In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Renaissance ExerciseRoy GlassbergDescribing the influence of Aristotle's Poetics on education in Renaissance Italy, Lane Cooper writes, "Before 15431 it was a regular academic exercise to compare a Greek tragedy with a Senecan, with the demands of the Poetics as a standard."2An interesting prompt for an article, one that I shall here pursue. In what follows, I compare Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus with Seneca's Trojan Women in terms of their (...) adherence to a set of three criteria culled from the Poetics, dramatic elements that were regarded by Aristotle as conducive to a well-constructed tragedy. For example, Aristotle writes in chapter 6 that "the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy [are] Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes."3 And that these are most effective when they occur concurrently (A, p. 41). Thus, I will inquire of each play whether it includes a scene of reversal and recognition and whether these happen simultaneously.Criterion one: Aristotle states in chapter 13 that "a well-constructed plot should … be single in its issue rather than double as some maintain" (A, p. 47). The plot of Trojan Women is double, one line of action leading to the death of Astyanax, the son of Hector and Andromache, and the other to the death of Polyxena, the daughter of Hecuba and Priam. The plot of Oedipus Tyrannus, on the other hand, is single, with its action focused on Oedipus from its beginning through its middle to its end. [End Page 490]Criterion two: Aristotle tells us in chapter 13 that "a perfect tragedy should … imitate actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation" (A, p. 47). He further remarks that "pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune and fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves" (p. 45). Thus, we pity Andromache and Hecuba for the loss of their children and fear the loss of our own. Similarly, we pity Oedipus for his unmerited misfortune, his situation being the result of a curse brought down upon Laius, his father. And we fear being subject, ourselves, to unmerited divine hostility.Criterion three: As noted above, reversal and recognition are regarded by Aristotle as providing "the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy" (A, p. 27).In Oedipus Tyrannus, reversal and recognition transpire simultaneously when the messenger comes bearing good news that turns out to be bad news: that the king and queen of Corinth are not Oedipus's real parents.4 We find no scenes of reversal and recognition in Trojan Women.Thus, in comparing Oedipus Tyrannus with Trojan Woman in terms of the three criteria presented above, the game goes to Sophocles.Roy GlassbergPortland, OregonFootnotes1. 1543 was the date of Cinthio's translation of Aristotle's Poetics into Italian, thus making the students' efforts at their own translations moot.2. Lane Cooper, The "Poetics" of Aristotle: Its Meaning and Influence (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963), p. 201.3. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1951), p. 27; hereafter abbreviated A.4. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 54–55.Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Aristotle's Poetics has come down to us in a form that is fragmented and incomplete. For example, its famous definition of tragedy begins by stating that it is a summation of what has come before:Let us now discuss Tragedy, resuming its formal definition, as resulting from what has been already said. Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being (...) found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.1But nothing has been said previously about the purgation of pity and fear.... (shrink)

In the words of film critic Roger Ebert, "The last scene of City Lights is justly famous as one of the great emotional moments in the movies."1 What accounts for its success? In the course of what follows I will suggest that a pair of structural elements—reversal and recognition, first described by Aristotle—underlie the scene, and account in large measure for its emotive power.The scene is available for viewing on the internet by searching on "City Lights last scene." For those (...) who have not seen the film, I offer the following recap.The Little Tramp falls in love with a blind flower girl, who mistakenly believes he's rich. He also becomes entangled with an... (shrink)

In his Epistle to the Pisos, Horace advises aspiring playwrights to use their work to teach and delight,1 a dictum that has resonated down through the ages and has been referred to as the "Horatian platitude."2 In the preface to his comedy Clizia, Niccolò Machiavelli echoes Horace: "Comedies were discovered in order to benefit and to delight the spectators. Truly it is a great benefit to any man, and especially to a youth, to know the avarice of an old man, (...) the passion of a lover, the tricks of a servant, the gluttony of a parasite, the misery of a pauper, the ambition of one who's rich, the flatteries of a whore, the untrustworthiness of all men."3And what of Machiavelli's Mandragola?... (shrink)

The following is an attempt at something new, an experiment in micro-criticism that proposes to solve the conundrum of Aristotelian catharsis in fewer than two hundred words. Reference is made to Oedipus Tyrannus.According to Aristotle, the catharsis of pity and fear is a primary goal of tragedy.1Pity is a response to “unmerited misfortune”.Fear depends upon pity—with the spectator fearing that he, too, may be subject to unmerited misfortune.Unmerited misfortune is an abomination, a condition suggestive of a defective moral order.Aristotle regards (...) Oedipus Tyrannus as an exemplary tragedy.Sophocles, by showing Oedipus behaving in ways that merit... (shrink)

