Abstract: Diogenes Laërtius reports Socrates saying that beauty is a "short-lived tyranny." Ironically, the beauty of Plato's Symposium immortalized the tyranny within. I argue that theoretical reflection, especially concerning Plato's dialogues, must be understood in tandem with our reflection on the theater of life—its beauty and its terror. The dramatic structure of the Symposium comes into focus

Abstract: In "Of Ephesus" Odysseás Elytis drew on the teachings of Heraclitus in an attempt to disrupt our ordinary view of reality and spark an alternative vision. Among the Heraclitean teachings that figure in Elytis's poem are the doctrine of the hidden unity of the opposites, the contrast between a child's and adult's experience of the world, and the conviction that our bodily senses provide an

Abstract: Al-Farabi justifies slavery by naturalizing the social conflict that supports it, and does so in part through a theory of natural slavery. Some people are slaves by nature, and are comparable to animals that have been brought under the yoke of civilization. By contrast, the Ikhwan al-Safa's fable, in which the animals take the humans to court, provides a more thorough treatment of slavery

Abstract: Jürgen Habermas has warned of an incomplete enlightenment with one realm of expertise—aesthetic, moral, scientific, or political—invading and spoiling all others. German director Edgar Reitz shows this happening in his "film-novel" Das Ende der Zukunft. First aesthetics, primed for beauty and morally forgetful, threatens the truth of an individual's suffering. Next, and worse, political opportunism

Abstract: Did Shakespeare read Plato? In Hamlet, Claudius proposes that reason's "common theme" is the "death of fathers." This allusion to Plato's Sophist casts the ghost as the dead "father" Parmenides, Claudius as the sophist who eludes capture in the Eleatic stranger's net of words, and Hamlet as the philosopher who can only catch him through an act of pure thought. After considering the literary

Abstract: How does Samson, who is portrayed in the opening of Milton's drama Samson Agonistes as a wretched prisoner, slaving away at the mill in Gaza with both his eyes put out, transform into an autonomous agent? This essay finds in the distinction between the A- and B-series of time, made by twentieth-century Cambridge philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart, a key to Milton's representation of the inner

Abstract: Interrupting an article on surrealist politics in 1935, André Breton reproduced three brand-new poems by Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, and Salvador Dalí to make a particular point. Although the poems were written in radically different styles, he explained, he admired them for their depth of feeling, richness of intuition, and lively structure. In the eleven years that had passed since the

Abstract: In response to recent debates about surface reading, critical description, and symptomatic interpretation, this article argues that the philosopher and literary theorist Richard Rorty offers new methodological possibilities for critics concerned with theories and practices of close reading. I suggest that, though Rorty's own analyses fail to respond to the aesthetic distinctiveness of the

Abstract: Ralph Waldo Emerson's style is dense with contradictions that become more comprehensible when placed in the philosophical tradition of anamnesis, or doctrine of recollection. Anamnesis, for Emerson, is an interlinked epistemology and rhetorical strategy. Recovering the histories of anamnesis underpinning his work will generate new readings of his rhetorical style as inherently pedagogical

Abstract: If early modern English medical texts use the word "egg" interchangeably with "fetus" to describe something vital but unborn, tenuous but complete, early modern English poets resist this thinking, handling the future with less assurance and new life with more uncertainty. Shakespeare uses "egg" to describe fragile things that must be crushed or killed; and there is no mention of "eggs" in

Abstract: The famous postcolonial literary critic Edward W. Said has become a symbol of academic activism. Yet Said was militantly opposed to professors who engaged in political advocacy in the classroom. This essay explores the apparent contradiction by examining a previously unpublished paper by Said on the relationship between politics and literature. I compare Said's arguments against political

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Abstract: Why, in Plato's Symposium, does Socrates claim he learns about love from Diotima? Voicing a philosophical account of love through the figure of Diotima disguises the real female authority in the text who remains unnamed: Sappho. Alcibiades's speech echoes elements of Sappho's poetic descriptions of love, thus enacting a dialogue between a philosophical account and an older, lyric one. Naming

Abstract: In this article I read Claudia Rankine's prose poem Don't Let Me Be Lonely through the lens of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. In particular, I use Heidegger's concept of Gestell to argue that the "unpoetic" elements Rankine collages into her book are not opposed but rather integral to its lyric. By contrast, critical responses often insist that Rankine pits the book's more poetic elements

Abstract: Great art has been created under conditions of immense suffering and social injustice. How can one responsively and sensitively make sense of and appreciate such art? How does one acknowledge the suffering that went into making the art, while seeing the creators as something other than victims of circumstance? I offer some reflections on the challenge of appreciating African American music

