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Gastvortrag von Douglas Cairns (Edinburgh)

Forms of Pride in Ancient Greek Culture

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Das Seminar für Klassische Philologie lädt alle Interessierten herzlich ein zu einem Gastvotrag von Prof. Douglas Cairns (Edinburgh), dem Anneliese-Maier-Forschungspreisträger 2018. Douglas Cairns wird sprechen über "Forms of Pride in Ancient Greek Culture". Der Vortrag findet statt am Dienstag, 21.5., 18 Uhr c.t. im großen Übungsraum des Seminars (Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6 D, WR 05 D07).Zum Vortrag: The paper begins by surveying briefly five main senses of the word ‘pride’ in English, senses all clearly related by their focus on the interplay of esteem and self-esteem. More than that, however, there is also a sense in which the English senses form a continuum: the pride that goes before a fall is typically seen as the excess of the positive pride that we might take in our own achievements. But in other modern languages (e.g. French) positive and excessive pride are denoted by more than one term (fierté and orgeuil) and in ancient Greek there is no single term for the positive sense of pleasure that one’s own or one’s associates’ achievements are such as to be admired by others, though Greek does clearly have a number of pejorative terms which unambiguously isolate the negative forms of pride. The paper considers whether this is merely a semantic phenomenon, or a reflection of a deeper psychological and sociological one, before concluding with some reflections on the place of positive and negative pride, and the potential role of forms of what we might regard as humility, in Greek (religious and philosophical) thought.

Zur Person: Douglas Cairns was appointed to the Chair of Classics in Edinburgh in 2004. He is the author of Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (1993), Bacchylides; Five Epinician Odes (2010), Sophocles: Antigone (2016), and many articles on Greek literature and thought, especially the emotions. He is also editor or co-editor of numerous volumes, most recently Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity (2018) and A Cultural History of the Emotions in Antiquity (2019). He is a Member of Academia Europaea, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the British Academy.