scholarly journals Social upbringing and an example of Antiquity in the writings of J.J. Rousseau

Hypothekai ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 236-247
Author(s):  
Sergey Zanin ◽  

The article analyses the influence of Antiquity on J.-J. Rousseau’s ideas of social education. It is noted that Rousseau's interest in Antiquity emerged in childhood and was stimulated by Plutarch's works. In later years, he studied Latin and elements of the ancient Greek language, and translated the works of Tacitus and Seneca into French. Modern scholars place an emphasis on Rousseau's direct acquaintance with the works of ancient authors, in particular, under the influence of the home education that he received from his father, a Geneva watchmaker. At the same time, the article draws attention to the fact that Rousseau's interest in Antiquity coincided with his life choice: he decided to make a career as a writer and composer, and therefore focused on popular examples of creative writing. Montesquieu, Fenelon, Marquis d'Argens introduced ancient themes into the context of literary and academic polemics. Their example was followed by Rousseau, which is convincingly illustrated by the comparative analysis of Fenelon’s Dialogues of the Dead and Prosopopoeia of Fabricius in Rousseau's first Discourse. While retaining the main intention of the great moralist, namely the moral education of society by the writer on the examples of Antiquity, Rousseau rethinks it in the context of his own social anthropology. Antiquity is not an example to follow, but a starting point for a person of his time to think about their own social and cultural identity that is different from the past. Being a writer-moralist and political thinker, Rousseau essentially solved the problem of moral education regarding the perception and assessment of the ancient culture by his contemporaries and society.

Antiquity ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 74 (283) ◽  
pp. 182-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Paulo A. Funari

It is now well accepted that archaeology and education are inextricably linked (cf. MacKenzie & Stone 1994) and that the past is often represented as mirrored by the dominant groups in a given society. The late educator Paulo Freire warned that educators ‘need to use their students' cultural universe as a point of departure, enabling students to recognise themselves as possessing a specific and important cultural identity’ (interview in MacLaren 1988: 224). Both education and archaeology deal thus with the manipulation of present and past to forge identities useful for people in power and archaeologists and educators have been active promoters of critical approaches. Critical pedagogy has been concerned with student experience, taking the problems and needs of the students themselves as its starting point and fighting for pedagogical empowerment (Giroux & MacLaren 1986: 234–8).


Author(s):  
Mónica Durán Mañas

This chapter is a didactic proposal for the teaching of Ancient Greek language and literature under an innovative and interdisciplinary approach. The history of teaching Ancient Greek shows different language acquisition methods that respond to the demands of their times, each of them with its advantages and disadvantages. The author combines diverse approaches to offer a new method for beginners in which students get involved in a stimulating practice that enables them to progress at the rhythm of their choice. The teaching materials are focused on real texts of Ancient Greek literature that work as starting point for an innovative and challenging language teaching for specific purposes approach. The final goal is to achieve student learning of Ancient Greek language through contextualized literary texts in order to get a better understanding of what Ancient Greek culture meant and why it has survived until today.


Author(s):  
Volker Scheid

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalerante Evagelia

AbstractThe present paper is involved with the Pedagogical faculties’ students’ critique on the current educational system as it has been altered after 1981. The research was carried out utilizing both quantitative and qualitative tools. Students-voters participated in the interviews whereas active voters were difficult to be located to meet the research requirements. The dynamics of the specific political party is based on a popular profile in terms of standpoints related to economic, social and political issues. The research findings depict the students’ strong wish for a change of the curricula and a turn towards History and Religion as well as an elevation of the Greek historic events, as the History books that have been written and taught at schools over the past years contributed to the downgrading of the Greek national and cultural identity. There is also a students’ strong belief that globalization and the immigrants’ presence in Greece have functioned in a negative way against the Greek ideal. Therefore, an overall change of the educational content could open the path towards the reconstruction of the moral values and the Greek national identity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Gunnel Ekroth

This paper addresses the animal bone material from ancient Qumran, from the comparative perspective of zooarchaeological evidence recovered in ancient Greek cult contexts. The article offers an overview of the paramount importance of animal bones for the understanding of ancient Greek religion and sacrificial practices in particular, followed by a review of the Qumran material, taking as its starting point the zooarchaeological evidence and the archaeological find contexts. The methodological complications of letting the written sources guide the interpretation of the archaeological material are explored, and it is suggested that the Qumran bones are to be interpreted as remains of ritual meals following animal sacrifices, as proposed by Jodi Magness. The presence of calcined bones additionally supports the proposal that there was once an altar in area L130, and it is argued that the absence of preserved altar installations in many ancient sanctuaries cannot be used as an argument against their ever having been present. Finally, the similarities between Israelite and Greek sacrificial practices are touched upon, arguing for the advantages of a continued and integrated study of these two sacrificial systems based on the zooarchaeological evidence.


