No one who reads Derrida closely could accuse him of “technophobia.” More than any other contemporary thinker, on the contrary, he has shown the limit of attempts to protect thinking and even being itself from technē. Yet, Derrida nevertheless insists that “deconstruction” is neither a “technique” nor the technology of thinking that modern philosophy calls “method.” What allows Derrida to exclude “technique” and “method” when he himself shows, in relation to Heidegger above all, that a certain technicity and methodicity always remain irreducible? After outlining its stakes (§I), this article seeks to raise this question by reconstructing Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger concerning the questions of technology (§II) and of method (§III) before turning to the techno-methodicity that Derrida attempts to dissociate from deconstruction in turn (§IV).

In this article I examine Nietzsche’s commentaries on the discipline of classical philology in relation to twentieth century philosophical hermeneutics. I argue that Nietzsche frequently made use of the concept of “life” to reflect ‘meta-critically’ on philology and nineteenth century hermeneutics, and that this use is much better represented by Heidegger and Gadamer than representatives of the standard Lebensphilosophie reading. Whereas the standard life-philosophical reading suggests that Nietzsche viewed the activity of interpretation as a mere symptom of biological, psychological life, the hermeneutic reading suggests that Nietzsche uses the concept of “life” to refer to the effective reality of interpretation, i.e., the “hermeneutic situation.” By this reading, Nietzsche’s interest in “life” is in fact an interest in deciphering the meaning content behind our own interpretations, and thus implies a commitment to interpretive pluralism—an interpretive pluralism which Nietzsche recognized as being essentially ontological in character.

Is Heidegger a temporal idealist or a temporal realist? That is, does he believe that time is supplied by the human standpoint, or that we derive it from the structure of the world around us? Blattner makes a compelling case that Heidegger is a temporal idealist, but a failed one. Rousse, however, argues that Heidegger’s position is more promising when he is interpreted not as an unsuccessful idealist, but as an underdeveloped realist. In contrast, we offer arguments grounded in German Idealist treatments of time that Heidegger is a successful idealist who can derive sequential time from nonsequential human temporality.

This paper proposes a new interpretation of Gadamer’s problematic appropriation of Platonic metaphysics. It argues that Gadamer, attempting to respond to the challenge posed by Heidegger’s interpretation of Platonic metaphysics and of its role in the history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), downplayed the transcendence of Platonic Forms. Gadamer achieves a reconfiguration of this transcendence and its transposition into what I call here a plane of immanence through two hermeneutic gestures: 1) interpreting Forms in light of Greek mathematics and especially in light of the structure of the sum-number; 2) introducing temporality and historicity in the Medieval doctrine of transcendentals by giving priority to the Beautiful over the Good. I contend that, Platonically speaking, this amounts to the rejection of νοήσις in favor of διάνοια, and that this raises issues concerning the problem of finitude and the potential limits of linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit).

Hegel’s chief criticism of Kant in his early essay Faith and Knowledge is that Kant’s philosophy introduces the dichotomy between intuition and concept, between being and thought. As a result, Kantian philosophy fails to explain how the synthesis between concepts and intuitions in experience is possible. Kant’s theory of ideas is symptomatic of this failure: Kant’s idea refers to the concept of totality, the highest expression of reason, which is nonetheless not accessible to human experience. Yet, Hegel recognizes another conception of an idea in Kant’s philosophy: the aesthetic idea in the Critique of Judgment is, according to Hegel, the “most interesting point in the Kantian System.” Kant describes the aesthetic idea as an intuition that contains much thought (conceptual content): in the aesthetic idea, then, the concept-intuition dichotomy falls away. And while Kant reduces the aesthetic idea to the subjective framework of reflective judgment, I argue that Hegel treats the aesthetic idea as something like a precursor of the speculative idea: the original unity between thought and being.

I argue that Goethe’s philosophy of nature can be presented in a vertical order of stages. By reading his natural philosophy as a system of hypostases, Goethe’s accentuation of a divine ground can be taken seriously. Related to the Neoplatonic hypostasis models, for Goethe the living organisms rest on a divine and metaphysical entity. It is a guiding argument of this article that the enigmatic and inexhaustible ‘Bildungstrieb’ (nisus formativus) of all-nature expresses itself in the respective primordial phenomena (Urphänomene). For this purpose, the ‘Bildungstrieb’ uses the two authoritative laws of polarity (Polarität) and increase (Steigerung). These laws form the second level of the graduaded order. The sphere of the diverse Urphänomene can thus be marked as the third level. They are themselves dependent on the Bildungstrieb and the principles of increase and polarity.

