Performing Scholarship for the Paris Opéra

2018 ◽  
pp. 79-106
Author(s):  
Samuel N. Dorf
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Knowledge ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Classical Ballet ◽  
Creative Media

This chapter examines an opera based on an ancient Greek subject created by two scholars of ancient Greek music, dance, and history: Maurice Emmanuel, a composer, musicologist, and dance historian specializing in ancient Greek music and dance, and Théodore Reinach, a librettist, archaeologist, musicologist, classicist, and numismatician. It begins by outlining and critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly contributions to the reconstruction of ancient Greek dance and contributions to musicology. It then demonstrates how tensions between conflicting trends manifested in the 1929 production of Emmanuel’s opera Salamine, with choreography by Nicola Guerra and a libretto by Théodore Reinach based on Aeschylus’s The Persians. During this time the Opéra had a eurhythmic dance section, a style that Emmanuel and critics such as André Levinson viewed with skepticism. In contrast to the Greek inspirations of Duncanism, Delsartism, and eurhythmics, Levinson used Emmanuel’s research to argue that classical ballet was the true inheritor of the ancient Greek tradition. Exploring Emmanuel’s aesthetics of dance (ancient and modern) affords a unique opportunity to see how these creative media were theorized and practiced during the eurhythmic years, while illustrating some of the conflicts between abstract and embodied knowledge.

Johannine Commentaries in the Early Church

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Lamb
Keyword(s):  
Early Church ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
The Face ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
John's Gospel ◽  
Scholastic Tradition

This chapter sets the making of commentaries on John’s Gospel, particularly within the Greek tradition, in the context of ancient Greek scholarship and the emergence of a scholastic tradition within the early Church. These commentaries drew on established philological conventions in order to clarify ambiguities and complexities within the text. At the same time, they served to amplify the meaning of the text in the face of new questions, controversies and preoccupations. Commentators used John’s Gospel ‘to think with’. With its allusive prose and symbolic discourse, the Fourth Gospel provoked commentators to respond to on-going doctrinal debate and to work out wider questions about Christian doctrine and identity.

scholarly journals Kant’s Confrontation with Plato and the Greek World in the Inaugural Dissertation

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Gualtiero Lorini
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Thought ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Greek World

The discussion concerning Kant’s knowledge of the Greek world has long been a subject of debate. Our contribution is intended to show that in the Dissertation of 1770 Kant is measured against some currents of Greek thought, and above all with Plato, on topics which will become very important in the articulated development of criticism in the 1770s. One aspect of our analysis deals with the texts that could have filtered Kant’s knowledge of ancient Greek tradition. We will then pore over some crucial features of the Dissertation, such as the distinction between sensible and intelligible knowledge and the ambiguous nature of the intellectualia, in order to assess how Kant’s understanding of certain issues of Greek classicism may have contributed to the outline of some still problematic theses in the text of 1770.

Ancient Greek Mathematics

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ferreirós
Keyword(s):  
Elementary Mathematics ◽  
Euclidean Geometry ◽  
Advanced Mathematics ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
The Common ◽  
Greek Mathematics ◽  
Joint Consideration ◽  
Practical Geometry ◽  
Further Development

This chapter focuses on the ancient Greek tradition of geometrical proof in light of recent studies by Kenneth Manders and others. It advances the view that the borderline of elementary mathematics is strictly linked with the adoption of hypotheses. To this end, the chapter considers Euclidean geometry, which elaborates on both the problems and the proof methods based on diagrams. It argues that Euclidean geometry can be understood as a theoretical, idealized analysis (and further development) of practical geometry; that by way of the idealizations introduced, Euclid's Elements builds on hypotheses that turn them into advanced mathematics; and that the axioms or “postulates” of Book I of the Elements mainly regiment diagrammatic constructions, while the “common notions” are general principles of a theory of quantities. The chapter concludes by discussing how the proposed approach, based on joint consideration of agents and frameworks, can be applied to the case of Greek geometry.

