Homer On Immortality

Roger Sworder is a lecturer in the Department of Arts at La Trobe University, Bendigo, Victoria, Australia.

Provides an accessible account of the variety and subtlety of Greek and Roman philosophy of death, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius.

Calling on history, cutting-edge research, complexity science and even The Lord of the Rings, renowned thought leader Thomas Homer-Dixon lays out the tools we can command to rescue a world on the brink. For three decades, Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down, has examined the threats to our future security—predicting a deteriorating global environment, extreme economic stresses, mass migrations, social instability and wide political violence if humankind continued on its current course. He was called The Doom Meister, but we now see how prescient he was. Today, just about everything we've known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures and institutions) is changing dramatically—too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent and more authoritarian. In his latest work (dedicated to his young children), he calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a decisively new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations and collective values. Commanding Hope marshals a fascinating, accessible argument for reinvigorating our cognitive strengths and belief systems to affect urgent systemic change, strengthen our economies and cultures, and renew our hope in a positive future for everyone on Earth.

This book considers the boast of literary power to glorify or immortalize, a topos of enormous popularity. Focusing on representative figures of Renaissance humanism and the roots of the topos in antiquity, author Stephen Murphy elaborates a complex myth of poetic power. This myth, constructed with the help of such theorists as Ernst Cassirer, Giambattista Vico, Marcel Mauss, and Theodor Adorno, includes the elements of nostalgia for a primordial epoch of magical effectiveness and social centrality, the ideal of patronage as gift exchange, and the absorption of these extra-literary circumstances into literary convention.