Thucydides, thinker of the political
One of the many disputes surrounding the interpretation of Thucydides' work lies in determining the genre of his writing. In this paper, Thucydides is considered as a political thinker, that is, an author that identifies certain underlying and founding features of a political order, rather than...
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| Formato: | Artículo revista |
| Lenguaje: | Español |
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Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires
2023
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| Acceso en línea: | http://revistascientificas.filo.uba.ar/index.php/CdF/article/view/12979 |
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| Sumario: | One of the many disputes surrounding the interpretation of Thucydides' work lies in determining the genre of his writing. In this paper, Thucydides is considered as a political thinker, that is, an author that identifies certain underlying and founding features of a political order, rather than as a historian of an ancient war. The approach developed here identifies four key concepts in the work of the Greek thinker: the notion of immanent and psychological cause (prophasis) as a more effective explanation in the face of mythical or final explanations when it comes to accounting for human events; the consideration of a problematic human nature (anthropeía phýsis) that transcends historical stages; the concealment (apokrýptein) of this nature in moments of normality and its irruption in moments of political crisis; and, finally, the primacy of desire (epithymía) over reason in the dynamics that drives the praxis of human beings. These concepts extracted from Thucydides' text form a theoretical corpus that will be taken up on more than one occasion by other thinkers who need to be able to think about a new political order. Hence, they have a trans-historical character |
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