Word: paideia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...born Classicist Jaeger fascinatedly read his first Latin grammar straight through, at 25 took over the University of Basel's Greek chair, once occupied by Nietzsche. His biography of Aristotle (1923) revolutionized classical scholarship when he was still a young professor at the University of Berlin; his monumental Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture is a three-volume university, a gold mine of the ideas that nurtured Western man. He left Hitler's Germany in the '30s, taught at the Universities of California and Chicago before going in 1939 to Harvard, where the Institute of Classical Studies...
Jaeger's best-known works are Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, which revolutionized Aristotelian scholarship 35 years ago, and Paideia, a three-volume study of the ideals of Greek culture...
...spewing out of prepared translations with an occasional cursory essay thrown in, and papers are almost unknown. Something beyond this should be expected of students theoretically beyond the elementary level. Analysis of text alone, however worthy as a discipline, leaves a good deal to be desired in transmitting paideia, for after all, facility in the language is only valuable insofar that it increases the student's understanding of the works written in that language. Because of the comparatively limited span of the classical era and because of its relative cohesion, a sense of unity and relationship is of first importance...
...collapse [of Fifth Century Athens] was only the outward and visible sign of the collapse of the individual character ... whose values are rotten with individualism," said Werner Jaeger in Paideia. This was caused by the failure of Homeric religion to overcome the centrifugal force of material success...