Peloponnesian War. Introduction. Athens and Sparta, both powerful Greek city-states, had fought as allies in the Greco-Persian Wars between 499 and 449 B.C. In the wake of the Persian retreat, however, Athens grew more powerful and tensions rose, escalating into nearly three decades of war.
READING GUIDE TO: the chapter on Rousseau, Althusser L (1972) Politics and History, Part 2, New Left Books: London. Here, Althusser argues that ideology is a theoretical practice, which is locked in a problematic which defines both problems and solutions.
In biology, altruism refers to behaviour by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing the fitness of the actor. Altruism in this sense is different from the philosophical concept of altruism, in which an action would only be called altruistic if it was done with the conscious intention of helping another. In the behavioural sense, there is no such requirement. As such, it is not evaluated in moral termsâit is the consequences of an action for reproductive fitness that determine whether the action is considered altruistic, not the intentions, if any, with which the action is performed.