Thomas Yaeger's Blog, page 22

A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology

'Philosophy Before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia' - Marc Van De Mieroop. Princeton University Press, October 2015. 
Marc Van De Mieroop’s book is an exploration of how the Babylonians understood and processed their reality in the 1st and 2ndmillennia BCE, long before the Greeks developed the apparatus of logical thought which we now associate with philosophy in the 5th century BCE.  Van De Mieroop chooses to call the Babylonian understanding of reality, which...

The Idea of Knowledge in the Ancient World

Ten articles on the idea of knowledge as it was understood in the ancient world, in the form of tweets:


Divination in Antiquity (and the sense it made) #Telos #Divination #Sacrifce #immanence https://t.co/leDJpoajDl pic.twitter.com/uTdNItBrGP

To know about important things in the ancient world it was understood you needed to have insight into the mind of God. The process of gaining that insight involved the technique of divination, and the paying of due honour in the form of sacrifice.

****...

Thomas Yaeger's Tweets for May 4, 2016

Today's scheduled tweets on the blog, which focus mainly on Mesopotamia. The Archaeology, Ancient History & Philosophy page is updated according to changes in the RSS feed sources:

Scheduled for:12:30pm · 4 May 2016Archaeology, Ancient History & Philosophy Feeds: https://t.co/rdtjzi9tKB #Archaeology #AncientHistory #Philosophy pic.twitter.com/jnubBhfYws

Scheduled for:2:31pm · 4 May 2016The Fifty Names of Marduk https://t.co/KOJyRtPEOv #An #Babylon #EnumaElish #Marduk #Mesopotamia #NewYe...

Excluding Parmenides

This is an extract from J.G. Frazer and The Platonic Theory of Being, published April 4, 2016. The extract is presented here without footnotes.




Section Fourteen
14.1. So far, this essay has consisted of the argument that both the Frazerian account of Plato's theory of Being and the Frazerian theory of Magic were developed in the light of the idea that man has progressed from an initial set of mistaken notions of the world, and that this was only possible by Frazer misreading key sources of evid...

Running Folklore to the Death

This is an extract from the book J.G.Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, published April 4, 2016. The extract is presented without its footnotes.




Section Thirteen

13.1. Frazer's work on the development of Plato's thought has made it more difficult to gain an understanding of the patterns of thought in antiquity - all his subsequent work is based on the presuppositions and arguments found in his early essay, and we still function within the vast paradigmatic frame established by these. And...

Is Plato's Ontology False?

An extract from the book J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, which was published as an eBook on April 4, 2016. Available from Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Inktera etc. Not currently available from Amazon. The extract is presented here without the footnotes:




Section Eleven
11.1. We now turn to examine what can be inferred of the nature of the ultimate reality (Being) as conceived by Plato, given the limitations of our intellectual tools.
11.2. Ultimately there must be a point...

'J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being' on Itunes

Published April 4, 2016
Further information

Free promotional copies of 'J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being'

James Frazer won a fellowship with an essay on the development of Plato's theory of the Forms or Ideas. In this essay he argued that there was no overarching theory of Being in Plato's mind before he embarked on the writing of his dialogues, and that consequently differences in approach and discussion apparent in his work are the result of development in his thought. Was he right?



Available now for pre-order from Barnes and Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Thomas+Yaeger?_requestid=310897,...

Beyond Mathematics and Geometry

Everything has an inside and an outside. We live in a world in which we mostly react to what is on the outside of things, and readily apparent, rather than what is on the inside, and often invisible to us. What is on the outside is the phenomenon, what is on the inside is the noumenon.
The distinction between what is phenomenal, and what is noumenal, is a major idea in the philosophical outlook of Kant, who pointed out that what things actually are is not only generally unknown to us, but is...

An Uneven Distribution: Research and Scholarly Resources in the 21st Century (I)

There are lots of digital resources out there for scholars and students of ancient history and ancient languages, which are my main interests. A really useful searchable version of the classic Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon for example, and the wonderful resources at the Perseus project; the electronic corpus of Sumerian literature at Oxford (ETCSL), The Sumerian Dictionary at the University of Pennsylvania (PSD), the Melammu database on Assyria and Babylonia at the University of Helsinki, &...