George Boas - Böcker

"All of us men were born in the first man without vice, and all of us lost the innocence of our nature by the sin of the same man. Thence our inherited mortality, thence the manifold corruptions of body and mind, thence ignorance, distress, useless cares, illicit lusts, sacrilegious errors, empty fear, harmful love, unwarranted joys, punishable counsels, and a number of miseries no smaller than that of our crimes."-St. Prosper of Aquitania, quoted in Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages This volume of essays, written by George Boas in collaboration with Arthur O. Lovejoy, was originally intended to be the second in a series of four documenting the history of primitivism and related ideas about goodness in the world. Covering the Middle Ages, these essays underscore the continuity between pagan and Christian cultures with respect to concepts of primitivism and examine the latter period's modifications of a group of favorite classical themes.They demonstrate the growth of primitivism and anti-primitivism from the first through the thirteenth centuries and include a discussion of such subjects as the Noble Savage, earthly paradise, the original condition of human beings, and cynicism and Christianity. They also, as Boas suggests in his preface, "drive the piles for a bridge between the Renaissance and Classical Antiquity, although the superstructure itself remains to be constructed."

Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity was intended to be the first volume of a four-part series of books covering the history of primitivism and related ideas, but the outbreak of World War II, and, later, Lovejoy's death, prevented the other books from being published as originally conceived by the two authors. A documentary and analytical record, the book presents the classical background of primitivism and anti-primitivism in modern literature, historiography, and social and moral philosophy, and comprises chapters that center around particular ancient concepts and authors, including cynicism, stoicism, epicureanism, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Cicero. According to the authors in their preface, "there is some reason to think that this background is not universally familiar to those whose special field of study lie within the period of the Renaissance to our own time"; this book, in which the original Greek and Latin sources stand side by side with their English translations, will prove useful to scholars from a variety of disciplines who study this period.

Originally published in 1969. The proverb vox populi, vox Dei first appeared in a work by Alcuin (ca. 798), who wrote that "the people [] are to be led, not followed. [] Nor are those to be listened to who are accustomed to say, 'The voice of the people is the voice of God.'" Tracing the changing meaning of the saying through European history, George Boas finds that "the people" are not an easily identifiable group. For many centuries the butt of jokes and the substance of comic relief in serious drama, the people became in time an object of pity and, later, of aesthetic appeal. Popular opinion, despised in ancient Rome, was something sought, after the French Revolution. The first essay documents the use of the titular proverb through the eighteenth century. In the next six essays, Boas attempts to determine who the people were and how writers and philosophers have regarded them throughout history. He also examines the people as the creators of literature, art, and music, and as the subject of others' artistic representations. In a final essay, he discusses egalitarianism, which has given a voice to the common person. Animating Boas's account is his own belief in the importance of the individual's voice—as opposed to the voice of the masses, which is by no means necessarily that of God or reason.

Originally published in 1961. Greek philosophers were concerned with the distinction between appearance and reality, and all the differences in their philosophic systems were ultimately predicated on their different views of this distinction. The history of Greek rationalism is, then, a study of the changing basis of Greek philosophy. George Boas provides a historical account of rationalism in classical philosophy. He focuses on four central topics: the distinction between appearance and reality, the method used to establish the distinction, the appraisal of life made by the philosophers studied, and their ethical theories.

Originally published in 1953. In this collection of essays, prominent midcentury intellectual historians provide critical essays on their field of specialty. Studies in Intellectual History gathers work by Harold Cherniss, George Boas, Ludwig Edelstein, Leo Spitzer, and others.