It is obvious (and I read it again recently, but I didn't write down the reference...) that "The West" as we know it has a "multiple inheritance" from the Greeks and the Jews.
Does anyone know anything about whether there was any contact between the two in "classical" (not late-Hellenistic!) times? What would Pericles, Aristotle, Socrates, Sophocles, Pindar, Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Protagoras et al. have made of Abraham, Moses, Jeramiah, Amos, Solomon et al., and vice versa?
Did they engage with each other? (That's probably historically irrelevant, since, if they did engage with each other, the engagement didn't result in a marriage, let alone any offspring -- like if the Chinese discovered The New World before Columbus, etc.). But, as psychoanalysts say: "everything is grist for the mill".
And, yes, what if Alexander the Great had not died in Iraq, but had been able to complete a journey to The East, and return? Might Persepolis have become Cosmopolis (ref. Stephen Toulmin's book by that name) and ethnicities have now for almost 2,500 years, have been -- for us citizens of the universal city -- of concern only to our ethnographers? Would we today live in a world where nachines move themselves so that we no longer need slaves, but we would still spend our days in leisured pursuit of "shining words and deeds" in the public space of the [cosmo-s creating] polis?
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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