Abstract: Although not well-known for his contribution to the theory of reasoning, Charles Dickens, in his final work, provides an impassioned attack on certain practices used in public debate. The "platform fallacy" consists in proclaiming that if another does not agree with one's position, he necessarily has certain other beliefs that somehow invalidate his point. I provide a thorough analysis of

Abstract: My paper argues that Sartre builds a literary variation of the liar paradox into Nausea in order to capture the paradoxical ontology of human life in Being and Nothingness, that is, to illustrate in literary form his view that the human being is-not-what-it-is and is-what-it-is-not. Sartre thereby attempts to express in literary form his view that it is impossible consistently or truly to

Abstract: A character in a novel pulls a book from a shelf and starts to read about himself in a novel. Puzzling, but what does it really mean? Does it force us to fundamentally reconsider the nature of fiction? Does it turn the novel into a kind of liar's paradox? And what exactly is a liar's paradox, anyway? Does the liar's paradox, despite its name, have anything to do with lying? What, if anything

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: "Can't move 'em with a cold thing like economics":On Pound's Cantos 18 and 19 Dongho Cha Ezra Pound's Canto 18 begins with Kublai Khan, the first emperor of the Yuan Dynasty, who undertook and indeed had the power to complete the coining of money, that is, the establishment of a new currency system.1 Despite the use of the word "coin,"

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Charlie Chaplin and Aristotle:The Mechanics of Ending City Lights Roy Glassberg 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

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Jeeves Resumes Charge (A Contribution to the Literature on Reading Nietzsche) S. Subramanian The following is a sequel to the narrative "Jeeves Takes Charge," first published in the Saturday Evening Post of November 1916, in which Lady Florence Craye is reported to have plans for getting Bertie Wooster to read Nietzsche. The threat, in

The lack of any explicit engagement with art and aesthetics, coupled with his strong rationalism and naturalism, has led to the claim that Spinoza held a philosophy actively "hostile" to art. My essay, contrary to this claim, brings together certain key principles of Spinozism and a poem by futurist poet Mina Loy. I argue that when viewed under Spinoza's ontology of power and through his relational

Abstract:Our moral lives are replete with acts of autobiographical storytelling. The stories we tell are intended to help others understand what we do by helping them understand "who we are" in a practical or normative sense. The act of addressing one's stories to an audience, however, is as likely to destabilize as it is to confirm one's understanding of who one is. Drawing on themes in Wally Lamb's

Abstract:Edmund Burke's On the Sublime and Beautiful is analyzed relative to real-life experiences, determining the sublime as deriving from sensations of pain or danger. Examples regarding the sexes propose aspects of self-preservation beyond Burke's original meaning, exhibiting pleasure in experiences involving revelation or destination. Sight and sound are demonstrated as eliciting the sublime,

Abstract:The famous "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech in Macbeth works on its own; the play works without the speech; and, in fact, including the speech in the play causes problems for interpretation. This paper argues that the speech was not written for the play in which it appears, but likely was written independently of the play and inserted because Shakespeare was eager to use it. For

Abstract:Daniel Defoe's fiction has never fit neatly into theories of the novel that rely upon Enlightenment ideals of secularization and development, largely because of his novels' dependence upon divine providence to explain the accidents of everyday life. Reading Defoe's philosophizing protagonists alongside Thomas Hobbes's notion of providence, I argue that the intense causal inquiry his characters

Abstract:Virginia Woolf mentions the philosopher Schopenhauer only once in her writings, in a 1917 book review. She ridicules the book's author for his interest in Schopenhauer, and says that he has put her off ever reading any of the German philosopher's work. Nevertheless, repeated echoes of Schopenhauer appear both in her essays and in To the Lighthouse (1927), the novel in which her interest in

Abstract:This paper argues that Jane Austen reconfigures the dynamics of kin altruism and reciprocal altruism in Pride and Prejudice. The previous generation has in mind the welfare of the family and the household's dependents; however, Mr. Darcy, the Bingleys, the de Bourghs, and the Bennets prioritize the lineage family. The plot is further complicated by the social logic of tit for tat and the behavior

Abstract:Is there a relation between the aesthetic and the ethical? Philosophers have long been intrigued by a sense of connection between them. John Dewey and Iris Murdoch agree that teaching art is teaching morals. If that's true, it's powerful. If the correspondence between aesthetic and ethical is metaphorical, remember that metaphor is real—and may have a basis in neurology. I discuss aesthetics

Abstract:Are fairy tales pieces of moral instruction, or mere diversions, to provoke excitement and wonder? I argue that they are neither: fairy tales have an ethical role, but this is in virtue of the ways that they engage the imagination, rather than through providing veiled moral commands. I discuss this in relation to two stories from the Brothers Grimm, linking scholarship on fairy tales to philosophical

