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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Ancient Western philosophy to c 500
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Untangling Heroism - Classical Philosophy and the Concept of the Hero (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R2,593
Discovery Miles 25 930
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Untangling Heroism - Classical Philosophy and the Concept of the Hero (Hardcover, New)
Series: Routledge Innovations in Political Theory
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The idea of heroism has become thoroughly muddled today. In
contemporary society, any behavior that seems distinctly difficult
or unusually impressive is classified as heroic: everyone from
firefighters to foster fathers to freedom fighters are our heroes.
But what motivates these people to act heroically and what prevents
other people from being heroes? In our culture today, what makes
one sort of hero appear more heroic than another sort? In order to
answer these questions, Ari Kohen turns to classical conceptions of
the hero to explain the confusion and to highlight the ways in
which distinct heroic categories can be useful at different times.
Untangling Heroism argues for the existence of three categories of
heroism that can be traced back to the earliest Western literature
- the epic poetry of Homer and the dialogues of Plato - and that
are complex enough to resonate with us and assist us in thinking
about heroism today. Kohen carefully examines the Homeric heroes
Achilles and Odysseus and Plato's Socrates, and then compares the
three to each other. He makes clear how and why it is that the
other-regarding hero, Socrates, supplanted the battlefield hero,
Achilles, and the suffering hero, Odysseus. Finally, he explores in
detail four cases of contemporary heroism that highlight Plato's
success. Kohen states that in a post-Socratic world, we have chosen
to place a premium on heroes who make other-regarding choices over
self-interested ones. He argues that when humans face the fact of
their mortality, they are able to think most clearly about the sort
of life they want to have lived, and only in doing that does heroic
action become a possibility. Kohen's careful analysis and
rethinking of the heroism concept will be relevant to scholars
across the disciplines of political science, philosophy,
literature, and classics.
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