greek tragedy | Pandaemonium

A SNIPPET OF THE QUEST: FROM HONOUR TO JUSTICE

September 8, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The North American edition of The Quest for a Moral Compass is published this week by Melville House. I will be in New York and Toronto to talk about it. While I am away, I will be publishing on Pandaemonium short extracts from the book. This first snippet is from Chapter 1, and discusses Aeschylus’ trilogy of tragedies, the Oresteia, and what it reveals to us about the transformation of Greek moral thought. I have previously published the opening section […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aeschylus, ethics, greek philosophy, greek tragedy, history of moral thought, homer

WITHOUT A MORAL SAFETY NET

May 12, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the text of a talk about my book The Quest for a Moral Compass that I gave at the Glasgow Aye Write festival last month. You can buy the book from my Pandaemonium bookshop. For other talks that I am giving see the Events page. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? Those are the questions at the heart of my book. And those are the questions […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alasdair macintyre, christianity, ethics, euthyphro dilemma, greek philosophy, greek tragedy, history of moral thought, holocaust, human agency, human nature, modernity, religion, sam harris, viktor frankl

ANTIGONE ACROSS THE AGES

December 27, 2011 by Kenan Malik

I have been reading Sophocles’ Theban Plays, a loosely connected trilogy which reworks the myth of Oedipus, the mythical king of Thebes who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, and whose family is fated to be doomed for three generations. I also came across the text of Berthold Brecht’s celebrated 1948 production of Antigone, the last of the Theban trilogy (though the first that Sophocles wrote). What is striking in reading the scripts side by side is the […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History • Tags: aristotle, brecht, greek philosophy, greek tragedy, sophocles

HOMER, AESCHYLUS AND MELANIE PHILLIPS

March 3, 2011 by Kenan Malik

‘Vengeance is simply justice with bad pr’. So claimed melanie Phillips on The Moral Maze last night, in a programme that began as a discussion of the possibilities of penal redemption and ended as a debate on the role of vengeance in the judicial system. It was a great line (Phillips was defending another panelist Anne McElvoy who had argued for the importance of vengeance to justice). And it was, of course, partly tongue in cheek. But it also summed up […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties • Tags: aeschylus, broadcasts, greek philosophy, greek tragedy, history of moral thought, homer, law, melanie phillips, moral maze, trojan war