In this article, I provide an interpretation of Heidegger’s critique of Hegel. Hegel’s ability to provide a presuppositionless metaphysics is often taken to be the core strength of his Logic. In his critique of Hegel, Heidegger attempts to show that Hegel in fact smuggles in a decisive presupposition concerning being. Building on the recent work of Robert Pippin, I argue that we can understand this critique by situating it in terms of their common understanding of problems of first principles. Once we do, we can fully appreciate a point that Pippin misses, that Heidegger develops his methodology and concept of ground in order to avoid the problems that he locates in Hegel. The upshots of my interpretation are that it (1) allows us to appreciate the systematicity and radicality of Heidegger’s mature ontology, and (2) forces those sympathetic to Hegel to reevaluate Hegel’s ability to provide a presuppositionless metaphysics.

In Heraclitus’ time, thymos and psyche carried highly similar or even identical meanings, because both could refer to life, courage, personality, emotions, and reason. Heraclitus probably worked with all of these meanings. He may have been partly inspired by Homer and post-Homeric literature, where the two terms were likewise placed side by side and often used interchangeably. In Heraclitus, thymos and psyche are not opposites in terms of signification. Oftentimes, they can be “swapped,” and their meaning and “costs” exchanged. The source and cause of this special exchange is desiring or wanting (thelein), which connects all these senses but is also the source of conflict and fighting. Desire—regardless of what it is and what is desired—is simultaneously the acquisition of the desired object or person and a way of paying for it. This struggle for the desired object is difficult not only because of its consequences (the price), but also because it is not possible to permanently stop desiring, which is why this struggle cannot be brought to an end.

Many fans of Diogenes of Sinope laud his parrhesia, free speech used for critique. However, Diogenes abused not only the powerful but also the socially marginalized. We argue that interpreters of Diogenes cannot explain away the undeniably troublesome things that Diogenes said about those at the margins. But we also argue that Diogenes ought nonetheless to be preserved. Some of his chreiai can be reminders of how to be courageous and fight for the downtrodden, and others can serve as reminders of how easily those aspirations can be forgotten. We offer a variety of ways to interpret Diogenes, especially since the figure of Diogenes is an historical composite from centuries of sources. But we arrive at a position of loving antagonism toward Diogenes, loving Cynic commitments to autarkeia and against wealth and power, and disapproving when Cynics fell short of their commitments and critical aspirations.

Most scholars have not assigned much interpretive importance to the specific use of the term ‘persuasion’ in the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus. This paper suggests understanding cosmological ‘persuasion’ in conjunction with ‘force,’ another trait of divine agency in the Timaeus. It analyses the nature of intelligent causation in the cosmology of the Timaeus, particularly in the construction of the cosmic body and soul. Then, it gives a detailed characterization of the causation of necessity, appearing in the Timaeus in three different versions, and relates it to the complex notion of intelligent agency. Ultimately, it claims that the cosmic music in the Timaeus, the primary agent of ordered causation in the cosmos, functions on two levels of conflict with the disorder of the sensible aspect of the world.

The role of intensity in Aristotelian philosophy is obscure. The problem has historically been approached through his logic and categorical sense of motion. Scholars have largely failed to consider the role of intensity in psychology and ethics, the consideration of which greatly clarifies the situation. To this end, I identify three types of intensity present in the corpus Aristotelicum: comparative, modal, inceptive. I show that the intensity of physical contraries is primary in nature but is different from those found in organic processes. I then show that the intensifications found in life, produced by the soul, are of paramount importance to Aristotle’s philosophy. Inceptive intensity is the backbone of psychical activities: concoction, sensation, pleasure, perception, effort, attention, and self-awareness. I outline two essential characteristics of these intensifications: (1) they imply an intransitive causality that is intrinsic to the entity’s nature or form; (2) that they involve an interaction of many parts which mutually amplify each other so that the whole is beyond (irreducible to) the totality of the parts. I end by comparing Aristotle’s views on intensity to contemporary ideas of emergence: feedback, holism, intentionality, and supervenience.

In this paper I argue that, to conceive transcendence, Levinas retrieves the Platonic concept of “separation” and deploys it in three ways: metaphysically, semantically, and affectively. Levinas finds in the interaction between being and the Good beyond being of Republic VI 509b a certain “formal structure of transcendence”—one in which a term is conditioned by another while remaining absolutely separated from it. This formal structure is subsequently deployed metaphysically, in the relation between creator and creature; semantically, in the relation between meaning and sense; and affectively, in the relation between the desiring self and its desired aim.

