Jean-Pierre Vernant Quotes on Knowledge
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. This page collects quotes attributed to Jean-Pierre Vernant on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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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:
“The polis invented the citizen; the citizen invented philosophy.”
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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