Did The Greeks Believe In Their Myths?: An Essay On The Constitutive Imagination
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What does it truly mean to believe — and can a society hold contradictory truths simultaneously without rupture? In Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, the distinguished French historian Paul Veyne confronts one of antiquity's most beguiling paradoxes: the ancient Greeks simultaneously treated their myths as sacred cultural truth and acknowledged them as poetic fiction, navigating this contradiction with a sophistication that challenges our most fundamental assumptions about belief, truth, and the imagination. Translated by Paula Wissing, this landmark work of historical epistemology argues that truth is not a singular, universal standard but a plurality of truth regimes — socially constructed frameworks that determine what a given culture accepts as real. Veyne's brilliance lies in his refusal to patronise the Greeks as credulous primitives; instead, he presents them as acutely self-aware participants in a constitutive imagination that actively shaped their social and political world. Drawing on a vast command of classical sources and modern philosophy, his prose moves with rare elegance between the rigorously analytical and the compellingly narrative, dismantling centuries of historiographical assumptions with quiet precision. A work of profound intellectual ambition, it leaves the reader asking an altogether more unsettling question: what are the myths *we* believe in today?
Author: Paul Veyne
Format: Paperback
Published: 1988, University of Chicago Press
Genre: Philosophy
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What does it truly mean to believe — and can a society hold contradictory truths simultaneously without rupture? In Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, the distinguished French historian Paul Veyne confronts one of antiquity's most beguiling paradoxes: the ancient Greeks simultaneously treated their myths as sacred cultural truth and acknowledged them as poetic fiction, navigating this contradiction with a sophistication that challenges our most fundamental assumptions about belief, truth, and the imagination. Translated by Paula Wissing, this landmark work of historical epistemology argues that truth is not a singular, universal standard but a plurality of truth regimes — socially constructed frameworks that determine what a given culture accepts as real. Veyne's brilliance lies in his refusal to patronise the Greeks as credulous primitives; instead, he presents them as acutely self-aware participants in a constitutive imagination that actively shaped their social and political world. Drawing on a vast command of classical sources and modern philosophy, his prose moves with rare elegance between the rigorously analytical and the compellingly narrative, dismantling centuries of historiographical assumptions with quiet precision. A work of profound intellectual ambition, it leaves the reader asking an altogether more unsettling question: what are the myths *we* believe in today?