In Republic II, after Socrates has constructed the smallest city answering the demands of Necessity, Glaucon dismisses it as unfit for human habitation. The lack of relishes makes life there unpalatable. Without further ado, this “healthy” and “true” city is abandoned, and Socrates spends the rest of the Republic on the etiology, diagnosis, and possible treatment of the chronic “fever” afflicting the city of luxury. Prominent commentators see nothing strange in his brisk turn away from the “true” city, taking the Kallipolis as a hardheaded alternative to Socratic pie in the sky. By contrast, I take seriously Socrates’ claim that the CP is the true city. I analyze its political-economic structure; show how this reappears in the Kallipolis; and explain the CP’s hidden role as a quasi-medical model of equilibrium, an ideal the Kallipolis never achieves, yet to which its rulers must look in exercising their craft.

This paper provides a novel response to Vlastos’s challenge that Platonic erōs in the Symposium, since it is for the form of beauty rather than any particular person, is impersonal and egotistical. Vlastos, in addition to generations of his readers and critics, badly misunderstands Diotima’s reproductive theory of love. In particular, it has been widely overlooked or diminished that the ideal erotic relationship set out in the ladder of love mirrors the reproductive labor of ancient Greek mothers and caregivers. The lover of the highest mysteries undertakes the psychic equivalent of motherly care to rear virtuous ideas in the next generation. Thus, properly understanding Diotima’s gendered vision of psychic reproduction reveals that Platonic love is anything but impersonal and egotistical.

At the peak of the Statesman’s myth of the reversed cosmos, the Eleatic Stranger asks after the conditions for human happiness. This paper suggests that philosophy and therewith human happiness is possible only in the age of Zeus, the age characterized by both the withdrawal of the gods and human neediness. The myth clarifies the inadequacy of the dialogue’s previous conception of the human being as a herd animal by illuminating what is missing from it: the erotic dimension of the human soul.

This paper addresses Socrates’ claim in the Cratylus that he and Hermogenes must learn of the correctness of names from “Homer and the other poets.” I argue that, in treating poetry as the starting point for investigating the relationship of language to reality, Plato reveals language to be a discursive articulation of non-discursive divine Being. Thus, while language cannot fully capture Being once and for all, it can function as a moving image of it by being kept in continual motion. Poetic language, as divinely inspired, sits at the threshold between language’s discursivity and the unified reality it strives to articulate, and can therefore reinvigorate philosophical contemplation by de-sedimenting concepts articulated in language that have become stagnant, re-opening them for examination in new, previously unarticulated, ways. This vision of philosophical contemplation through language is part of a greater theme of the tension between mortal and divine modes of knowing. Humans desire divine understanding but only approach it through the motion of contemplation. Plato’s treatment of Apollo at 404e–406a reveals the two-fold nature of philosophical contemplation as relying on a certain tension between the revelation of the inarticulable, unchanging divine Being and the attempt to employ reason to test and interpret such disclosures through the unfolding motion of dialectic.

Ancient sources present mainly two Stoic definitions of passion: as an irrational and unnatural movement of the soul, and as an excessive impulse. These definitions hold for the Stoics in general, and undoubtedly for Zeno. However, in other sources, passion is seen as a judgment or as what supervenes on judgement. In this case, some sources refer to Zeno, others to Chrysippus, and still others do not refer to any particular Stoic philosopher, so it is unclear whether the idea of judgement was already present in Zeno or is an innovation of his successor. Starting from this problem, I attempt to reconstruct the meaning of Stoic passion, with a particular interest in the definition of passion as judgement. In this way I will try to show that the apparently different positions of Zeno and Chrysippus are in fact the same when viewed within the framework of the Stoic theory of action.

In this paper I ask what it is that adds credibility to Crantor (d. 276/5 BC) as an authority on managing one’s grief, especially grief at the loss of children. At first sight the homoerotic ethos of the Academy in his time made it unlikely that high profile members would have concerned themselves with children of their own. The primary source used is Plutarch’s Consolation to Apollonius, where it is clear that immediate suppression of grief and other natural feelings is not intended, nor must rationality always override them. Rather the consolation helps to produce a pause that allows reason to gradually bring such feelings down to a rational level. Texts associated with Crantor already idealize suspension of judgment at times of pressure, even if his partner Arcesilaus took this epokhê further.

