Greg Anderson holds degrees from the Newcastle and London Universities in his native UK and a PhD from Yale. He is currently Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University, where he has taught since 2005. His primary research areas are ancient Greek history, historical thought, and critical theory.

• Preface


• Figures


• Introduction: Retrieving a Lost World of the Past


• Part One: Losing Athens in Translation


• Chapter One: Our Athenian Yesterdays


• Chapter Two: A World of Contradictions


• Chapter Three: Missing Objects


• Chapter Four: Historicism and its Consequences


• Chapter Five: Beyond Cultural History


• Part Two: The Many Real Worlds of the Past


• Chapter Six: Other Ways of Being Human


• Chapter Seven: The Anomalous Foundations of Modern Being


• Chapter Eight: Ethnographies of the Present


• Chapter Nine: Ontological History


• Part Three: Life in a Cosmic Ecology


• Chapter Ten: The Metaphysics of Polis Community


• Chapter Eleven: Governed by Gods


• Chapter Twelve: The Cells of the Social Body


• Chapter Thirteen: Living as One Liked


• Chapter Fourteen: The Cares of a Corporate Self


• Chapter Fifteen: The Circulation of Life's Resources


• Chapter Sixteen: Being in a Different World


• Conclusion: New Horizons of History and Critique


• Bibliography

The Realness of Things Past proposes a new paradigm of historical practice. It questions the way we conventionally historicize the experiences of non-modern peoples, western and non-western, and makes the case for an alternative. It shows how our standard analytical devices impose modern, dualist metaphysical conditions upon all non-modern realities, thereby authorizing us to align those realities with our own modern ontological commitments, fundamentally altering their contents in the process.