Hellenic Colloquia - meghívó

Glenn Most
The Child is Father of the Man: Childhood Experience and Adult Character, Then and Now

Time: Monday, 8 December 2008, 17:30
Place: CEU, Zrinyi 14, Room 412

How do people tend to conceive the relation between a person's childhood experiences and his adult character? Beginning with a comparison between Homer's epic Iliad and Salman Rushdie's novel Fury, the paper explores two different models by which this relation has often been conceived, of which one was dominant in Greco-Roman antiquity and the other in our own culture.

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Gerhard Wolf
The Transfigured Mountain. Sacred Topography and the Icons at Saint Catherine's monastery (4th to 13th century)

Time: Tuesday, 9 December 2008, 16:00
Place: CEU, Monument Building, Popper Room

The lecture is about the changing nature of pilgrimage to Mount Sinai from Early Christianity to the Crusades. It questions the relation between the walled monastery and the holy sites in the desert and discusses the collecting of icons, focusing on their specific aesthetics and role within and beyond the monastery. And finally, it iuxtaposes the scriptural tradition of the holy sites of Moses and Elijah with the establishing of the cult of Saint Catherine from the 12th century on.

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James Allen (University of Pittsburgh)
Why there are ends of both goods and evils in ancient ethical theory

Time: Tuesday, 9 December 2008, 5.30 PM
Place: Zrinyi 14, Room 412

This talk's point of departure is Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the ends of goods and evils). This work is probably our most important source of information about Hellenistic ethical theory, but its title has long been a puzzle. One renaissance scholar chalked it up to an error on Cicero's part. Although this solution to the problem has not won many adherents, talk of ends of both goods and evils remains mysterious. This paper begins with a review of the history of the question and attempts at a solution. I then present evidence from Cicero and, especially, Greek authors before proposing an account of ends of goods and evils that relates the meaning of this phrase to the more familiar sense of the end as that for the sake of which.