"Iron Age" is a term that has nothing at all to do with metallurgy. It is a term of art used by archaeologists to provide a chronological sequence into which to sort the "styles" they claim to recognize in potsherds excavated at various sites ...
Shane Mage ---------- Come on. Don't be so literal. `Charlie' was making a joke about Jaspers' lack of knowledge or acknowledgement of more material causes. Charlie notes Gordon Child, and by some fluke of my Man and Western Civ professor, I have Child's The Dawn of European Civilization. It was on the suggested reading list and I was wild about the class. Child is somewhat tidious, but worth it. He is out dated now. There has been a boom in archaeology which is hard to keep up with. You or somebody commented on material urban development for the similaries or at least the change from a more mythological ritualistic pov to a more secular discursive version. Urban development makes a lot of sense, since it is part of the more refined division of labor, evolution of class and caste structures, writing, the collection of texts and their scribbling bureaucratic mentalities with propensities to codify everthing in writing, argue from authority, etc. BTW Carrol made a mistake to cite 800->2000. It was 800->200 bce. According to my art history text (Janson) that period corresponds to very late New Kingdom Egypt (may not apply), Greece (the obvious model), Crete or Etruria and early Rome (might not apply), Persians to Achaemenids, India (with Buddha), and China middle and late Chou. I just repaired the binding on Janson a few days ago and managed to save this time line on the inside covers. Doing what Jaspers did, a cultural philosophy roughly started in the modern era with Hegel whose history of philosophy and philosophy of history are examples. This had a big influence on european philosophy, intellectuals, and the general intellectual climate, almost none of which made it here to the US. These kinds of ideas were uniformly scorned by the US academies in favor of positivism in the social sciences, empiricism in the sciences proper, and the anglo-american analytic tradition in philosophy. The consequences in my opinion were to render most of the humanties a barren sort of study, bereft of a sense of poetry and a literary sensibility which was afterall part of their origin and the point to an education in the humanities. I've read some of Jaspers and enjoyed him. But he was not useful to me for the purpose I read him, which was to find out something about my favorite enemy Leo the Terrible. Jaspers appealed to Hannha Arendt, probably more for her poetic than academic impluse. She edited the first two volumes of Jaspers' The Great Philosophers. Her letters to Jaspers are full of the back and forth struggle to get this work published in English. I bought all four which were dirt cheap since they are never read. I only wanted to read his thoughts on Spinoza to see how that related to Leo's take. It didn't. And, his Spinoza was available in paperback, which I only found out later. I read a few other entries and he generally gave a somewhat more spiritually informed view. If I went through the work, I could probably find a much better nuanced version for the axial turn... But that's a whole other world... CG
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