This paper investigates a reference to the voice of the legendary musician Orpheus in Plato’s Protagoras. I propose that the Orpheus image does serious philosophical work in the text. Understanding the mythic and religious elements of the Orpheus tradition can help us conceptualize the harms of sophistry from a Platonic viewpoint. In the light of the image, the sophist emerges as a quasi-magical manipulator of rhetorical beauty who charms his students into subrational creatures. Furthermore, the image provides insight into Plato’s conception of the difference between sophistic and Socratic education. Playing on the tradition of Orpheus as (failed) psychopomp, I suggest that the sophist employs a descent-style education which holds students captive in an underworld of glamorous but empty sensibles. In sharp contrast, Socratic ascent-style education pulls students upwards to active contemplation of ultimate reality.

In Metaphysics M, Aristotle aims to refute the Platonic view that mathematical objects are substantially prior to sensible things. For Aristotle, mathematical objects are the abstracted attributes of sensible substances required for geometrical analysis and proof. Yet, despite this derivative status of the objects of mathematics, Aristotle insists that they are logically prior to individual substances. This paper examines the distinction between logical and substantial priority, arguing that it underwrites Aristotle’s conception of mathematical necessity and explanation.

This paper examines the sophistic practice of antilogikê or antilogic, which consists in, as G. B. Kerferd described, “causing the same thing to be seen by the same people now as possessing one predicate and now as possessing the opposite or contradictory predicate.” Although, since Plato, antilogic has been cast in a cloud of suspicion, understood primarily as the dubious practice of making the weaker argument stronger, I explore a contrary interpretation that antilogic was a technique for pursuing the suspension of judgment, or epochê. In this paper, I define the practice of antilogic through the tale of Corax and Tisias and the surviving fragments of Protagoras and Gorgias. In so doing, I hypothesize that antilogic was a method for averting the natural tendency of language to assign stability and durability to being. Through the perpetual displacement of one logos by another, antilogic grants thought access to the ceaseless flux and becoming of nature. As it barred language from assigning stability to being, so too did it provide a “way out” of the inexorable human drive captured in the opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All humans naturally desire to know.”

There was a long and lively debate in Ancient Greece on the nature of music, spanning philosophy, cosmology, and psychology. Peripatetic musicology based its understanding of the nature of music on philosophical principles derived from Aristotle’s psychology in order to address debates among their predecessors, primarily to shift the focus away from the physical sounds or their mathematical ratios, towards the investigation of the psyche, which I show was a sort of proto-phenomenology. Music involves a voluntary activity accompanied by a natural joy. This joy grows and intensifies the energeia of the psyche. The nature of music is related directly to the nature, essence, or activity, of the psyche.

This paper argues that Aristotle’s representation of mothers and motherly love in two separate arguments about friendship in his ethical treatises are not to be read as positive valuations of mothering and its associated traits but rather as perpetuating the common Greek animalization of women. For the deep love and the complex care and practical intelligence human mothers exhibit for their children are according to Aristotle rooted in the biological capacities that they share with non-human animals. Importantly, these capacities are instinctual rather than chosen and grounded primarily in women’s perceptive soul rather than in their rational soul. By emphasizing the naturalness and the affective character of motherly love in his ethics, Aristotle assimilates human mothers to animal ones and depicts their excellence in mothering as a biological virtue rather than a moral one.

This article aims to sketch a phenomenological approach to Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis. In understanding Ereignis as the presencing of being, the fun­damental question is whether and how this presence of being, i.e., presence as such, can be experienced. While this experience is incompatible with a transcendental ap­proach, the suggestion here is that Ereignis can be experienced not as my own, but as an anonymous presence. To flesh out this suggestion, a close reading of Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity in the Contributions will elaborate on why presence can belong neither to humanity nor to being. In a second step, a motif in Heidegger’s reception of Schelling is discussed which clarifies that the experience of Ereignis involves a necessity that goes beyond subjectivity. In a third step, the idea of “letting-presence” shows how the coming into being of experience has to remain anonymous in order to be the experience of Ereignis.

Commenting upon van der Heiden’s The Voice of Misery, this paper addresses the peculiar task of witnessing and testimony that reaches beyond the ordinary sense of being a witness that is defined by the sphere of juridical concerns. Here the concern is with testimony that reaches to the point of “bare life”, the point at which a life is stripped down to a point at which the very idea of speech and bonds with others is shed. Understood in this sense, the task of testimony begins a the limits of what we call “the human”. Following from Heidegger, Plato, and Celan the effort is made both to speak about the character of such testimony as well as about the “ethos” of such a relation to life itself.

