The Shape of Ancient Thought Quotes

“Fish gotta swim Bird gotta fly Man gotta sit and say Why why why”
― Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies

“The European reception of Greek philosophy has been dominated by a model in which Plato and Aristotle are seen as the centers and others such as Sextus Empiricus—whose extant works are comparable both in extent and in importance to those of Plato and Aristotle and as representative of the Greek philosophical tradition—are not heard of. In fact, Plato too is censored, in that the Parmenides, which Plotinus regarded as the essential Platonic work, is regarded as a joke or a game, and passages such as “destroying the hypotheses” in the Republic are either edited out of the text or interpreted out of the commentary. The fact that Greek philosophy from the very beginning was characterized by critical dialectic and by the ethics of retreat that often attends it is not studied in our schools. When attention is occasionally paid to, say, Pyrrhonic skepticism, it is seen as outrageous and inhuman. Greek philosophy has, in effect, been forced into the mold of European philosophy, when in fact it had a great deal more in common with its contemporaneous Indian thought.”
― Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies

“If the Greek miracle were to remain a miracle, its proponents must maintain that it happened by a kind of parthenogenesis, not by a fertilization from outside. So the whole Hegelian view of history and civilization, with its emphasis on cultural purity and its disapproval of hybridity, brushed aside the question of possible influences passing between Indian and Greek philosophers. For”
― Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies

“The African-American classical scholar Frank Snowden has argued that color prejudice did not exist in the Greco-Roman world.35 “In the Mediterranean world,” he notes, “the black man was seldom a strange, unknown being.” Further, “in antiquity slavery was independent of race or class,” so the stereotype of the black human as inherently slavish never developed as it did in the era of the middle passage.”
― Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies

“In Babylonian religious thought the gods are represented by numbers. The number 1 represented the High God. The god of music, Enki, was represented by the number 40 which, in the sexagesimal system, means , that is, or the musical perfect fifth—the same ratio applied to the winter solstice (the New Year). One cannot regain the whole system, only edges of it here and there—a “great worldwide archaic construction” which was “preserved almost intact in the later thought of the Pythagoreans and Plato.”70”
― Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies

“Important “round” numbers in the sexagesimal system include the base of 60; its square, 3,600 (602), which the Sumerians called sar or universe; and its fourth power, 12,960,000 (3,60o2 or 604), which has been called “The greatest sacred number in Babylonia … the sar squared.”13 This system was founded, Neugebauer says, on a “decimal substrate” the decimal system, in other words, had been invented first, and interacted with the emerging sexa-gesimality. Thus we find sexagesimal units like 30 or 60 interacting with decimal units such as 5 or I0. Sixty twice, for example, is 120, which times ten is 1,200, a common number in the texts that flow from this tradition. Six gets special prominence as the decimal reduction of 60; from this interplay arise 36 (6 X 6) and 360 (6 X 60), which also have other connections with the system: 360 X 12 = 4,320, and so on. These numbers interact with calendrical units: 60 / 5 (days in Babylonian week) = 12 (months—nations—in a year) 12 X 6 (decimal contraction of 60) = 72 (weeks in a Babylonian year) 5 X 72 = 360 (days in a Babylonian year) 6 X 72 = 432 (a common round number in the tradition)”
― Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies

“There Pericles says that the essence of the Athenian democracy is that any citizen, regardless of class or profession, should be able to take over any governmental office and execute it properly and wisely with the good of his fellow citizens in mind. The reason any citizen would have the necessary ability had nothing to do with family lineage; it was simply the universal dispensation to citizens, in childhood, of paideia, the Hellenic education. Paideia was an ideology based on democracy, an attitude that was recovered and reconstructed in Europe from the Renaissance to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Education was supposed to transform one from a child unthinkingly submissive to autocracy into an adult capable of guiding one’s own destiny and that of one’s fellows.”
― Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies

“Lyotard remarked that post-Modern artists often function as philosophers. They may deal with issues of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as many influential critics today approach art through philosophy.”
― Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies