| dc.contributor.author | Laycock, Rosemary Anitra. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:36:55Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2004 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2004 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINQ94045 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/54660 | |
| dc.description | This dissertation is a conceptual study of central ethical issues in human association identified and addressed within the context of the Hellenic polis ideal of Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. The study derives its coherence from the recognition that there is present for Athenians throughout this period a sustaining underlying conception of the polis as an essential unity. This idea is formally defined by Aristotle as a 'whole of parts', an 'ethical substance' in which citizens come together in association within an ordering polity. In the dynamic interplay between the 'parts', however, disruption and instability readily arise so that in practice the concord that distinguishes the just polis is disturbed. Hence the exposition of the nature of political association becomes not that of the ideal but of the perturbations destructive of that ideal. | en_US |
| dc.description | During the 5th century intellectual enlightenment, belief in the justice of Zeus as the causal principle conferring a unity on the polis wanes in influence. Reason and feeling, no longer ordered in justice and friendship to the common good of the polis as a whole, stand increasingly opposed. The aetiology of this pathological process is found revealingly explored in tragic drama, offering an insight into how the 'whole' which is the polis ideal loses its structural integrity to become in effect no more than a 'heap' of competing 'parts'. | en_US |
| dc.description | Drawing on the understanding that tragic drama provides into the human condition, Plato and Aristotle articulate and reconstitute for thought the defining parameters of the polis ideal as a 'whole of parts'. It is through habituation and education to virtue of the individual as ethical agent, they agree, that the resolution of ethical dilemma is effected at the level of the political. However, like Sophocles, and in contrast to Plato, Aristotle acknowledges that man must perforce seek his inner and outer good within a world which distorts and holds hidden from him the true end to which he is by nature ordered. Prevention of conflict in the political community, the assurance of its integrity, Aristotle concludes, is 'up to us'. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2004. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, Classical. | en_US |
| dc.title | The essential polis: Bridging the tragic divide. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