Plato’s Protagoras is famous for Protagoras’s defense of the public practice of sophistry and his great myth, which contains his account of the origins of political life, as well as for Hippias’s rejection of the tyranny of nomos in the name of the natural kinship of the wise. What is perplexing is that Socrates makes no explicit response to these arguments. This essay argues that Socrates’s indirect response is actually contained in his otherwise unmotivated interpretation of the poem of Simonides, where his description of “laconic philosophy” is in fact an indirect description of his own philosophical practice. While the sophists reject nomos without recognizing their own dependence on its stabilizing force, Socrates argues that genuine philosophers, recognizing at once the necessity as well as the defectiveness of nomos, must “unwillingly praise” convention and only present their criticisms indirectly. Socrates’s interpretation of Simonides, then, points the way to his own understanding of the tension between, but also the interdependence of, nomos and physis.

Since Truth and Method, Gadamer’s account of language or linguisticality as the medium of hermeneutic experience has prompted an ever-recurring reflection and critical engagement with the interpretive implications of this claim. For Gadamer, there is no subject matter that comes to the fore without linguisticality, that is, without the possibility of the subject matter to come into language in the first place. However, in later essays, he briefly discusses what he calls ‘prelinguistic’ in hermeneutic expe­rience. In this essay, I offer an account of the prelinguistic in Gadamer’s works that still maintains the primacy of language in his hermeneutic project. The prelinguistic marks not only a kind of precondition of linguisticality itself, but it also marks the fundamentally disclosive and demanding character of hermeneutic experience as such. As a precondition, the prelinguistic is not something beyond or outside of language, but is the very impulse or drive towards linguistic expression.

What philosophical reasons are there that could ground Kant’s Declaration in 1799 against Fichte’s Doctrine of Science? To answer this question, the present paper reconstructs what Kant could have said but did not. The first section traces the possible peer influences on Kant’s stance toward Fichte expressed in the Declaration and derives from it what Kant conceived to be the problems with the Doctrine of Science. The second section establishes three formation conditions for transcendental paralogisms. The third section proposes a Fichtean variant of paralogism and shows how in Fichte’s case the three formation conditions obtain.

In this essay, the author takes up the responses of Dennis J. Schmidt and Carolyn Culbertson to his monograph The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony. It first observes that both respondents have a shared interest in the ethical dimension of the question of testimony, which has much to do with the exceptional subject matter, namely that of bare life, that The Voice of Misery takes as its point of departure to analyze what testimony is. In the first section, the author engages with Schmidt’s account of the importance of Heidegger, Plato’s myth of Er and Celan’s poetry for thinking testimony and shows how exactly these references allow us to think the ethos and the ethics of textimony. In the second section, he discusses the three questions Culbertson raised concerning the practical, more everyday stakes of testimony in relation to the epistemology of testimony and the question of epistemic justice.

The article explores the proximity between Simondon’s philosophical project and phenomenology through his relation to Merleau-Ponty. Three concepts that link the two philosophers are examined: genesis, relation, and Simondon’s preindividual, which are shown to constitute an attempt to answer questions Merleau-Ponty was addressing in his later work. The article shows how Simondon’s argument for ontogenesis rather than ontology is related to Merleau-Ponty’s ontological project, which in turn originates in the latter’s reading of Husserl, particularly the interest in genetic phenomenology expressed as early as the Phenomenology of Perception. It then shows that the radical notion of relation employed by Simondon responds to problems Merleau-Ponty had encountered in thinking the corps propre and the chiasm. The paper then discusses the link between Merleau-Ponty’s thinking of the flesh and Simondon’s concept of preindividual. By confronting these two bodies of work, the article suggests that phenomenology is an important starting point for Simondon.

This article examines the meaningful intervention that Gert-Jan Van der Heiden’s recent book, The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony, makes in the developing field of the philosophy of testimony. I argue that this intervention is accomplished through a phenomenological investigation into the nature of the testimonial object and of the demand that it makes upon one who bears witness. In taking such an approach, I argue, Van der Heiden initiates an ontological turn in the field of testimonial theory, shifting the conversation away from a debate about the conditions in which belief in testimony is justified – a debate that has in many ways defined the field for philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. I suggest that Van der Heiden’s account is helpful in demonstrating that, in many cases, doing justice to a testimonial object requires an epistemic-ethical attitude other than belief. The article concludes by developing a few questions for Van der Heiden based on my interpretation of his project, including to what extent his phenomenology of testimony can account for how often our receptivity to testimony depends on the default trust that we have in others by virtue of our fundamental immersion in social life.

