[SydPhil] Fwd: Ben Brown Seminar Thursday 16th May 4.15pm

Ben Brown benjamin.brown at sydney.edu.au
Mon May 13 08:34:58 AEST 2019


Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The Department of Classics and Ancient History invites you to attend the next instalment in our seminar series. Please join us on Thursday 16th of May to hear Dr. Ben Brown, Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. Ben will deliver a paper entitled:

The Object of Thucydides
Starting from his famous self-reference ktēma es aiei, this paper thinks about Thucydides, so to speak, ‘before history’, that is, before historiography firmly established itself as the primary mode of contact with the human past. Rather than recuperate Thucydides, yet again, as the protos heuretes of our (bourgeois) historiographic tradition, it will follow the prompts of Heidegger, Nietzsche and Loraux ("Thucydide n'est pas une collègue”) seeing in his text instead an astonishing gesture at once avant-garde and archaic. Implicated philosophically and poetically in the fifth century’s epistemological revolutions, Thucydides is here interpreted occupying a unique sophistic space, yoking a Heraclitean critique of Ionian historia to a tragic consciousness for a radical mode of experiencing the past. Our Thucydides will thus sit before and opposite the generation who would misunderstand and invert his trope, and obscure his historicism for millennia. Looking back across Homer, Pindar, Sophocles and Herodotus in the process, this paper will also touch very briefly upon some questions of much broader significance in the history of Greek thought for which Thucydides is paradigmatic: the relationship between presence and knowledge, the ontology of the historical event and a phenomenology of reading.

The paper will commence at 4.15pm at the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia (CCANESA) Boardroom, Madsen Building, University of Sydney. The paper will be followed by light refreshments.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact either James Winestock (jwin7052 at uni.sydney.edu.au<mailto:jwin7052 at uni.sydney.edu.au>) or myself.

All best wishes,
Kirsten


Kirsten Parkin | Postgraduate Representative
Department of Classics and Ancient History
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
E kpar0133 at uni.sydney.edu.au<mailto:kpar0133 at sydney.edu.au>| W sydney.edu.au/arts/classics_ancient_history<http://sydney.edu.au/arts/classics_ancient_history>

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