Jean-Pierre Vernant Quotes
Jean-Pierre Vernant was a French historian and philosopher of ancient Greek thought, professor at the College de France, and the founding figure of the Paris school of structural anthropology of the Greek world. Myth and Thought among the Greeks and The Origins of Greek Thought reread the early Greeks as a culture in which religious, political, and philosophical categories took shape together, neither autonomously nor in opposition. The quotes below are attributed to Jean-Pierre Vernant, organized by topic.
Jean-Pierre Vernant on Knowledge
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Attributed to Jean-Pierre Vernant:
“Greek thought did not emerge from myth; it emerged through it.”
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Attributed to Jean-Pierre Vernant:
“To study the Greeks is to study a moment in which religion, politics, and reason were not yet separated.”
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“quoted in Arvidsson, S. (2006). Aryan idols: Indo-European mythology as ideology and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.”
These myths were steeped in erudition, informed by profound knowledge of Hebrew and Sanskrit, fortified by comparative study of linguistic data, mythology, and religion, and shaped by the effort to relate linguistic structures, forms of thought, and features of civilization. Yet they were also myths, fantasies of the social imagination, at every level. The com parative philology of the most ancie
Jean-Pierre Vernant on Politics
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Attributed to Jean-Pierre Vernant:
“Tragedy is the political dramatization of the limits of the human.”
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Attributed to Jean-Pierre Vernant:
“The polis invented the citizen; the citizen invented philosophy.”
Jean-Pierre Vernant on Virtue
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Attributed to Jean-Pierre Vernant:
“The hero of tragedy is one who acts within a contradiction he cannot dissolve.”