Richard Seaford

Richard Seaford was the Exeter classicist whose Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (2004) advanced one of the most consequential philological theses of the past generation: that the emergence of coinage in sixth-century Greece — the abstract, universal, interchangeable token standing behind concrete value — was the material condition for the pre-Socratic thought of a single underlying substance and for the classical conception of the abstract, interior self.

The argument is the structural counterpart to Bruno Snell’s Discovery of the Mind. Where Snell traced the emergence of the unified self through lyric and tragedy, Seaford traced the same emergence through the transformation of economic practice. The monetized imagination and the philosophical imagination arise together; the abstract self is the psychological form of the abstract value. His Dionysus (2006) and Cosmology and the Polis (2012) extend the thesis across ritual and civic life. For the Seba tradition, Seaford supplies the historical-materialist ground of the interiority Jung presupposes. See seaford-money-early-greek-mind.

Relationships

• seaford-money-early-greek-mind
• otto-dionysus-myth-cult
• interiority