Whose Idea of Tragedy? Mrs Dalloway and the Ancient Greek Tradition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gourd
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Previous Scholarship ◽  
Commit Suicide

As Septimus Smith prepares to commit suicide by throwing himself out of the window and ‘vigorously, violently down onto Mrs Filmer’s area railings,’ he comments on the narrative tradition of his own tragic demise. ‘It was their idea of tragedy,’ he reflects with bitter irony – ‘Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing.’ This paper addresses the wider implications of this sentiment in Mrs Dalloway, by positioning Septimus’ death as the tragic climax and dramatic focus of the novel. Previous scholarship has failed to recognise the significance of this allusion to Greek tragedy, though Woolf was an accomplished classical scholar and a voracious reader of ancient literature. This detail would repay attention, as the author’s self-conscious engagement with the literary and intellectual tradition of tragedy, demonstrated through the narrative and suicide of Septimus Smith, impacts upon our understanding of the novel as a whole. It raises several important questions which this paper seeks to address: to what extent does Woolf intend for us to sympathise with Septimus as the tragic protagonist? How does Woolf’s appropriation and manipulation of the tragic genre reflect her views on war, mental illness, and her relationship with her doctors? And finally, what does it tell us about Woolf’s idea of tragedy, and what she considers to be tragic?

The conundrum of transmitting embodied knowledge for intercultural performance: A case study

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Margaret Coldiron
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Knowledge ◽  
Intercultural Performance ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Performance Techniques ◽  
Classical Ballet ◽  
Traditional Performance ◽  
Body Practices ◽  
Regular Practice

How is ‘embodied knowledge’ transmitted? Certainly, in most Asian traditional performance practice, it is dinned into the body of the disciple through daily repetition. Unlike many western performance techniques, for example classical ballet, the discipline and transformation of the body in Asian performance forms is not managed through abstracted exercises, but rather by learning whole roles. In Bali, the student imbibes technique through regular practice until tarian masuk – literally until the dance enters the body. As a beneficiary of this pedagogical method, I know what it feels like, and as a student of anatomy and kinesiology I have some intellectual understanding of the nervous and muscular processes that make the appropriate movement happen; but how is this ‘sensuous knowledge’ transmitted? This case study examines the author’s experience of directing a group of Western-trained actors using techniques of Balinese topéng for an intercultural production of the Greek tragedy Hippolytos. It explores the physical and philosophical challenges for those who would make intercultural work, and who must find appropriate and effective methodologies for developing new body practices – often in a very short period of time.

scholarly journals The Use ofKairosin Renaissance Political Philosophy*

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Paul
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Important Concept ◽  
Niccolò Machiavelli ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
History Of

AbstractAlthough the Greek concept ofkairos (καιρός)has undergone a recent renewal of interest among scholars of Renaissance rhetoric, this revival has not yet been paralleled by its reception into the history of political thought. This article examines the meanings and uses of this important concept within the ancient Greek tradition, particularly in the works of Isocrates and Plutarch, in order to understand how it is employed by two of the most important political thinkers of the sixteenth century: Thomas Elyot and Niccolò Machiavelli. Through such an investigation this paper argues that an appreciation of the concept ofkairosand its use by Renaissance political writers provides a fuller understanding of the political philosophy of the period.

scholarly journals Atossa’s Dream Yoking Music and Dance, Antiquity and Modernity in Maurice Emmanuel’s Salamine (1929)

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 27-34
Author(s):  
Samuel N. Dorf
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Dance History ◽  
Dance Culture ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Creative Media

This essay explores the conflicting trends of tradition and modernism, unity and independence in Parisian musical and dance culture in the late 1920s through an analysis of Maurice Emmanuel’s (1863-1938) aesthetics of contemporary and ancient Greek music and dance. It begins by outlining and critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly contributions to ancient Greek dance history and music history before demonstrating how these tensions manifested in the 1929 production of Emmanuel’s opera Salamine based on Aeschylus’s The Persians. Exploring Emmanuel’s aesthetics of music and dance (ancient and modern) affords a unique opportunity to see how these creative media were theorized and practiced in the tumultuous years after the Ballets russes, while illustrating some of the conflicts between what Léandre Vaillat termed “the academic and the eurhythmic” in dance and music.

