Book ID: CBB740039533

The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason (2022)

unapi

Ober, Josiah (Author)


University of California Press


Publication Date: 2022
Physical Details: 488
Language: English

This revisionist history traces an influential theory of practical reason from its origins in ancient Greece to its modern and contemporary permutations. The Greek discovery of practical reason, as the skilled performance of strategic thinking in public and private affairs, was an intellectual breakthrough that remains both a feature and a bug of our modern world. Countering arguments that rational choice-making is a contingent product of modernity, The Greeks and the Rational traces the long history of theorizing rationality back to ancient Greece. In this book, Josiah Ober explores how ancient Greek sophists, historians, and philosophers developed sophisticated and systematic ideas about practical reason. At the same time, they recognized its limits—that not every decision can be reduced to mechanistic calculations of optimal outcomes. We see contemporary echoes of this tradition in the application of game theory to political science, economics, and business management. The Greeks and the Rational offers a striking revisionist history with widespread implications for the study of ancient Greek civilization, the history of thought, and human rationality itself.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB740039533/

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Authors & Contributors
Kaufman, David
Marc Champagne
Horky, Phillip Sidney
Vernant, Jean-Pierre
Slingerland, Edward
Schickela, Joel A.
Concepts
Philosophy
Philosophy of mind
Reason
Psychology
Cosmology
Mind and body
Time Periods
Ancient
Modern
Medieval
Early modern
Renaissance
Enlightenment
Places
Greece
China
Rome (Italy)
Mesopotamia
Israel
Iran
Institutions
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) (Study group: U.S.)
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