Tag Archives: Voegelin

HomePosts Tagged "Voegelin"

“An intermediate nature . . . prevents the universe falling into two separate halves.”
—Plato, Symposium (203b).
 
Almost from the beginning of when human beings began to ponder their situation in the order of things, they have somehow seen themselves as living in a world which is incomplete: a world that is separate, split, in some way ‘torn apart’ from its source…

Logos and Mythos in Plato’s Dialogues
Metaphor and analogy are a preparation for examining the status and function of mythos in Plato. What does it mean that philosophy is the love of wisdom?[1] If philosophy is primarily and essentially logos, then what is its relationship to mythos? The following series of questions bear upon the status of mythos vis-à-vis Plato’s philosophical…

Plato’s Mythoi: The Political Soul’s Drama Beyond. Donald H. Roy.  Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018.
 
In Plato’s Mythoi, the Political Soul’s Drama Beyond, Donald H. Roy aims to place Plato’s use of mythoi in the context of his dialogues as a whole. He challenges the philosophical interpretation of Plato’s myths from interpreters such as Bambrough and Vlastos, rejecting their interpretations as…

Introduction
The purpose of this essay is to examine the legacy of Moses as a political leader in search of political order.  The Mosaic conflict with the Pharaonic world is of great significance to politics, although it has not attracted much interest from political scientists.  This field of study demands highly developed research skills in areas usually considered beyond the pale…

Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition: Explorations in Modern Political Thought. Lee Trepanier and Steven F. McGuire, editors. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2010.
 
Originality and independence of thought are  evident  within  the  continental tradition. Yet the search for freedom and for truth has been marked by growing concerns about the possible collapse of modern Western society. Conscious reflection on…

This article presents an analysis of Sima Qian’s account of Shang Yang’s proposal for fundamental reform, a passage from the Records of the Grand Historian. Shang Yang (390-338 BCE) was a political theorist and statesman: he engineered and executed the fundamental reform of Qin, which facilitated it to become a hegemon in less than two decades. Contingent on the reform…

Eric Voegelin wrote about China, once taught courses related to China, and even could read Chinese text. Nevertheless, he never traveled to China. During his life time, he might not expect that his ideas would have important impact on China.
In the past several years, however, the name of Eric Voegelin has begun to be discussed more and more in the…

Eric Voegelin was a German-born political theorist who fled Nazi persecution and immigrated to the United States in 1938, where he had a long and productive academic career. He is widely considered one of the most insightful political scientists of the twentieth century, but is sadly not as well known as other contemporaries like Leo Strauss or Hannah Arendt. This…

Abstract
The release of Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations was the occasion for quite the stir in academic circles. Perhaps more importantly, his ideas of civilizations and the incommensurability of values continues to have outsized influence on the framing of policy debates and public opinion. While initial critiques of his ideas were sharp, they have elided the deep theoretical…

Introduction: Aeschylus, the Cosmos and the Cosmion
A great gulf lies between the Minoans and Mycenaeans of the 2nd millennium B.C, on the one shore, and the Hellenes of classical times on the other. Nor is this gulf purely temporal, nor only indicative simply of an abyss of memory that already seems to have separated the civilizational descendants from their precursors.…