The Soul and the Celestial Afterlife in Greek Philosophy before Plato

This text is an attempt to see sport in different ways in the light of ancient philosophical themes. Philosophy of sports gets less attention than other areas of the discipline that examine the other major components of contemporary society: philosophy of religion, political philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of science. Talking about sports is often cheap, but it does not have to be that way. One of the reasons for this is insufficiently paid attention to the relation between sport and philosophy in Greek. That is it's important to talk about sports, just as important as we are talking about religion, politics, art and science. The argument of the present text is that we can try to get a handle philosophically on sports by examining it in light of several key idea from ancient Greek philosophy. The ancient Greeks, tended to be hylomorphists who gloried in both physical and mental achievement. Тhe key concepts from Greek philosophy that will provide the support to the present text are the following: arete, sophrosyne, dynamis and kalokagathia. These ideals never were parts of a realized utopia in the ancient world, but rather provided a horizon of meaning. We will claim that these ideals still provide worthy standards that can facilitate in us a better understanding of what sports is and what it could be. How can a constructive dialogue be developed which would discuss differences in understanding of sport in Ancient Greece and today? In this paper, the authors will try to answer this question from a historical and philosophical point of view. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section of the paper presents two principally different forms or models of focus in sport competitions – focus on physical excellence or focus on game. The dialectic discourse regarding these two approaches to physical activity is even more interesting due to the fact that these two models take precedence over one another depending on context. In the second section of the paper, the focus shifts to theendemic phenomenon of the Ancient Greek Olympic Games, where the topic is discussed from the perspective of philosophy with frequent historical reflections on the necessary specifics, which observeman as a physical-psychological-social-spiritual being. In the third section of this paper, the authors choose to use the thoughts and sayings of the great philosopher Plato to indicate how much this philosopher wasactually interested in the relationship between soul and body, mostly through physical exercise and sport, because it seems that philosophers who came after him have not seriously dealt with this topic in Plato’s way, although they could.

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Ethical-cultural Maps of Classical Greek Philosophy: the Contradiction between Nature and Civilization in Ancient Cynicism

Cultura ◽

10.3726/cul012019.0003 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 39-53

Author(s):

Vytis VALATKA ◽

Vaida ASAKAVIČIŪTĖ

Keyword(s):

Swot Analysis ◽

Greek Philosophy ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

Positive Aspect ◽

Weak Point ◽

Dio Chrysostom ◽

Weak Points ◽

Cultural Maps ◽

Classical Greek Philosophy ◽

Ancient Cynicism

This article restores the peculiar ethical-cultural cartography from the philosophical fragments of Ancient Greek Cynicism. Namely, the fragments of Anthistenes, Diogenes of Sinope, Crates, Dio Chrysostom as well as of the ancient historians of philosophy (Diogenes Laertius and Joanes Stobaeus) are mainly analyzed and interpreted. The methods of comparative analysis as well of rational restoration are applied in this article.The authors of the article concentrate on the main characteristics of the above mentioned cartography, that is, the contradiction between maps of nature and civilization. The article comes to the conclusion that the basis of this contradiction is the concept of the main value as well as virtue in the above mentioned cynicism, namely, natural radical temperance. According to ancient cynics, this virtue is absolutely incompatible with pleasure-driven civilization, as the latter annihilates the former. Therefore, cynics interpreted the whole territory of the world known at that time as divided between maps of nature and civilization that never overlap or even intersect. Moreover, according to ancient cynics, the territory covered by maps of civilization is considerably smaller than that enframed by the maps of nature. Moreover, the areas of nature are continuously being diminished, as civilization resolutely goes ahead. In such a situation that threatens survival of human nature the only possible way out is a return to the natural value of radical temperance. After cynics, the only effective strategy of achieving that challenging goal is askesis as excercises of temperance dedicated both to body and spirit.The authors of the article also give a certain SWOT analysis of the above mentioned cartography in the context of contemporary society. According to them, such a cartography possesses both strong and weak points. The main weak point is the contradiction itself between maps of culture and civilization. As a matter of fact, civilization does not annihilate the possibility of natural temperance, whereas a human being, according to his/her nature, is a creator of culture and civilization. On the other hand, the main positive aspect is an emphasis on virtue of temperance, which is actual, significant and relevant in any epoch, culture and civilization, and which is pretty much forgotten nowadays.

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Commentary

10.1093/oso/9780190863661.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Simon Nicholls ◽

Michael Pushkin ◽

Vladimir Ashkenazy

Keyword(s):

World View ◽

German Idealism ◽

Russian Philosophy ◽

Creative Work ◽

Greek Philosophy ◽

Indian Culture ◽

Russian Symbolism ◽

P Sources

Sources of the thinking are given, preceded by an investigation of the relation between philosophy and music, an account of the idiosyncratic way Skryabin studied, an interview between Skryabin and a philosopher of the period and a memoir by a student and patron summarizing the thought. The titles of the sections show the sources and influences: Ernest Renan, Greek philosophy, German idealism, Russian philosophy, and Russian symbolism, Conference at Geneva (this was a philosophical conference of which Skryabin studied some of the material), the influence of theosophy, and Indian culture. These influences were combined by Skryabin, not into a system but into a world view which vitally affected his creative work.(114)

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Milesian Measures: Time, Space, and Matter

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195146875.003.0004 ◽

2009 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Stephen A. White

Keyword(s):

Fourth Century ◽

Natural World ◽

The Other ◽

Sixth Century ◽

Greek Philosophy ◽

Time Space ◽

Complementary Problems

Any attempt to trace the origin of Greek philosophy faces two complementary problems. One is the fact that evidence for the early philosophers is woefully meager. The other problem raises a question of what is to be counted as philosophy. Yet neither problem is insuperable. This article proposes to reorient the search for origins in two ways, corresponding to these two problems. First, rather than trying to reconstruct vanished work directly, this article focuses on a crucial stage in its ancient reception, in particular, the efforts by Aristotle and his colleagues in the latter half of the fourth century to collect, analyze, and assess the evidence then available for earlier attempts to understand the natural world. The other shift in focus this article makes is from philosophy to science; or rather, it focuses on evidence for the interplay between observation, measurement, and explanation in the work of three sixth-century Milesians.

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