Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This book treads new paths through the labyrinths of our human thought. It meanders through the darkness to encounter the monsters at the heart of the maze: Minotaurs, Centaurs, Automata, Makers, Humans. One part of our human thought emerges from classical Ionia and Greek civilisation more generally. We obsessively return to that thought, tread again its pathways, re-enact its stories, repeat its motifs and gestures. We return time and time again to construct and re-construct the beings which were part of its cosmology and mythology – stories enacted from a classical world which is itself at once imaginary and material. The “Never Never Lands” of the ancient world contain fabulous beasts and humans and landscapes of desire and violence. We encounter the rioting Centaurs there and never again cease to conjure them up time and time again through our history. The Centaur mythologies display a fascination with animals and what binds and divides human beings from them. The Centaur hints ultimately at the idea of the genesis of civilisation itself. The Labyrinth, constructed by Daedalus, is itself a prison and a way of thinking about making, designing, and human aspiration. Designed by humans it offers mysteries that would be repeated time and time again – a motif which is replicated through human history. Daedalus himself is an archetype for creation and mastery, the designer of artefacts and machines which would be the beginning of forays into the total domination of nature. Centaurs, Labyrinths, Automata offer clues to the origins and ultimately the futures of humanity and what might come after it.

E-books --- Mythology, Classical. --- Centaurs. --- Memory. --- Ancient Greek religion & mythology --- Retention (Psychology) --- Intellect --- Psychology --- Thought and thinking --- Comprehension --- Executive functions (Neuropsychology) --- Mnemonics --- Perseveration (Psychology) --- Reproduction (Psychology) --- Mythology, Classical --- Classical mythology --- classical literature --- ancient history --- monsters --- mythology --- centaurs

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This book radically re-examines Europe’s imaginaries of its origin in the ancient Greek world. Extracting central concepts of critical theory in its widest sense - beyond the Frankfurt School - like the human, force, spirit and domination, it allies them to characters, mythologies and motifs in ancient thought. Just as the stories of Achilles, Helen and Odysseus have become central to our modes of self-understanding, so we can also examine the roots and routes of the concepts of social theory out of the ancient earth and its myths. An important book for scholars and students of critical theory, social theory, aesthetic theory and the history of the human sciences, it alerts us to the catastrophe that we are facing in the 21st century - a catastrophe of domination and ecological collapse that has its origins in the ancient world and the ways in which it began to define a certain sense of humanness. Considering the artistic production of the ancient world in relation to the thought of Adorno, Critical Theory and the Classical World argues that it is only by understanding the persistence of the haunted motifs of the past into the present that we can begin to re-forge our critical theory of society and re-found our social formations on a new basis.