Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Plutarch

Athens Corner

This is my entire discussion of the opening to Thucydides's Peloponnesian War for the Technology & Nihilism series on my website (AthensCorner.com). In this recording I read in its entirety, and discuss in very meticulous detail, the first twenty-two paragraphs of Thucydides's Peloponnesian War (commonly referred to as "the Archaeology" of the text). At issue is just how much we as default postmoderns still have so very much to learn from what Thucydides has to teach us, particularly regarding his thematic treatment of what we think of today as technology and, just as importantly, how technology relates to and defines man in political community. In presenting this teaching, I go into great detail about the following, along with quite a bit more (!!!):
1.) The relationship between Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, which itself unfolds into a discussion of the relationship between Thucydides and Homer, Thucydides and Plato and Aristotle, and Thucydides and Plutarch.
2.) The difference between Thucydides's understanding of history, our own current understanding of scientific history, so-called philosophies of history, and how what we refer to as technology is definitive of the difference between Thucydides and our postmodern understandings of each of those latter two conceptions.
3.) The meaning and the significance of greatness and Greekness for Thucydides, and how it is to be understood in distinction from barbarism.
4.) The meaning and significance of the achievement of Athens in relationship to the rest of Greece and especially Sparta for Thucydides.
5.) The relationship between custom or law ("nomos") and nature ("phusis") in the meaning of the Greek accomplishment for Thucydides as it unfolds into the relationship between images and mind for the Greeks as seen in, for instance, the art of the Parthenon Frieze.

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