of different times up to the present. They concentrate on three issues. The first is related to contemporary attempts to develop a humanist and historical hermeneutics of the Qur'an and of Islamic history. The second discusses the humanist heritage and the humanitarian trends of Muslim religious and literary culture. The third highlights the discussion on Humanism and Islam as a topic within European identity politics, covering the role of this discussion for the history of Islamic Studies in Europe and America, and the contemporary polemics around Islam in the Netherlands. Taken together, the contributions of the volume attempt to provide the groundwork for an assessment of the roots and prospects of an intercultural humanism with respect to the Muslim world.