Heidegger’s discussion of the concept and the phenomenology of ‘world’ is defined by its dual meaning, referring to both the unity of a single, encompassing whole and a number of different meaning contexts, i.e., ‘worlds’ in the plural. Heidegger’s emphasis on the verbal meaning of world (‘worlding’) and the discussion of problems such as the ‘world entry’ of an entity articulate the tension and dynamic between these two meanings. This contribution develops Heidegger’s account by (i) elucidating Heidegger’s early and late discussion of ‘worlding’; (ii) connecting ‘worlding’ to the discussion of ontological pluralism in recent work by Kris McDaniel; and (iii) delineating a specific notion of a metaphysically neutral ‘phenomenological realism’ compatible with Heidegger’s version of ontological pluralism.

Aristotle writes the Art of Rhetoric rhetorically. His actions sometimes speak louder than his words. At first, he presents rhetoric as concerned with a species of logos, but gradually makes clear that all logos is somehow rhetorical. To understand human beings, the animals with logos, one must first understand logos, thinking through its dyadic structure as at once communication and articulation—a structure that guarantees its failure fully to articulate and fully to communicate. Now, persuasion proceeds “by speaking either examples or enthymemes, and besides these nothing.” To understand the enthymeme proves to require an understanding of topos—topic. But topos becomes clear only by way of a long series of examples. Finally, then, it is owing to the example, its strange mixture of the universal and particular, that we understand what Aristotle is doing. The example, itself exemplary of the power logos is the key to understanding human nature.

This paper is about Kant’s late unfinished manuscript, (1796–1803) and some of the resonances it has with Schelling’s early (1797–1800). Most of the secondary literature on investigates its relation to the rest of Kant’s corpus, often framing the drafts as an attempt to fill a so-called “gap” in the Critical philosophy whilst ignoring the relationship it has to the wider landscape of late eighteenth century German philosophy. Whether may provide grounds for reviewing the relationship between Kant and Schelling’s , for example, is rarely discussed. Some scholars have remarked upon the striking parallels between and , but there has yet to appear a single monograph-length text on the relation. Whilst certainly “Schelling’s Post-Kantian confrontation with nature itself begins with the overthrow of the Copernican revolution” (Grant 2008, 6), what if Kant was himself overthrowing the Copernican revolution? In this paper, I will outline some of the points of contact to start from in support of posing this question.

Two formative forces for Greek philosophers remain undertheorized: polytheism as a metaphysical position and myth as a source of intelligibility. Heidegger’s work is perhaps exemplary in this regard: he both runs together Greek Metaphysics and Monotheism as well as fell prey to the power of myths. In this paper I introduce and translate the 1953 essay “Mythology and the Tropic Experience of Being” by the Brazilian philosopher Vicente Ferreira da Silva, where he proposed an openly polytheistic Heideggerian metaphysics and philosophy of mythology. Vicente Ferreira da Silva thereby developed a phenomenological approach to myth that can dialogue fruitfully with ancient philosophy in its fullness and also reflect critically about contemporary myths.

In Schelling’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, he outlines an aesthetic theory of the novel and how it communicates truth, based around his Identitätssystem. In doing so, he understands truth as symbolic, where the symbolic is tautegorical. In his later lectures on mythology he instantiates a new understanding of ontology and mythology as tautegorical, and makes gestures towards how to understand aesthetic forms based on these new accounts. This paper explores how that new aesthetic understanding of truth, ontology, and aesthetics can be used to create a new Schellingian theory of the novel. To explore this, the paper looks at the worldview presented in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, arguing that it could be seen as the late Schellingian novel and as such, present a new paradigm for understanding truth as communicated through literature.

This essay argues that the Phaedrus’s Palinode articulates an account of love (erōs) in which the experience of love can morally and intellectually transform both lover and beloved. After situating this account of love within the dialogue’s thematization of soul-leading (psuchagōgia), I show how Socrates’s account of love makes an intervention into typical Greek thought on pederasty and argue against Jessica Moss’s contention that soul-leading love suffers severe limitations in its soul-leading capacity, showing that Moss is wrong to think that love can only efficaciously lead souls that are already well-formed. By contrast, the Palinode portrays the moral and intellectual formation of the lover, who first approaches the beloved in the spirit of rapacity only to be turned by his experience of beauty toward genuine service, ordered to the beloved’s benefit. The beloved likewise undergoes such a transformation as a result of his nascent return-love (anterōs).

