Philosopher Kings And Tragic Heroes

On at least one of Plato's visits to the sparkling city of Syracuse, he must have visited its famed theater and taken in a tragedy or two. He may also have reflected, as he sat there on the marble seats and looked up occasionally to glimpse the Ionian Sea, that his own adventure resembled that of a tragic hero. It had shining ideals, noble goals, great risk, a bit of hubris, and would end in death, nearly for the philosopher himself, and senselessly for his protégé, Dion. This connection between philosophy and drama goes back farther than Plato, though. It has roots in the plays of Syracuse's Epicharmus and can be seen in the earliest intellectual history of Magna Graecia, where such thinkers as Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Empedocles blended philosophy, poetry, and performance. Sicily and Southern Italy, in particular, seem to have inspired the kind of original ideas that defy disciplinary designation. This collection of essays from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including archaeology, classics, philosophy, and art history, offers a refreshing new outlook on the heritage of Western Greece.

From Heidegger's reading of Antigone to Nietzsche and Benjamin's book-length studies of tragedy, Philosophy and Tragedy presents an outstanding and original study of philosophers' preoccupation with the concept.

The Tragedy of King Lear precedes Cymbeline King of Britain as the earliest of Shakespeare's English history plays in the sense that it represents a primordial age when the "sceptered isle" of "England" was hardly yet even clearly differentiated from "Britain." The decay and fall of the world is visible, i.e., is originally conceivable as a subject, only from a vantage that is in some sense not itself limited to error or fault. This resolution cannot be a thesis that is merely proved from outside but a vantage that emerges in a careful reading of the 1623 Folio text from the beginning that is alert both to the whole of Shakespeare's corpus and its cultural context. The reading shows The Tragedy of King Lear to be a Thomistic portrayal of the problem and reality of kingship, in which there emerges an increasingly explicit and profoundbut unsentimentalChristianity that seems as much Augustinian as Thomistic.

One of the most celebrated of Plato's ideas was that if human society was ever to function successfully then philosophers would need to become kings, or kings philosophers. In a perfect state, therefore, philosophic wisdom should be wedded to political power. In antiquity, who were or aspired to be philosopher-kings? What was their understanding of wisdom and the limits of knowledge? What influence have they had on periods beyond antiquity? This volume focuses on Plato and his contemporaries; Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic successors; Marcus Aurelius and the 'good emperors'; Moses, Solomon and early Hebrew leaders; and Julian the Apostate, the last of the pagans. In conclusion it looks at the re-emergence of the Platonic ideal in important moments of European history, such as the Enlightenment. The theme of the philosopher-king is significant for Greco-Roman antiquity as a whole, and this work is unique in detailing the development of an idea through major periods of Greek and Roman history, and beyond.

This book, written in an accessible style, is an exhaustive survey of the philosophy of tragedy from antiquity to the present. From Aristotle to Žižek, philosophers have asked: why, notwithstanding its distressing content, do we value tragedy? Some point to a certain pleasure that results from tragedy, others to the knowledge we gain from tragedy - of psychology, ethics, freedom, or immortality.

An exciting and accessible study of the genre of fantasy. One of the dominant modes of storytelling in the twenty-first century, fantasy can mirror contemporary experiences and convey our anxieties and longings better than any representation of the merely real. It is the lie that speaks truth. This book addresses two central questions about fantastic storytelling: first, how can it be meaningful if it doesn't claim to represent things as they are, and second, what kind of change can it make in the world? How can a form of storytelling that alters physical laws and denies facts about the past be at the same time a source of insight into human nature and the workings of the world? What kind of social, political, cultural, intellectual work does fantasy perform in the world—the world of the reader, that is, not that of the characters? Focusing on various aspects of fantastic world-building and story creation in classic and contemporary fantasy, from the use of symbolic structures to the way new stories incorporate bits of significance from earlier texts, this book shows how fantasy allows writers such as Michael Cunningham, Hans Christian Anderson, Helene Wecker, C. S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, George MacDonald, Aliette deBodard, and Patricia Wrightson to test new modes of understanding and interaction and thus to rethink political institutions, social practices, and models of reality.

A Companion to Ancient Philosophy is a collection of essays on a broad range of themes and figures spanning the entire period extending from the Pre-Socratics to Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic thinkers. Rather than offering synoptic and summary treatments of preestablished positions and themes, these essays engage with the ancient texts directly, focusing attention on concepts that emerge as urgent in the readings themselves and then clarifying those concepts interpretively. Indeed, this is a companion volume that takes a very serious and considered approach to its designated task—accompanying readers as they move through the most crucial passages of the infinitely rich and compelling texts of the ancients. Each essay provides a tutorial in close reading and careful interpretation. Because it offers foundational treatments of the most important works of ancient philosophy and because it, precisely by doing so, arrives at numerous original interpretive insights and suggests new directions for research in ancient philosophy, this volume should be of great value both to students just starting off reading the ancients and to established scholars still fascinated by philosophy's deepest abiding questions.

Spanning a wide range of texts, figures, and traditions from the ancient Mediterranean world, this volume gathers far-reaching, interdisciplinary papers on Greek philosophy from an international group of scholars. The book’s 16 chapters address an array of topics and themes, extending from the formation of philosophy from its first stirrings in archaic Greek as well as Egyptian, Persian, Mesopotamian, and Indian sources, through central concepts in ancient Greek philosophy and literatures of the classical period and into the Hellenistic age. Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy offers both in-depth, rigorous, attentive investigations of canonical texts in Western philosophy, such as Plato’s Phaedo, Gorgias, Republic, Phaedrus, Protagoras and the Metaphysics, De Caelo, Nichomachean Ethics, Generation and Corruption of Aristotle’s corpus, as well as inquiries that reach back into the rich archives of the Mediterranean Basin and forward into the traditions of classical philosophy beyond the ancient world. Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy is of interest to students and scholars working on different aspects of ancient Greek philosophy, as well as ancient philosophy, more broadly.