Abstract:I make three surprising and related claims. An important strand of Romanticism: 1) embraced and championed the idea of second nature (the formative importance of traditions, customs, and practices); 2) espoused progressive democracy, which included political, economic, and social justice; and 3) understood an intimate connection between (1) and (2). I focus on British Romanticism, especially

Abstract:In this essay I discuss the evaluative modes of Wayne Booth's controversial figure—the male mentor—attending, in particular, to the intricate mix of social and psychological insight that informs Thomas Hardy's account of the views of Gabriel Oak, the hero of Far from the Madding Crowd. Privileging character appraisal in the business of assessing the putative wrongdoing of a playful woman turns

Abstract:G. K. Chesterton had clear social ideas that closely reflect his views on the processes of interpretation and apprehension. This thesis can fruitfully be explored by an analysis of his detective fiction. As exegetes, his protagonists employ methods of investigation that diverge widely from the scientific approaches taken by detectives such as Sherlock Holmes. Illustrating Chesterton's antipositivistic

Abstract:Is there anything new to be said about Romeo and Juliet? Anything neither trivial nor arbitrary, that is? If, instead of revisiting any of the things that have been made of the play, one attends closely to what Shakespeare made of the biblical and medieval Christian texts he used in composing it, then yes. Then it becomes evident just how radical a philosophy and theology Romeo and Juliet

Philosophers discussing lyric poetry often focus on first personal expression as a mark of the ‘lyric’, which has resulted in a narrow characterisation of the nature of intimacy in lyric poetry that focuses on the individual poet, poetic voice or reader. In this article, I highlight a valuable way in which some works of lyric poetry can engage us in a kind of intimate relationship that connects the

Abstract:Reflection on Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan's Atonement can help us understand two key aspects of self-forgiveness. First, she illustrates an unorthodox conception of humility that aids the process of responsible self-forgiveness. Second, she fleshes out a self-forgiveness that includes continued self-reproach. While Briony illustrates elements of the self-absorption about which critics of continued

Having established that what D. H. Lawrence means by truth is moral truth, we delineate his view of the novel as the best vehicle to communicate with the ‘subtle interrelatedness’ without which morality is merely moralism. We then examine Lawrence’s view that ‘art speech is the only truth’ and his distinction between the creating artist and the man, contrasting it with T. S. Eliot’s. This is done with

Abstract:Hugh MacDiarmid and Charles Tomlinson certainly make strange bedfellows for a comparative study, yet by placing MacDiarmid's "Third Hymn to Lenin" in dialogue with Tomlinson's poems "Prometheus" and "Assassin," written in opposition to the Russian Revolution, a common approach to the question of poetry's social efficacy emerges. The central issue in these works is not superficial expression

Abstract:What is it about Nietzsche that has attracted novelists from 1922 to 2014? Not so much the thought as the man! Apart from an early fictional counterpart to Ecce Homo, two novels, reflecting the prominence of psychiatry in modern culture, present the philosopher through the eyes of his psychotherapists. Two others portray his interaction with a variety of figures in Sils Maria and Nice, and

Abstract:Novels speak about human life in relation to the norms and values that orient them. Ideography, which consists in first selecting a set of values and then inventing examples that embody them, was the most frequent way of building novels before the eighteenth century. Later, realist writers focused less on making abstract values visible than on portraying the surrounding world. First they were

Abstract:Too much ink has been spilled detecting a multitude of ingeniously hidden, and therefore questionable, philosophical influences in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. To increase the signal-to-noise ratio, I study the novel in connection with the philosopher it mentions most frequently, David Hume. I justify his presence on literary grounds in two ways. First, the oft-repeated Hume anecdote

From the combination of knowledge and actions, someone can improve their skill and ability. It will lead them to live and work much better. This is why, the students, workers, or even employers should have reading habit for books. Any book will give certain knowledge to take all benefits. This is what this report on experience tells you. It will add more knowledge of you to life and work better. Try

Abstract:Audiences find Euripides's Hecuba unremittingly bleak, and critics find its composition confused. I argue that the play has an aesthetic integrity throughout its composition that derives from Euripides's use of the Odyssey's Cyclops episode, and that a study of the several ways in which Homer's symbolism is used reveals the play to be a profound examination of the nature of justice and injustice

Abstract:To describe Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 and Seamus Heaney's "The Nod"—poems about a look and a nod—is to see literary form as an act of perception, one that is always historical and meaningful, a movement back and forth between perceiver and perceived. Even so conspicuous a form as the sonnet is never empty and only provisionally subject to measure or analysis. To read these works is to recognize

Abstract:Thucydides's account of both the Spartan siege of Plataea and the efforts by its defenders to save themselves and escape their doomed city relates some of the most daring acts of his History, a work with no shortage of daring deeds. But reading this bracing account in light of the allegory of the cave and the divided line made famous in Plato's Republic, a reading that highlights the literary

