Writing and the origins of Greek intellectual influence
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Why is ancient Greek civilization considered the cradle of Western thought and intellectual practice? Although it is undeniably the Greeks who have shaped European and Western practice in science, mathematics, philosophy, historiography, and many other disciplines, the ancient Greeks themselves might have been surprised to find themselves occupying the role of "founders of the Western tradition" in lieu of their Near Eastern neighbors, to whom they credited the invention of many practices they pursued themselves, and with whom they had much fruitful intellectual exchange. Whereas it has traditionally been assumed that Greek thought became canonical in the West because of its inherent rationality, my dissertation argues that the outsize "genetic success" enjoyed in the West by Greek intellectual culture was the result of the emergence in Greece of an unusual literary culture, whose textual products proved uniquely capable of transmitting knowledge and practices across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Far from happening inevitably as the result of (e.g.) an alphabetic culture enabling rising literacy, this dissertation argues that this event required a series of extraordinary accidents to come about: namely, the return of writing technology to Greece from abroad, as opposed to its re-invention within Greece, after a lengthy period of illiteracy and low state development; and the emergence in the fifth century BCE of a political landscape which transformed various forms of knowledge and expertise into marketable commodities.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Shi, Veronica Shue-Ron |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Morris, Ian, 1960- |
| Degree supervisor | Netz, Reviel |
| Thesis advisor | Morris, Ian, 1960- |
| Thesis advisor | Netz, Reviel |
| Thesis advisor | Martin, Richard P |
| Thesis advisor | Ober, Josiah |
| Degree committee member | Martin, Richard P |
| Degree committee member | Ober, Josiah |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Classics |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Veronica Shue-Ron Shi. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Classics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/hp036pn7060 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Veronica Shue-Ron Shi
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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