Το Κέντρον Ερεύνης της Ελληνικής και Λατινικής Γραμματείας της Ακαδημίας Αθηνών σας προσκαλεί στη διαδικτυακή διάλεξη της Yumi Suzuki (Καίημπριτζ) με τίτλο
Plant Life and Human Life:
The Philosophies of Agriculture in Early China and Ancient Greece
Η διάλεξη θα πραγματοποιηθεί την Πέμπτη 28 Μαΐου στις 15.00.
Περίληψη
This talk is not about the spirituality or symbolism of plants, such as exquisite flowers, divine trees or majestic wild forests. Instead, it focuses on the plants and partly animals most familiar to us that are used and abused by humans for practical purposes. These include trees, grains, fruits, and vegetables, as well as various domesticated animals, which have been cultivated or bred for consumption using agricultural and husbandry techniques. Recent environmental movements have encouraged us to critically reflect on how humans have treated other living beings throughout history. All of these beings were originally wild and free from human intervention and manipulation. In antiquity, however, the success of domestication was generally considered a positive achievement of civilisation and celebrated as a triumph of human wisdom to manoeuvre “nature”. In this talk, I shall closely examine several early Confucian and Daoist texts relating to the philosophy of agriculture, and compare them with the views of Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus. Through these comparisons, I shall demonstrate the pattern of reading human ethics in domesticated plants and animals, and thereby also the tendency to learn about human life and moral characteristics from them. The underlying philosophy is that humans are the most successfully domesticated species that conquers the wildness and wilderness within themselves and others, albeit in different ways in these two intellectual histories.
Ηλ. Διεύθυνση επικοινωνίας για τον σύνδεσμο ΖΟΟΜ: mkonaris@academyofathens.gr