Y. Barilan

Virtuous Worldviews and Bottom-up Deliberation: Origins of Liberal Democracy in the "Iliad" and the Hebrew Bible

The paper aims to trace hermeneutically some ideas that today are fundamental to the moral and political ethos of Western culture. This is done with a focus on the Iliad and on the Hebrew Bible, and its exegesis by the Talmudic rabbis. It is argued that combining ideas from both texts is key to overcoming the limitatio...