Four Cultures of the WestHarvard University Press, 2004 M10 15 - 261 pages The workings of Western intelligence in our day--whether in politics or the arts, in the humanities or the church--are as troubling as they are mysterious, leading to the questions: Where are we going? What in the world were we thinking? By exploring the history of four "cultures" so deeply embedded in Western history that we rarely see their instrumental role in politics, religion, education, and the arts, this timely book provides a broad framework for addressing these questions in a fresh way. |
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... Latin of his full corpus in the High Middle Ages , after which he dominated the history of the sciences and other academic disci- plines for centuries . More pertinent for us , the relationship of Ath- ens to Jerusalem took on its ...
... Latin translation half of Aristotle's works on logic , which were studied and appropriated long before the rest of the corpus became available . These works in particular grounded academic culture in its fundamental characteristic and ...
... Latin antiquity , but by a curious symbiosis they and their contemporaries made some of the first lasting contributions to the great corpus of vernacular masterpieces that has continued to expand almost exponentially down to the present ...
... Latin and Greek , the novel and the play assumed for the heirs of this tradition the status of wisdom literature . They gave aesthetic pleasure , but even as they did so they acted as gentle and persuasive invitations to look in- ward ...
... Latin works , which nobody reads today . For Dante , and then for Shakespeare and others , direct dependency is even more tenuous . Nonetheless , the traditions of vernacular literature represented by Petrarch , Dante , and Shake ...