Abstract

Not every philosopher engages in personal reflection, and many who reflect would not count themselves philosophers. For this writer, "narrative " is the natural expression of reflection. This paper traces the origins of a philosophical standpoint that exists outside of the conventional discourses of philosophy. Informed by feminist writing on "the other," it suggests that by revisiting two archetypal figures in Greek mythology previously discussed in PCW (Thompson 1996; 1998), it may be possible to discern two mutually defining "ways of seeing" and two "ways of knowing " that are complementary, but not necessarily confined by gender. Based on a reconceptualization of the ancient Greek oikos and polls, the proposed paradigm describes two mutually defining systems of action - the Hestian (domestic) and the Hermean (civic) that co-exist and co-emerge in everyday life.