Past to Present
Shaman Drums in Postmodern Hungarian Religiosity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Edit Ujvari PhD
The study analyses the forms and narratives of an archaic religious form, shamanism, and its main religious object/instrument, the shaman drum, in postmodern new religiosity. The interpretation of these phenomena is enriched by numerous publications of Hungarian religious studies. Shamanism in Hungary can be considered a syncretic belief system, which became a dominant element of the new Hungarian mythology-based identity constructions after the regime change of the 1990s. In addition to the sociology of religion, cultural anthropology, ethnography, semiotics, and social psychology also play a role in the research on this topic. The interdisciplinary approach sheds light on the main motivations for the revival of ancient cultures and the specificities of the Eastern European Hungarian ethnopaganism, which differs from similar religious phenomena in Western Europe. The role of contemporary media, the World Wide Web, is also important to examine in researching this topic.
Rhetorical Haunts: The Ancient Greek Temenos, Plato's Phaedrus, and a New Theory of Civic Discourse View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ben Crosby
The links between civic architecture, sacred space, and rhetorical discourse in the ancient Greek world are relatively well established. It seems clear that both civic and sacred design elements developed in concomitant ways with the advent of democracy and the development of rhetoric as a discipline in the fifth century and beyond (Lewis). In other words, scholars know that key elements of civic life have their roots in a timeless cosmogonic impulse. Through a close reading of the setting and speeches of Plato's Phaedrus, this paper proposes a theory of the temenos as a foundation for what I call a sacred-civic rhetoric. This paper then applies this theory to a modern rhetorical artifact: the 1988 Gallaudet University protests in the United States. By virtue of their success, these protests have become a touchstone for other protests in which civic spaces are occupied for rhetorical purposes, often to powerful effect. Ultimately, this paper shoes that the sacred-civic power of the temenos has rhetorical traction still today, and often manifests as protest.
Religion in the Philosophical Sphere: The Digression in Plato's Theaetetus View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kerasenia Papalexiou
The reference frame of this paper is the concept of philosophical godlikeness in Plato’s Theaetetus, and more specifically in the digression (172c-177c) which presents the personalities of the orator and the philosopher. The digression is articulated in three axes of study: a. ontological, b. anthropological (authenticity of the philosopher's philosophical experience), and c. moral. The paper focuses on the last axis and my purpose is to argue that philosophical godlikeness is focused on the conception of true knowledge (Theaetetus reviews three definitions of knowledge) and virtue and is perceived only by philosophers. The digression highlights that the knowledge of divine justice provides the social presence of the philosopher and is the measure of human worth and wisdom and prudence (against Protagoras’ theory). The results of this study are intended to show the timeless connection between the moral and the divine in platonic philosophy (ontology, moral philosophy). Our research in terms of the method is bibliographic, historical-interpretive, and integrated into the wider framework of philosophical anthropology.
