MdM SEMINAR SERIES - “Lessons from Ancient Greece in the Face of Climate Change” by Prof. Richard Seaford

MdM Seminar Series

 

 

 

Title: “Lessons from Ancient Greece in the Face of Climate Change”

 

 

 

 

Speaker: Prof. Richard Seaford, University of Exeter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Date: Thursday, June 14th 2018

Time: 12 h

Venue: Room Z/022 - 023

 

 

 

 

If you want to attend a small group meeting with Professor Seaford at 3 p.m. where we will be discussing his book Money and the early Greek mind, write to giorgoskallis@gmail.com to register and to pass you the relevant texts. 

 

 

 

 

The continuing cultural and political prestige of ancient Greece, and in particular of Athenian democracy, can make the radical opposition between ancient and modern democratic culture serve as an ideological tool in the campaign against climate change. Ancient Greek culture was precapitalist, and was what I call a culture of limit, whereas capitalism promotes a culture of the unlimited. The Greeks in various spheres (including economic and political practice, metaphysics, mythology, ethics, psychology, and tragedy) insisted on the central importance of limiting the potentially unlimited. A key factor was their reaction against the (historically new) unique unlimitedness of the individual accumulation of (and desire for) money. However, the Greek economy was - though pervasively monetised - free from the inherently unlimited necessity of self-expansion that will later characterise capitalism; and so Greek culture was able to retain a relatively static, ordered world view with which to reject the potential unlimitedness of money and of human action. At the heart of the ancient origins of our culture was precisely the necessity - re-emergent in our generation - of limit. The ancient Greeks can be influential allies for those concerned to encourage the fundamental changes of mentality required for preventing climate change.

 

 

 

 

Richard Seaford is a British classicist. He is professor emeritus of classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter. His work focuses on ancient Greek culture, especially that of ancient Athens. Seaford has published about 90 papers on subjects that include Homer, Greek lyric poetry, Greek religion, presocratic philosophy, the comparison of early Indian with early Greek religion and thought, Greek tragedy, satyric drama, the New Testament, and the reception of ancient drama. His book published by Cambridge University Press “Money and the Early Greek Mind. Homer, Tragedy, Philosophy” (2004) explores the role of money on ancient Greek culture, which was the first culture to become pervasively monetised. He argues that the introduction of coinage, which occurred around the end of the 7th century BCE, provided a crucial stimulus for the advent of Greek philosophy, in which a universal substance is (like money) transformed from and into everything else. In 2005-2008 he was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a study of Aeschylus. For 2013-4 he was awarded an AHRC Fellowship for a comparative historical study of early Indian with early Greek thought.