Toby Buckle
speaker
272 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2018
last heard Oct 2018
Toby Buckle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Great.
So one point just about anachronism and then one point about like the disjuncture between different ages.
So yes, I say it's impossible to study the ancient world with anachronism.
I'm kind of channeling Dale Martin, who's a really brilliant New Testament scholar who I just had on my podcast.
There are better and worse anachronisms, right?
So you can get closer or further away with a particular concept.
And just to take the example, yeah, there's probably an example of behavior that both you and Plato could agree on is rational or irrational, but there's also probably examples of behavior or argument where you would differ in your interpretation of its rationality.
But I just want to add one more element.
It's both that word.
words and languages change, and that the categories and concepts we attach to different words change quite radically.
But it's also, and this might be more fundamental,
That the relative salience and value and importance of particular concepts changes radically.
How so, with individualism, for example, it's not so much that they had no idea, oh my god, there's different people, like we've always had that awareness, but how central that is to your political worldview has changed quite a lot.
And I'll add just one more example to that, which I think in this is the clearest, is the centrality of the value.
Freedom.
It's not that there wasn't a distinction.
In any society that's held slaves, you have a distinction between slave people and free people.
But prior to ancient Greece, the idea of being a free person would be something like we would think of being a not homeless person.
It's a category.
It's a category that makes sense to us, but we would never say that the goal of our society is to be non homeless.
Showing 121–140 of 272 · page 7 of 14
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