There has been considerable disagreement about the relationship between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (TLP) and his Philosophical Investigations (PI) with some scholars arguing that there is considerable continuity between them and some arguing that they are completely opposed. The paper argues that this breadth of disagreement is not surprising because the relation between TLP and PI is analogous with that described in Hegel’s dialectical model of philosophical truth in the Phenomenology of Spirit. One might say that TLP is “refuted” by PI but there is also a sense in which PI is “the truth” of TLP. TLP and PI are both essential stages in “the progressive unfolding of truth” bound together like the successive stages in a single living organism where the view of the former is both “annulled” and “preserved at a higher level” in the view of the latter (Aufhebung). The paper thereby helps to facilitate Rorty’s attempt to usher “analytical philosophy” from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage.

This paper focuses on the emotional make-up of Descartes’s generous person. Described as having complete control over the passions, the generous person is not passion-free; she feels compassion for those in need but unable to bear their misfortunes with fortitude, hates vice, takes satisfaction in her own virtue, etc. To bring to light the coherence of the generous person’s emotional configuration, a compare and contrast analysis with Descartes’s deficient moral type, the abject person, is provided. Real life as well as literary examples (Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes himself and Kadhy Demba, one of the main characters of Marie NDiaye’s novel Trois Femmes Puissantes) further refine the portrait of Descartes’s generous person and show that generosity is achievable by anyone who uses their will well. Descartes’s position on harmonizing the passions is reconstructed as a developmental trajectory: harmonizing the emotions is possible courtesy of God who put this sphere of created affairs under our jurisdiction; harmonizing the passions is required since the alternative is sub-optimal (souls enslaved and miserable); finally, harmonizing the emotions is satisfying. Since, as the above examples demonstrate, in the process of making their emotional composition coherent, different people take different routes and thus “create for themselves a personal, quite personal ideal,” acquiring Cartesian generosity points the way to Nietzsche’s later notion of self-creation.

The Theaetetus’s midwife metaphor contains a puzzling feature, often re­ferred to as the “midwife paradox”: the physical midwives must have first given birth to their own children in order to have the necessary experience to practice their art. Socrates, however, seems to disavow having any children of his own and thus appears to be unqualified to practice philosophical midwifery. In this paper, I aim to dissolve the midwife paradox by arguing that it rests on problematic assumptions, namely, that Socrates never gave birth to a child at all or the child of wisdom in particular, and that he is primarily an intellectual midwife. I offer a new interpretation of Socratic midwifery, arguing that what Socrates may have birthed in the past which qualifies him for midwifery is his virtuous recognition of his ignorance, and that this “epistemic virtue” is also the proximate goal of Socratic midwifery.

Aristotle claims that the virtuous motive in benefitting others is altruistic. But he also claims in Nicomachean Ethics 9.7 that benefaction is an expression of self-love. This essay examines the account of benefaction with an eye to resolving the tension between these claims. By drawing out Aristotle’s comparison between reproduction and benefaction, I show that Aristotle conceives of self-love principally in terms of activities whose causal effects redound not only to the beneficiary but also to the benefactor. With this understanding of self-love, we better understand the relationship between self-love and benefaction and between self-love and friendship.

Following Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer states that the primordial way we experience the past is through forgetting rather than memory. This essay seeks to explore the various senses of forgetting as it appears in Gadamer’s thought with a particular emphasis on how forgetting and memory structure the unique temporality of the work of art. This exploration reveals that the interplay between forgetting and remembering is more complicated than mere opposition; this interplay is specifically revealed in Gadamer’s analyses of the epochal transition and the transmissive event of history. In both cases, forgetting is revealed not as a lack or lacuna, but as a dynamic generating structure that elevates the work of art from its original past—constituting the immemorial dimension of the work. This essay concludes by gesturing toward the repercussions of forgetting on subjectivity and a theory of time in Gadamer’s hermeneutics.

