Do Homeric Heroes Make Real Decisions?

Classical Quarterly 40 (01):1- (1990)
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Abstract

Bruno Snell has made familiar a certain thesis about the Homeric poems, to the effect that these poems depict a primitive form of mindedness. The area of mindedness concerned is agency, and the content of the thesis is that Homeric agents are not agents in the fullest sense: they do not make choices in clear self-awareness of what they are doing; choices are made for them rather than by them; in some cases the instigators of action are gods, in other cases they are forces acting internally on the agent and over which he has no control. Homeric heroes act in the way Descartes thought an animal acts: agitur, non agit. Such agents ‘handeln nicht eigentlich , sondern sie reagieren’. The model of the agent which we nowadays have is roughly of a self which determines, rather than is determined to, action; the self arrives at this determination by considering available reasons for action in the light of its overall purposes, and it moves to action in full self-consciousness of what it is doing, and why. This model of action, Snell claims, is not met in Greek literature before the tragedians. I think anyone ought to concede that there is some difference between the way Homer portrays decision-making and the way it is portrayed in tragedy ; but has Snell located the difference in the right place? I shall argue in this paper that he has not

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Richard Gaskin
University of Liverpool

Citations of this work

Patterns of human error in Homer.Margalit Finkelberg - 1995 - Journal of Hellenic Studies 115:15-28.
The parts for the whole: parataxic mentality in Homer and the Old Testament.Willibaldo Ruppenthal Neto - 2018 - Archai: Revista de Estudos Sobre as Origens Do Pensamento Ocidental 24:159-178.
The independent heroes of the Iliad.P. V. Jones - 1996 - Journal of Hellenic Studies 116:108-118.

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References found in this work

Virtue and Reason.John Mcdowell - 1979 - The Monist 62 (3):331-350.
The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans & John Mcdowell - 1986 - Philosophy 61 (238):534-538.
Aristotle’s Theory of the Will.Anthony Kenny - 1979 - Philosophy 56 (215):120-124.

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