Glenn Warren Most

Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College, University of Chicago, USA; Professor for Greek Philology, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy

Breaking the Wall around Ancient Greece. How to Imagine the Classics in the 21st Century

 

For centuries, Europeans often idealized and misunderstood Ancient Greece as an isolated miracle, as the uniquely seminal culture that provided the foundation of all  that was good in Western civilization. But some people have always questioned this notion and in the past decades a number of scholars have begun to substantially revise it, emphasizing for example the degree to which ancient Greece was actually an Asiatic fringe-culture. Our conception of the ancients, their mentality and philosophy can, if reconfigured, redefine our contemporary world, argues Glenn Warren Most (1952), the first Classicist to win the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. He argues that we can be certain that this reconfiguration will continue in the coming years in two ways, and that we can be hopeful that it will begin in a third way. Most’s approach both challenges and enriches our common conception of ancient culture and philosophy.

http://socialthought.uchicago.edu/faculty/glenn_most.shtml

www.sns.it/it/lettere/menunews/docenti/most