Sacrifice In The Odyssey

Hero’s come in many different perspectives. Some might view a hero as the fictional super heroes. Other’s consider hero’s to be modern day people. Some qualities of a hero are someone who is courageous, brave, and kind. A hero is a person who is admired for their courageous acts and achievements. They never give up even when times get hard. It’s more about the hero taking a stand for what they believe is right. Taking a stand counts more than winning.

Everyone has their own idea of what a hero is and what a hero does. Most people think that guys like superman and batman are heroes because they have incredible superpowers and they are famous people who receive glory. Many people describe heroes as strong and indestructible people, however, heroes are actually not always famous and they are not always the way that society portrays them. In fact, most heroes are ordinary people who do extraordinary things and have notable traits for society to follow. Although heroes are mostly overlooked or misinterpreted by many people, a hero is always a courageous, selfless, and persistent person who has the determination to create change for the better.

For some people, being a hero or having heroic attributes includes zooming in with super speed to save to city from a monster, but in reality there are no aliens or super powers. A hero is someone who puts others needs before theirs, like Elie Wiesel in Night. Sometimes people aren’t considered heroes, but have heroic attributes like Hans in Journey to the Center of the Earth. Heroes like George Washington are heroes who are also leaders. Although many heroes are considered heroes, some are just put in situations where they must be heroic in order to survive.

Empathy is the ability to understand and experience the feelings of others, particularly others’ suffering. Humanity’s gift of understanding complex emotions ushers in a new way of understanding ourselves and how we react to stimuli. This ultimately leads to questioning of everything, leading us to one strong notion: Does empathy guide or hinder moral action?

One of the many themes that Homer Iliad expresses in The Odyssey is that of sacrifice. The word sacrifice gets thrown about a lot. It’s been said for years and years, “if you love me let me go” a phrase very commonly said when speaking about relationships or maybe children leaving home for college or another life adventure. In The Odyssey the terms is more often used in terms of literal sacrifice, like, of living human beings being sacrificed for the greater good of the team.Sacrifice is the ability to protect others for their sake, not yours. It has flaws if it is thought of selfishly.

When Odysseus left for Troy his servants remained loyal and life at home carried on as normal, but as time progressed and their master and king had still not returned home, many began to turn their backs on their queen and her son. One servant in particular is the goatherd, Melanthius. When Melanthius was speaking with the swineherd, Eumeaus, he demonstrates his true disloyalty and hatred towards Odysseus and Telemachus, “‘One of these days I’ll pack him off from Ithaca in a black ship and sell him for a fortune. As for Telemachus, may Apollo with his silver bow shoot him down in the palace this very day, or the Suitors crush him, as surely as Odysseus’ chance of returning home from abroad has gone forever’” (Homer 229). Melanthius shows no respect for his master and his master’s son. He

Empathy, the ability to recognize and share feelings of others, has been in our brains since the beginning of time. It was discovered by the Greeks which they called it, “Empatheia” meaning, “In feeling.” Then a German psychologist Vischer in 1837 and he called it

In Homer's book “The Odyssey” our epic hero Odysseus needs to travel back to ithaca after nearly 20 years away from home at the battle of troy. This is relatable to modern day life because we all have to usually experience a struggle to get to the ones we love, and usually we also have to sacrifice a lot to get what we think we deserve. So that is how I think “The Odyssey” and real life can relate.

A hero is someone who demonstrates traits of being selfless, courageous, and determined in situations and towards others. One important characteristic that defines a hero is being selfless towards others. There are two characters in The Odyssey that demonstrate

For years, neuroscientists have tried to explain the reasoning for evil or malevolent doing. Recently, neuroscientists have attributed a lack of empathy, which is the inability to understand others feelings, to be the same as evil due to brain scans showing associations between the two. This overreliance on science is known as scientism (Burnett, 2017). In this paper, I am going to argue that evil and lack of empathy are two different things despite neuroscientists ‘claims; instead, lack of empathy merely contributes to malicious acts.

An individual, indeed, cares about another’s pain more, and wishes its relief more, the larger the pain, the more she knows it, and generally the more she knows the other person, relates to her, and likes her. This basic and obvious fact can mobilize various types of sentiments. Sentiments of compassion and pity rest on an emotion and are commonly supported by a moral demand. In most cases, their object is the pain of another person. The emotion is then influenced by empathy about this pain (with the possible assistance of some emotional contagion).

Have you ever watched a video clip of a person getting injured, and then winced and felt pain in a similar area of your body? Sometimes, when someone else hits their knee or elbow on something, do you find yourself saying “ouch” or clutching yourself? Empathy is what allows you to feel the pain of someone else though you are not physically experiencing it. Some studies have shown that the empathic activity in response to pain is not associated with the exact sensory and motor qualities of it but instead with its unpleasantness, as the sensory and motor pathways are not replicating the exact pain that another person experiences (Singer

Let it be clear that there is no suggestion that observing someone’s hardship can alone result in a complete understanding of them. Through seeing the life others live and witnessing the specific struggles they encounter, one cannot claim familiarity. What is being proposed, is that if our acquired knowledge of the brain has illuminated something about empathy, then it would be reckless as citizens and as scientists to not use this information to try harder. We never be able to fully understand any one besides ourselves, but despite this limitation our brains are already, without conscious direction/ on its own accord working to understand. Without any effort on the part of the individual, there is a physiological trace of the experiences

Most definitions of empathy are based on the same core idea - empathy is the ability to understand and identify someone else’s thoughts and feelings, as if they were one’s own (wordreference online dictionary, 2016). Although it’s been said “there are probably nearly as many definitions of empathy as people working on the topic.” (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006, p.435) suggesting that there is no singular way to even define empathy, let alone explain its impact on our behaviour. Due to the sheer depth and complexity of empathy it’s understandable that each discipline within psychology presents it’s own explanation for why we experience it, and how it can affect our interaction with the world around us. Psychologists have been exploring empathy for decades, in hope of gaining a complete grasp of what it means and how it can vary between each person, therefore its important we look at different psychological perspectives to try to understand it’s many dimensions.

The ability for an individual to recognize another’s suffering and experience the same emotions to some extent is common in order to promote pro-social behaviour among humans (Cikara, Bruneau, Van Bavel, Saxe, 2014). This ability to empathize with others begins early on and is motivated by the need to alleviate the distress in another when they are suffering. As noted by de Waal (2008), empathy occurs quickly and automatically as a way to respond to the emotional states of others, in turn being a major part of social interactions, coordinated activity, and cooperation toward shared goals. Thus, de Waal (2008) discusses the three different levels of empathy, among which are emotional contagion, sympathetic concern, and empathic perspective-taking. Firstly, emotional contagion is simply about automatic sharing as the individual takes on the emotional state of another even without any understanding of the other (de Waal, 2008). Next, de Waal (2008) suggests sympathetic concern is when an individual attempts to understand and reduce distress in the other (i.e. comforting behaviour), as there is knowledge that the response is about the other. Lastly, empathic perspective-taking occurs when an individual is dependent on imagination and mental state attribution as it is entirely about the other and separate from the self (de Waal, 2008).