Religious Leadership: Two Faces of Authority

Robert Spillane and Jean-Etienne Joullié
Additional contact information
Robert Spillane: Macquarie University
Jean-Etienne Joullié: Gulf University for Sciences & Technology

Chapter 5 in Philosophy of Leadership, 2015, pp 87-108 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The Greeks and the Romans developed the foundations of the Western rational tradition, with its emphasis on the free and critical pursuit of knowledge in the service of truth and personal well-being. As the Greeks were not dominated and coerced by a priestly class, they were free to draw a distinction between philosophy which is concerned with truth, and religion which is concerned with myth. Their search for the truth of the world took them beyond the evidence of the five senses into the realm of reason. When they announced that the world was really this or that, they began that search for the nature of things which has inspired philosophers and scientists ever since. The ability freely to speculate about the world and themselves, without the interference of religious fanatics, resulted in the establishment of various Greek philosophical schools — Plato’s Academics, Aristotle’s Peripatetics, Megarian, Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics — which flourished until the Romans sacked Athens in 86 BCE.

Keywords: Religious Leadership; Thirteenth Century; Natural Theology; Traditional Authority; Protestant Ethic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-49920-2_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137499202

DOI: 10.1057/9781137499202_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().