Christopher Brown
speaker
1,098 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 20 Jan
Christopher Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
raises all kinds of deep moral and ethical issues.
And in the civilizations where we have records that allow us to explore those tensions, those views,
It's a kind of a familiar way of thinking about this subject.
It's where you see defenses of slavery.
There must also have been questions and attacks on it.
And in Greek times, in Roman times, there are all kinds of ways that
That slavery is justified.
Sometimes the idea that an enslaved person is naturally a slave, that of course was Aristotle's way of looking at the subject very famously.
Some emphasize that's the body that's enslaved, but not the spirit.
And there's a whole body of Roman thought among the Stoics that made that point.
There's a very long tradition in the Latin legal tradition right down to the Middle Ages that regards slavery as against natural law, as a violation of natural law.
but instead as a creature of the laws of nations that comes conventional in human civilizations, even though it's not part of the natural order of things.
The other thing that happens is that, and this is actually really important for this subject, is that slavery is a state that because it's regarded as a kind of a misfortune,
rather than, because especially in the Mediterranean world, anybody can be enslaved, taken as captive.
There's no races that are marked as slave races per se.
There develops a very strong notion that, first of all, obviously the status of slavery is something to avoid, but
an identity, collective identities begin to establish around who should be enslaved and who should not be enslaved.
And this goes with the rise of Christendom and then with the development of Islam, where the taking of slaves is what you do to those who are not of your religious world.
It begins in the Middle Ages to acquire a kind of a religious framework where it's those who are of a different confessional world are those who should be enslaved.
Right.
Showing 101–120 of 1,098 · page 6 of 55
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