Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
75
result(s) for
"Lane, M. S. (Melissa S.)"
Sort by:
The birth of politics : eight Greek and Roman political ideas and why they matter
\"[An introduction] to the foundations of Western political thought, from the Greeks, who invented democrary, to the Romans, who created a republic and then transformed it into an empire...[Lane] focuses on eight political ideas from the Greco-Roman world that are especially influential today...and describes how the ancient formulations of these ideas often challenge widely held modern assumptions\"--From publisher description on book jacket.
Book
Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution
Despite more than half a century of hominin fossil discoveries in eastern Africa, the regional environmental context of hominin evolution and dispersal is not well established due to the lack of continuous palaeoenvironmental records from one of the proven habitats of early human populations, particularly for the Pleistocene epoch. Here we present a 620,000-year environmental record from Chew Bahir, southern Ethiopia, which is proximal to key fossil sites. Our record documents the potential influence of different episodes of climatic variability on hominin biological and cultural transformation. The appearance of high anatomical diversity in hominin groups coincides with long-lasting and relatively stable humid conditions from ~620,000 to 275,000 years bp (episodes 1-6), interrupted by several abrupt and extreme hydroclimate perturbations. A pattern of pronounced climatic cyclicity transformed habitats during episodes 7-9 (~275,000-60,000 years bp), a crucial phase encompassing the gradual transition from Acheulean to Middle Stone Age technologies, the emergence of
in eastern Africa and key human social and cultural innovations. Those accumulative innovations plus the alignment of humid pulses between northeastern Africa and the eastern Mediterranean during high-frequency climate oscillations of episodes 10-12 (~60,000-10,000 years bp) could have facilitated the global dispersal of
.
Journal Article
Doing Our Own Thinking for Ourselves: On Quentin Skinner's Genealogical Turn
In the original publication of \"Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,\" Quentin Skinner enjoined that when it comes to seeking \"answers\" to questions, \"we must learn to do our own thinking for ourselves.\" In this article, I focus on one of the most recent turns in Skinner's work, to a practice of genealogy. By disentangling various claims too often bundled together under the heading of \"contingency,\" and by distinguishing Skinner's practice of genealogy from Nietzsche's, I argue that that Skinner's genealogical turn is at once less novel, more modest, and more productive than his own characterization of it makes it appear.
Journal Article
The Origins of the Statesman—Demagogue Distinction in and after Ancient Athens
This article argues against the assumption that Athenian political practice involved an evaluative distinction between terms signifying the good “statesman” and the bad “demagogue.” Terms now translated “demagogue” are used by Aristophanes, Thucydides, and other Athenian orators and historians in a neutral, or even positive, sense. Instead, the evaluative distinction is built by Plutarch out of Platonic analysis, Aristotelian vocabulary, and the Thucydidean classification of Athenian politicians. The article concludes with reflections on the context of Moses Finley’s classic analysis of Athenian demagogues, and on the implications of the argument for political practice and thinking today.
Journal Article
Hydroclimate changes in eastern Africa over the past 200,000 years may have influenced early human dispersal
Abstract Reconstructions of climatic and environmental conditions can contribute to current debates about the factors that influenced early human dispersal within and beyond Africa. Here we analyse a 200,000-year multi-proxy paleoclimate record from Chew Bahir, a tectonic lake basin in the southern Ethiopian rift. Our record reveals two modes of climate change, both associated temporally and regionally with a specific type of human behavior. The first is a long-term trend towards greater aridity between 200,000 and 60,000 years ago, modulated by precession-driven wet-dry cycles. Here, more favorable wetter environmental conditions may have facilitated long-range human expansion into new territory, while less favorable dry periods may have led to spatial constriction and isolation of local human populations. The second mode of climate change observed since 60,000 years ago mimics millennial to centennial-scale Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and Heinrich events. We hypothesize that human populations may have responded to these shorter climate fluctuations with local dispersal between montane and lowland habitats.
Journal Article
Eco-Republic
Ancient lessons for sustainable citizenship An ecologically sustainable society cannot be achieved without citizens who possess the virtues and values that will foster it, and who believe that individual actions can indeed make a difference. Eco-Republic draws on ancient Greek thought—and Plato's Republic in particular—to put forward a new vision of citizenship that can make such a society a reality. Melissa Lane develops a model of a society whose health and sustainability depend on all its citizens recognizing a shared standard of value and shaping their personal goals and habits accordingly. Bringing together the moral and political ideas of the ancients with the latest social and psychological theory, Lane illuminates the individual's vital role in social change, and articulates new ways of understanding what is harmful and what is valuable, what is a benefit and what is a cost, and what the relationship between public and private well-being ought to be. Eco-Republic reveals why we must rethink our political imagination if we are to meet the challenges of climate change and other urgent environmental concerns. Offering a unique reflection on the ethics and politics of sustainability, the book goes beyond standard approaches to virtue ethics in philosophy and current debates about happiness in economics and psychology. Eco-Republic explains why health is a better standard than happiness for capturing the important links between individual action and social good, and diagnoses the reasons why the ancient concept of virtue has been sorely neglected yet is more relevant today than ever.
eBook
Eco-Republic
An ecologically sustainable society cannot be achieved without citizens who possess the virtues and values that will foster it, and who believe that individual actions can indeed make a difference.Eco-Republicdraws on ancient Greek thought--and Plato'sRepublicin particular--to put forward a new vision of citizenship that can make such a society a reality. Melissa Lane develops a model of a society whose health and sustainability depend on all its citizens recognizing a shared standard of value and shaping their personal goals and habits accordingly. Bringing together the moral and political ideas of the ancients with the latest social and psychological theory, Lane illuminates the individual's vital role in social change, and articulates new ways of understanding what is harmful and what is valuable, what is a benefit and what is a cost, and what the relationship between public and private well-being ought to be.
Eco-Republicreveals why we must rethink our political imagination if we are to meet the challenges of climate change and other urgent environmental concerns. Offering a unique reflection on the ethics and politics of sustainability, the book goes beyond standard approaches to virtue ethics in philosophy and current debates about happiness in economics and psychology.Eco-Republicexplains why health is a better standard than happiness for capturing the important links between individual action and social good, and diagnoses the reasons why the ancient concept of virtue has been sorely neglected yet is more relevant today than ever.
eBook
Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy
This is the first exploration of how ideas of politeia (constitution) structure both political and extra-political relations throughout the entirety of Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging from Presocratic to classical, Hellenistic, and Neoplatonic thought. A highly distinguished international team of scholars investigate topics such as the Athenian, Spartan and Platonic visions of politeia, the reshaping of Greek and Latin vocabularies of politics, the practice of politics in Plato and Proclus, the politics of value in Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, and the extension of constitutional order to discussions of animals, gods and the cosmos. The volume is dedicated to Professor Malcolm Schofield, one of the world's leading scholars of ancient philosophy.
eBook