At the beginning of his essay "On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex," E. R. Dodds tells us what prompted him to write it. As Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, he served as an examiner in the annual undergraduate honors trials, and as such posed the following question: "In what sense, if in any, does the Oedipus Rex attempt to justify the ways of God to man?"1 He divided the responses into three categories. The first of these, the (...) largest group, held that the play demonstrates that the universe is just, and that Oedipus received the punishment he deserved. The second group regarded the play as demonstrating that man lacks free will and is "like a puppet in the hands of the gods." The third group... (shrink)

Why do things happen as they do in the universe of Oedipus Tyrannus, consisting of the play itself coupled with the myth that surrounds and informs it? Why is Oedipus fated to kill his father and marry his mother? What part does Oedipus play in his own destruction? What role do divinities play? And what of human free will? In what follows I consider the power of curses, prophecy, prayer, fate, the gods, and human self-determination as they serve to effect (...) the action.Generally accepted is the notion that the Greek audience knew the Oedipus myth before entering the theater. Sophocles's use of dramatic irony depends on this. But where does the myth begin? Sophocles starts in medias res with the plague, but the myth... (shrink)

What are we to make of Sophocles's use of the term "Tyrannus"1 in the title of his tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus? Did he simply mean "king," as most translators would have it, or did he mean "tyrant" in the sense of despot—or some combination of both? A sampling of translations offered by Amazon yields seventeen titles using either "Rex" or "King," on the one hand, and three using "Tyrant."H. G. Liddell and Robert Scott define tyrannus as meaning an "absolute monarch unlimited (...) by law or constitution … not applied to old hereditary sovereignties … for the term rather regards the irregular way the power was gained, than the way in which it was exercised.… However, the word soon came to imply reproach, like our... (shrink)

Jules Brody argues that Aristotle's usage of hamartia in The Poetics is best understood in terms of its literal meaning, "missing the mark," rather than in the broader, familiar sense of "tragic flaw." Hamartia is a morally neutral non-normative term, derived from the verb hamartano, meaning "to miss the mark," "to fall short of an objective." And by extension: to reach one destination rather than the intended one; to make a mistake, not in the sense of a moral failure, but (...) in the nonjudgmental sense of taking one thing for another, taking something for its opposite. Hamartia may betoken an error of discernment due to ignorance, to the lack of an essential piece of information.1 Or, as S. H. Butcher would have it:... (shrink)

Roy Sorenson offers a unique exploration of an ancient problem: vagueness. Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? According to Sorenson's epistemicist approach, the answers are yes! Although vagueness abounds in the way the world is divided, Sorenson argues that the divisions are sharp; yet we often do not know where they are. Written in Sorenson'e usual inventive and amusing style, this book offers original insight on language and logic, the way world (...) is, and our understanding of it. (shrink)

Today, economic theory is a mathematical theory, but that was not always the case. Major changes in the ways economists presented their arguments to one another occurred between the late 1930s and the early 1950s; over that period the discipline became mathematized. Professor Weintraub, a noted scholar of the modern history of economic thought, argues that those changes were not merely cosmetic: The mathematical forms of the arguments significantly altered the substance of the arguments. Stabilizing Dynamics is particularly concerned with (...) the ways in which the rich and confusing talk of the 1930s evolved, over a fifteen-year period, into technical analysis of some mathematical structures. The author describes the context for the history of that change, locating it in the broader intellectual currents, and shows how the history of modern economics can be seen as a confluence of several disparate traditions. Historiographically, this book offers one of the first constructivist accounts of modern economic analysis. (shrink)

María Lugones was a feminist philosopher whose work spanned four decades, two continents, and multiple languages. Over the course of her career, her writing made major contributions to feminist ethics, the philosophy of race, lesbian epistemology, and decolonial thought. She passed away on July 14, 2020, after many years of poor health, leaving behind an influential legacy and a substantial body of unpublished work.

Stranger and more momentous than the strangest of scientific theories is the appearance of God on the intellectual horizon of contemporary science. From Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg, to Margenau, Hawking, and Eccles, some of the most penetrating modern minds have needed God in order to make sense of the cosmos.

We consider domains with a natural property called top-circularity. We show that if such a domain satisfies either the maximal conflict property or the weak conflict property, then it is dictatorial. We obtain the result in Sato :331–342, 2010) as a corollary. Furthermore, it follows from our results that the union of a single-peaked domain and a single-dipped domain is dictatorial.

