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Kenneth S. Sacks explores how America's first public intellectual, determined to live self-reliantly, wrestled with his personal philosophy and eventually supported collective action to abolish slavery. Ralph Waldo Emerson was successful in creating a national audience for his philosophy and enjoyed the material and social rewards of that success. Contrary to most other Emerson scholars, however, Sacks argues that Emerson resisted active abolition and did not become a supporter until events forced his hand. Committing to the antislavery movement was risky and ran against his essential belief in social gradualism. Events in the mid-1850s, though, hastened Emerson's conversion and he eventually became a leader in the movement. A study of an intellectual under the pressure to engage in political action, Emerson's Civil Wars enriches our understanding of Emerson's antislavery activities, life, and career.
This chapter presents a revised, annotated translation of the Periplous (Circumnavigation) erroneously attributed to Skylax of Karyanda (Chapter 2 of this volume) but most likely written in 338–335 BC (conceivably by Dikaiarchos of Messana, Chapter 9), together with selected testimonia and fragments arranged as seven extracts. The translation reflects recent improvements to the Greek text. The chapter introduction characterizes the author’s conception of continental divisions and of the inhabited world as a sequence of ethnic regions. His focus on coastal topography, baldly enumerated, may reflect the aim of calculating the ‘length’ of each continent. This idiosyncratic work may have been intended for circulation only within Aristotle’s Peripatos (Lyceum); its impact seems to have been limited, other than perhaps upon Dikaiarchos and the late antique Euxine (Chapter 36). A new map summarizes the author’s clockwise ‘progress’ round the Mediterranean and Black Sea, while a second shows the key points in his portrayal of Greece and the Aegean.
This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the testimonia and fragments of the geographical writings of the philosopher Dikaiarchos of Messana (late 4th BC), arranged into 15 extracts. The chapter introduction identifies his innovative focus upon physical geography. A new map illustrates Dikaiarchos’ concept of a central parallel of latitude bisecting the inhabited portion of the world; in devising this, he may have been building upon Eudoxos of Knidos (Chapter 6 of this volume). He may have pioneered the measurement of the heights of mountains using triangulation, and the use of noonday shadows to estimate the circumference of the Earth, a technique which Eratosthenes famously took further (Chapter 12) and which in effect adopts the concept of a meridian of longitude.
Oratory played a significant and enduring role in the public life of Frederick Douglass. This chapter charts the various eras, genres, places, topics, and traditions in which Douglass’s speaking traversed. For example, this chapter addresses Douglass’s early rhetorical education, how his contemporaries described his speaking, his connection to religion, his long career as a lecturer, the threats of violence he experienced while speaking publicly, and the array of subjects about which Douglass spoke. Such a capacious understanding of context allows for a fuller depiction of Douglass’s skill as an orator while also acknowledging his failures that are often elided from the general account of his rhetorical prowess.
Throughout the many centuries of their existence, the Academy, the Peripatos, the Garden, and the Stoa complemented and competed with each other in promoting distinctive ways of being in the world. The development of their philosophical thought amid the historical and topographical realities of ancient Athens turned their adherents into enduring models of how people should think, act, live, and die.
It has become increasingly clear that debates among Peripatetics in our period are significant not only as the background against which later Platonists were subsequently to read Aristotle's works, but also in highlighting issues in the interpretation of Aristotle for contemporary scholarship. Aristotle's immediate colleagues and successors in the Lyceum in the fourth and third centuries BCE were 'Peripatetics' in the sense that they contributed to and continued Aristotle's approach to inquiry, without accepting all of Aristotle's views or devoting attention equally to all the areas with which he himself was concerned. The new interest in Aristotle's esoteric works from Andronicus onwards was expressed in the form of debates about the details of their interpretation. It is only very recently in the history of Aristotelian studies that attention has focused on the zoological works and the type of reading adopted by Alexander has been challenged.
The founding, during the course of the fourth century, first of Plato's Academy and then of Aristotle's school, the Lyceum or Peripatos, had far-reaching significance not just for what may be called higher education, but also for scientific research. The Alexandria became pre-eminent in many branches of scientific research in the third century, even though Athens remained supreme throughout antiquity in philosophy. Already in the mid fourth century BC Plato and Isocrates distinguished between two main types of reasons for studying mathematics, that is broadly the practical and the theoretical. Both geography and astronomy have on the one hand a descriptive and on the other a theoretical, mathematical aspect. The history of medicine and the life sciences in the Hellenistic period illustrates several of our principal themes, the increase in specialization, but also the fragmentation of scientific research, the role of royal patronage, and the patchy success in the application of scientific knowledge to practical ends.
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