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The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason

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Tracing practical reason from its origins to its modern and contemporary permutations

The Greek discovery of practical reason, as the skilled performance of strategic thinking in public and private affairs, was an intellectual breakthrough that remains both a feature of and a bug in our modern world. Countering arguments that rational choice-making is a contingent product of modernity, The Greeks and the Rational traces the long history of theorizing rationality back to ancient Greece.

In this book, Josiah Ober explores how ancient Greek sophists, historians, and philosophers developed sophisticated and systematic ideas about practical reason. At the same time, they recognized its limits—that not every decision can be reduced to mechanistic calculations of optimal outcomes. Ober finds contemporary echoes of this tradition in the application of game theory to political science, economics, and business management. The Greeks and the Rational offers a striking revisionist history with widespread implications for the study of ancient Greek civilization, the history of thought, and human rationality itself.

Author: Ober Josiah
Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Pages: 448
ISBN: 9780520380165
Cover: Hardback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2022

Josiah Ober is currently a Professor of classics, political science, and (by courtesy) philosophy at Stanford University, California. He has been the Chairman of both a top-ranked humanities department within the department of classics at Princeton University, New Jersey, and a top-ranked department of political science at Stanford University. He has held visiting professorships in the UK, France, and Australia. His previous books have won prizes from the American Philological Association, the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, and the Association of Academic Publishers, and have been translated into French, German, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Korean, and Turkish.

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