This is the first full-length survey of current work which examines the compatibility of microeconomics and macroeconomics. Its particular distinction is that it makes accessible, to non-specialists, those extensive modern refinements of general equilibrium theory which are linked to macroeconomics and monetary theory. Part I traces the development and interlocking nature of two scientific research prgrams, macroeconomics and neo-Walrasian analysis. The five chapters in this part examine general equilibrium theory, Keynes' contribution, the 'neoclassical synthesis', and the Clower–Leijonhufvud contributions to questions (...) of systemic coordination. The four chapters of Part II place recent work on the micro-foundations of macroeconomics within a taxonomic scheme of Walrasian equilibrium, Walrasian disequilibrium, Edgeworthian equilibrium, and Edgeworthian disequilibrium. Part III, a single chapter, provides an overview of the subject and ventures some conclusions. (shrink)

It deals with the problems of the Latin text (taking account of Michael Winterbottom's new edition), it delineates the work's structure and sometimes elusive train of thought, clarifies the underlying Greek and Latin concepts, and provides starting points for approaching the philosophical and historical problems that De Officiis raises.

Deze studie wil de wijsgerig-ethische stromingen van de 19e en 20e eeuw op een overzichtelijke wijze presenteren. Zij biedt veel en ongetwijfeld kan zij dienst doen als een eerste oriëntatie. De continentale filosofie komt goed aan de orde, zij het dat de auteurs de aandacht voor de bibliografische notities vaak laten gaan ten koste van de toch al summiere inhoudelijke inleidingen. De auteurs beschrijven en beoordelen - dikwijls in moraliserende termen - maar gaan niet in dialoog noch met de behandelde (...) auteur noch met de lezer. De angelsaksische wereld komt nauwelijks aan de orde (29 blz.). De betekenis van de analytische ethiek voor de normatieve ethiek wordt niet gezien. Het boek stopt ook te vlug. De recente ontwikkelingen komen niet aan de orde. Over narratieve ethiek wordt niet gesproken. Maar evenmin over de hernieuwde aandacht voor de deugden-ethiek. Deze studie laat duidelijk zien dat de gigantische onderneming om een goede inleiding in de wijsbegeerte en de ethiek van de 19e en 20e eeuw te schrijven, niet door een of twee personen kan worden voltooid. (Biblion recensie, Prof. dr. F.J. Heggen.). (shrink)

This volume is a 'stand alone' follow up and companion to the forthcoming volume Metatheory for the 21st-Century: Critical Realism and Integral Theory in Dialogue. Whereas Vol. I is primarily theoretical in its focus, this volume (Vol. II) will build on many of the theoretical foundations laid in Vol. I while applying them more concretely and practically to addressing the complex planetary crises of a new era that many scholars now refer to as 'the Anthropocene.' We live in a time (...) when humanity's powers have become so powerful and ubiquitous that our impact on nature has literally reached tectonic proportions. Welcome to the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2002): a new epoch marked by the profound and far-reaching causal power of human, social life in shaping the trajectory of Earth system processes, including the climate system. The state of the world is thus profoundly influenced by the shortcomings of our dominant philosophies and metatheories and the collective self-understanding(s) they have produced. A key aim of this volume is thus to develop metatheoretical applications that serve emancipatory praxis toward a flourishing world. This volume will be of interest to upper-undergraduate and post-graduate students of philosophy, sociology and critical realism. (shrink)

The side-effect effect is the seemingly irrational tendency for people to say harmful side effects were more intentional than helpful side effects of the same action. But the tendency may not be irrational. According to the Tradeoffs Justification Model, judgments of a person's intentions to cause harm depend on how that person decided to act, and on whether the reasons for acting justified causing the harmful consequences. Across three experiments (N = 660), unjustified harms were viewed as more intentional than (...) justified harms. If the person had a choice of what to do and knowingly caused harm for no good reason, people judged that the person must have actually desired and intended to cause the harm. However, if the person had a strong, compelling reason (e.g., to ransom his daughter from kidnappers) that the observer deemed to have justified causing the harm, then observers thought the harm was weakly intended at most. Taboo harms that violated sacred moral values were especially likely to be seen as intentional because most reasons do not adequately justify violating a sacred value. (shrink)

This paper explores the semiotic status of algebraic variables. To do that we build on a structuralist and post-structuralist train of thought going from Mauss and L vi-Strauss to Baudrillard and Derrida. We import these authors' semiotic thinking from the register of indigenous concepts (such as mana), and apply it to the register of algebra via a concrete case study of generating functions. The purpose of this experiment is to provide a philosophical language that can explore the openness of mathematical (...) signs to reinterpretation, and bridge some barriers between philosophy of mathematics and critical approaches to knowledge. (shrink)

Philosophical work on comics from within the “analytic” tradition is a relatively new phenomenon, and still somewhat of a niche subfield in the philosophy of ar.