This volume includes the lectures of Cornelius Castoriadis during the first five months of his teaching at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in the academic year 1982-1983, where he explained the seemingly "paradoxical" concepts articulated in an unpublished text from 1979, which is also published here. Issues such as the originality that characterizes the dual Greek creation, democracy and philosophy, the position of the individual and the experience of death in the Homeric world, the nature of Greek religion and mythology, and the genesis of philosophical questions from the pre-Socratics like Anaximander and Heraclitus are also analyzed.
These issues are analyzed with a focus on one of Cornelius Castoriadis's main subjects of contemplation: the emergence of societies capable of questioning their own foundations.
"The Greek Distinctiveness" is the second volume of "Human Creation," a work that includes all of Castoriadis's seminars at the EHESS from 1980 to 1995.