Historical settings

Read about the historical contexts examined in the collection.

1 reading
Classical Athens
Plato portrays Socratic examination against a background of courts, civic charges and political demands. Read it in that setting without letting the city’s verdict stand in for philosophical judgment.
1 reading
Colonial Nahua manuscript production
Nahua collaboration, the aims of Christian conversion and a Spanish column that often departs from the Nahuatl beside it all shape the surviving discourse. The work of interpretation and teaching also continues in living communities.
1 reading
Contemporary Haudenosaunee government
Compare the Onondaga Nation’s contemporary account with Horn-Miller’s 2013 discussion of Kahnawà:ke, without dating either practice’s origins or equating their procedures.
2 readings
Eastern Zhou China
Consider how weakening royal authority and inherited Zhou forms give the Analects’ account of cultivation a political setting.
2 readings
Egyptian religious and royal life
Compare a royal offering with a later object that may depict Maat; neither shows what all Egyptians believed.
1 reading
Greek-language Hermetica under Roman rule
The Hermetic teaching in Poimandres belongs broadly within Greek and Egyptian traditions under Roman rule, though that setting does not give the work a secure author, date or line of influence.
1 reading
Philosophy in imperial Japan
Philosophy in imperial Japan raises questions about cultural plurality, national privilege and complicity. Nishida’s metaphysics does not settle the dispute over his political claims.
2 readings
Reform in colonial India
Ambedkar and Iqbal argue within different social and religious projects in colonial India. Read side by side, they show two ways an inherited authority can come under criticism; sharing a setting does not make their aims or proposals the same.
1 reading
Translation into Arabic
The reading follows selected work associated with Hunayn ibn Ishaq and al-Kindi in ninth-century Baghdad, where translation, textual correction and philosophical argument had different roles.
1 reading
Valladolid conquest inquiry
The Valladolid inquiry is the setting for arguments about conquest and authority. Indigenous criticism read alongside it asks a further question: who can speak to colonial rulers and instruct them?