scholarly journals La astucia en la conceptualización platónica de σοφία

Nova Tellus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
Trinidad Silva Irarrázaval
Keyword(s):  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
Archaic Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Instrumental Value ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
The Subject

Considering the importance of cunning in the characterization of σοφία in the Ancient Greek tradition, from the literature of the archaic period to the Socratic circle, it is striking that in Plato there is no such thing as a cunning σοφός. Apart from the Lesser Hippias, which offers an ambiguous assessment of Odysseus πολυτροπία, the σοφός is almost never defined by its intelligence —this is not a distinctive feature of the σοφός or φιλόσοφος— but rather by the knowledge of certain things. The lack of treatment has led to most interpreters to neglect the subject. In order to remedy this situation, in this article I offer an interpretation that diagnoses the absence of an attribute such as cunning in the conceptualization of σοφία in Plato, but not as the result of simple condemnation or censorship as argued, for example, by Detienne and Vernant 1978 and suggested by Montiglio 2011. In this paper I propose that Plato would manifest a lack of interest regarding these attributes. From the analysis of the Platonic corpus I seek to demonstrate that, although attributes of intelligence are considered advantageous and desirable qualities, the have only instrumental value with respect to the attainment of truth and good.

In search of black bile

1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian E Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Correct Diagnosis ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Natural State ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
School Based ◽  
School Of Medicine ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Specific Organ ◽  
The One

Historically Western medicine has been divided into two main schools that were based on the ancient Greek tradition. These are the Hygeian school, based on the views of Hippocrates (born 460 BC), and the Asclepian school which is named after the Greek god of medicine but probably based on the physician Asclepius who was said to have performed miracles!In brief, the Hygeian school of medicine views health as a natural state of the body. The body is believed to be endowed with inherent healing powers which, if one lives in harmony with these powers, maintains health and helps to restore it should it become impaired. Disease is seen as a manifestation of a weakness of the inherent healing powers of the body and the function of the physician is to help the patients to live within the natural law (vis medicatrix naturae) and to remove impediments to those mechanisms that maintain and restore health.The second school that has profoundly influenced the development of modern medicine is the Asclepian school which arose in about 1200 BC around the teaching of Asclepius. This school focuses on diseases, their causes and cures. Each disease is considered to be the effect of, or response to, a specific cause that primarily affects a specific organ system. For every disease it is postulated that there is a specific drug or procedure which can alleviate the symptoms or cure the disease. Thus, the successful physician is the one who can make the correct diagnosis and prescribe the correct therapy.

ḤUNAYN IBN ISḤĀQ'S CONCEPTION OF HIS READING PUBLIC ACCORDING TO A PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED LETTER

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-189
Author(s):  
Coleman Connelly
Keyword(s):  
Early Career ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Arabic Translation ◽  
Unpublished Letter ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Scientific Project ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThis article presents an edition, translation, and analysis of a prefatory letter addressed by the Galen translator Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (d. 873) to one of his East-Syrian Christian patrons, the physician Salmawayh ibn Bunān (d. 840). Ḥunayn composed this Letter to Salmawayh ibn Bunān in Syriac, but it survives only in his nephew's Arabic translation. Since its discovery over eighty years ago, the text has received little attention and has never before been published in its entirety. The Letter provides new insight into Ḥunayn's early career and the Christian milieu in which he moved, demonstrating his indebtedness to the Syriac literary past exemplified by the prefaces of the earlier Galen translator Sergius of Rēšʿaynā (d. 536). At the same time, the Letter indicates part of what made ʿAbbāsid-era translators like Ḥunayn different from their late ancient predecessors. This study argues that increased demand from patrons and Ḥunayn's close reading of Galen's Hippocratic commentaries yielded the Letter’s novel claim that readers of all abilities can and should have access to ancient Greek scientific texts. In this way, the Letter hints tantalizingly at Ḥunayn's understanding of his own literary and scientific project and its relationship with the ancient Greek tradition.

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