The Beginnings of European Theorizing: Reflexivity in the Archaic Age

How did the cultural practices of early Greek society construct the self? How does the self appear in the earliest forms of Greek poetry and literature? What are the relationships between the art of the Archaic age and the emergence of autonomous political and theoretical institutions? How did these practices of self-reflection shape the emergence of later forms of theorizing, science and philosophy?
In Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason, Barry Sandywell outlined and defended a central place for reflexivity in the human sciences. In this second equally outstanding and challenging volume of Logological Investigations, he reconstructs the origins of European reflection.
The author's central claim is that the world does not exist independently of human practices, but that it is constituted through the terms of our discursive categories. Rather than research being a triumphant exploration, it is more fully understood as agonized self-reflection on the grounds of knowledge production. Sandywell argues that this approach has been inherent throughout Western philosophy and in so doing, he shows that the reflexive character of human experience in Western culture can be traced through the desire for intelligibility that animated Greek drama, poetry, philosophy, and science as explorations of the cosmos, body-politic, and the soul.