2019 ◽  
pp. 446-461
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Baydalova

The postcolonial studies have been under discussion in the Ukrainian historiography, social science, culture studies and literary criticism since 1990 years. They have originated from American, European, and Australian academic studies and became more and more popular in modern Ukrainian culture recently. The nation and the nationalism, Orientalism, multicultural and ambivalent individuality self-presentation, the search of cultural identity, the problem of ambivalent attitude to the past are in the paradigm of postcolonial studies. The problems of national identity, the totalitarian past, the interactions with neighboring countries especially Russia and Poland, the instable Ukrainian society’s condition are analyzed under the postcolonial ideas in the Ukrainian intellectual discourse. The postcolonial theory has become the main interpretative strategy of the Ukrainian researchers lately. Nevertheless, there is no unconditional modus vivendi in the Ukrainian academia about postcolonial conceptions, strategies and principles. One of the most important unsolved issues is the question of correlation of postcolonial and postmodern components of the Ukrainian national literature. The inclusion of the studies of trauma and anticolonial and posttotalitarian discourses into the framework of the postcolonial studies is the most distinguishing feature of postcolonial studies in the Ukraine.


Author(s):  
Fahad Nabeel

In 2016, the United Nations (UN) launched the Digital Blue Helmets (DBH) program under its Office of Information and Communications Technologies (OICT). The launching of DBH was a continuation of a series of steps that the UN and its related agencies and departments have undertaken over the past decade to incorporate cyberspace within their working methodologies. At the time of inception, DBH was envisioned as a team capacitated to act as a replica of a physical peacekeeping force but for the sole purpose of overseeing cyberspace(s). Several research studies have been published in the past few years, which have conceptualized cyber peacekeeping in various ways. Some scholars have mentioned DBH as a starting point of cyber peacekeeping while some have proposed models for integration of cyber peacekeeping within the current UN peacekeeping architecture. However, no significant study has attempted to look at how DBH has evolved since its inception. This research article aims to examine the progress of DBH since its formation. It argues that despite four years since its formation, DBH is still far away from materializing its declared objectives. The article also discusses the future potential roles of DBH, including its collaboration with UN Global Pulse for cyber threat detection and prevention, and embedding the team along with physical peacekeepers.


Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies

Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) theorisations of anxiety, discerns recursive investments in past experiences of hope (invoking Jennifer Wenzel’s work to consider the afterlives of anti-colonial prophecy), assesses the usefulness of Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of the ancient Greek understanding of stasis as civil war, and asks how these works’ elaboration of stasis might be understood in relation to Wendy Brown’s discussion of the eclipsing of the individual subject of political rights by the neoliberal subject whose very life is framed by its potential to be understood as capital.


Author(s):  
Marie-Sophie de Clippele

AbstractCultural heritage can offer tangible and intangible traces of the past. A past that shapes cultural identity, but also a past from which one sometimes wishes to detach oneself and which nevertheless needs to be remembered, even commemorated. These themes of memory, history and oblivion are examined by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his work La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (2000). Inspired by these ideas, this paper analyses how they are closely linked to cultural heritage. Heritage serves as a support for memory, even if it can be mishandled, which in turn can affect heritage policies. Memory and heritage can be abused as a result of wounds from the past or for reasons of ideological manipulation or because of a political will to force people to remember. Furthermore, heritage, as a vehicule of memory, contributes to historical knowledge, but can remain marked by a certain form of subjectivism during the heritage and conservation operation, for which heritage professionals (representatives of the public authority or other experts) are responsible. Yet, the responsibility for conserving cultural heritage also implies the need to avoid any loss of heritage, and to fight against oblivion. Nonetheless, this struggle cannot become totalitarian, nor can it deprive the community of a sometimes salutary oblivion to its own identity construction. These theoretical and philosophical concepts shall be examined in the light of legal discourse, and in particular in Belgian legislation regarding cultural heritage. It is clear that the shift from monument to heritage broadens the legal scope and consequently raises the question of who gets to decide what is considered heritage according to the law, and whether there is something such as a collective human right to cultural heritage. Nonetheless, this broadening of the legislation extends the State intervention into cultural heritage, which in turn entails certain risks, as will be analysed with Belgium’s colonial heritage.


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