Abstract:The Great War left an indelible mark of horror and brutality on the Western imagination, not least on how we have come to understand the toll wars take on their survivors. This article gauges some of that effect through an examination of the work of two noted veterans: Wilfred Owen and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Through a discussion of Owen's poetry in tandem with Wittgenstein's earlier philosophy

. . . [Upon] his capture, Sisyphus was brought before the council of the gods, who were informed of all his crimes. After withdrawing from the chamber for many hours, they returned to sentence Sisyphus to his fate. He was doomed to roll a rock up a hill, watch it roll back to its starting place, and begin again, and to repeat this for all eternity. He would do this alone, without the comfort of company

I am going to discuss two fictional characters, each of whom embodies opposite reactions to the problem of moral luck identified by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. The two characters are Noah Cross, played by John Huston in Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown, and Father Zosima from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. Cross takes the existence of moral luck as a reason to fly from moral

Abstract:Why does Aristotle seem to take such a narrow view of "history" when contrasting it with "poetry"? I shall revisit his notions of "poetry," "history," and mimesis to clarify the contrast between declarative assertions central to history and mimetic displays of "universals" central to poetic fiction. The key difference lies in their treatment of individuals. While history affirms biographical

Abstract:What meaning did Sophocles intend when he titled his work Oedipus Tyrannus? Did he mean Oedipus the King, as most translators would have it, or Oedipus the Tyrant, in the sense of despot? In this essay I argue that, while we cannot know with certainty what Sophocles had in mind, a case can be made that both king and tyrant were intended, and that the title is multifaceted.

Abstract:Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave pride of place to the imagination in his new science of consciousness. Two of his most important literary works, Confessions and Julie, were intended to exhibit the range, complexity, and potency of this much-maligned faculty, thereby affirming its rightful place in a science of what consciousness reveals. In mining his own experience for data, Rousseau discovered

Abstract:Throughout his career Oscar Wilde battled his contemporaries' tendency to look at literary works through the lens of the author. He held that the practice of reading for the author misses the point of why we should turn to literature in the first place, and that it runs into a number of ethical, methodological, and metaphysical problems. Here I reconstruct Wilde's position from his various

Abstract:The heroine's gradual sinking into the mound in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days is one of the most baffling instances of human suffering in world literature. Yet Winnie's lighthearted concern with her imminent death is not only astonishing but also uniquely authentic. I adopt Heidegger's understanding of authenticity and present a Heideggerian reading of Beckett's play. Simultaneously, I address

Abstract:This essay reclaims "Thoughts on Art" as Emerson's principal statement about art as part of a general theory of action and creation. It argues that Emerson viewed art as a question of degree, something more or less present in individual artworks. It explores the tension between Emerson's idea that art is created by Spirit and the fact that it is created by artists, and defends Emerson against

Abstract:I discuss Charles Baxter's criticisms of progressive and dysfunctional variants of narrative theory, along with his defense of what he calls narrative rhyme, which counters the ideas of both progression through an ordered series of events and entanglement in the loop of trauma with that of repetition. Rather than being developmental in nature, narratives of this sort are permutational, inviting

Abstract:How should we theorize the connections between literary expression and space/place? Literary texts are replete with spatiality, but the "spatial turn" has yielded little in the way of systematic thought about the relationship between literature and space, its advocates eschewing the notion of a "spatio-cultural" map. Here, I outline parameters we could use for reflecting on that relationship

Abstract:After covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which ended in 1962, Hannah Arendt turned increasingly to the life of the mind, man in the singular rather than the men in their plurality she'd long insisted upon. To understand how we might avoid future evil by developing our capacities for thinking and judgment, Arendt drew on Socrates's idea of the individual as "two-in-one." Here, I use Flannery

Abstract:The stories of Jorge Luis Borges and philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead view concepts as fictions, aesthetic objects that abstract particular aspects of reality, altering our feeling of the world around us. This aesthetic function of concepts makes them crucial elements of our perspective of the world. They delineate relevant and irrelevant aspects of experience, further directing our interests

Abstract:In Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, former Nazi perpetrator Hanna Schmitz commits suicide, and scholars have not yet answered the question why. When Michael visits Hanna's cell after her death, he notices books on her shelf by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Améry, Rudolf Höss, and Hannah Arendt. By citing works from these authors, I argue that Hanna kills herself because she

Abstract:The Theaetetus's midwifery metaphor is well-known; less discussed is the brief passage accusing Socrates of behaving like Antaeus. Are philosophers midwives or monsters? Socrates accepts both characterizations. This passage and Socrates's acceptance of the metaphor creates a tension in the text, birthing a puzzle about how readers ought to understand the figure of the philosopher. Because