Gadamer’s retrieval of phronēsis lies at the heart of his philosophical hermeneutics. This paper argues that this retrieval requires a co-retrieval of what Aristotle referred to as character virtue, and that Gadamer’s work largely neglects this. In part one, I review Aristotle’s analysis of the relationship between phronēsis and character virtue. In part two, I show how Gadamer’s double insistence on the importance of phronēsis for his hermeneutics and on taking responsibility for concepts generates the requirement of a co-retrieval of character virtues and vices. Following this, I then survey four ambiguous tendencies in Gadamer’s work that seem to militate against such a retrieval. I conclude with some remarks for future work.

This article juxtaposes Derrida’s last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (volume 2) with Heidegger’s The Event (from 1940/41) in order to question Derrida’s reading of the notion of Walten in Heidegger’s texts in relation to the themes of sov­ereignty and death. It draws out different senses of Walten depending on whether Heidegger thinks Greek φύσις or the other beginning and it points out the importance of constancy for the notion of Walten. In each case Walten shatters in relation to death or to the notions of the “beingless” and “expropriation” that Heidegger introduces at the beginning of the 40s. At the same time, there emerges a strange proximity between an originary differencing Heidegger thinks in relation to the notions of “the beingless” and “expropriation” on the one hand, and Derrida’s notion of différance on the other hand (an originary differencing that, in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger, institutes a “sovereignty of last instance”) as well as a strange proximity in the circular character of both Heidegger’s and Derrida’s writings that has to do with how death informs their writing.

Diogenes’s exchange with Cicermos the Olympic pankratist is unusual in that it is both a dialectical exchange and is successful in changing Cicermos’s mind. Most Cynic rhetoric is physical or gestural and more often alienates than convinces. The puzzling difference is explained by the rhetorical choices Diogenes makes with his uniquely receptive audience.

Schelling’s 1794 commentary on the Timaeus makes extensive use of Plato’s Philebus, particularly the principles of limit and unlimited. In this article, we demonstrate the resonances between Schelling’s 1794 treatment of the metaphysics of the Philebus and his 1798 philosophy of nature. Attention to these resonances demonstrates an underexplored but important debt to Plato in Schelling’s philosophy of nature. In particular, Schelling is indebted to Plato’s late metaphysics in his model of the iterative combination of two basic principles: a productive, positive principle, akin to Plato’s unlimited, and a limiting, negative principle, akin to Plato’s limit. In Schelling’s philosophy of nature, the iterative interaction of these principles both provides a common ground for and accounts for the differences between inorganic and organic nature.

In times of climate change and unpredictable variations in weather conditions, not least in the climate of the North, Descartes’s treatise on Meteorology, published with Discourse on Method in 1637, has gained new relevance. He presents us with the kind of transformations that a Northern climate in particular materializes: weather consisting of small particles changing in shape and movement, intertwining, interfering and reorganising. This article argues that the Cartesian “figures” of the essay can be seen as philosophical thought-images of a preconceptual dimension of experience that abstract language fails to seize. In this way, they point to a dimension in Descartes’s philosophy that has been little commented upon, a tool of aesthetic approximation that lies between the res extensa and the res cogitans, a philosophical methodology using images explicitly appreciated by Descartes. The article links the use of images to the epistemological concept of “figure”, used to describe phenomena of the atmosphere that may be described as rhythmic. Here the analysis takes recourse to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of figural extension.

St. John of the Cross was aware of the fact that his mysticism resisted prosaic, discursive representation; however, most contemporary scholars have overlooked this radical component of his work. First, I trace the major philosophical influences on John’s work: Medieval Neoplatonism and Scholasticism (especially Pseudo-Dionysius and St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as Ibn Arabi and possibly Averroes). Second, by drawing on the Barthesian-Foucauldian concept of the author function, I demonstrate that the Mystical Doctor saw his poetry as free-standing, inexhaustible by even his own efforts to systematize key aspects of his poetry—an insurmountable task, which he had to be compelled to compile and publish by the nuns he guided in spiritual direction.

According to Stephen Darwall, being with others involves an implicit, second-personal respect for them. I argue that this is correct as far as it goes. Calling on Jean-Luc Nancy’s more ontological account of being-with, though, I also argue that Darwall’s account overlooks something morally very important: right at the heart of the being-with that gives us to ourselves as answerable to others on the basis of determinate, contractualist moral principles, we encounter an irreducible excess of sense that renders those principles questionable. Following Nancy, I characterize this exposure to excess as adoration and develop some of its moral implications.

These notebooks were written during the years that F. W. J. Schelling spent as a student at the Tübinger Stift (1790–1795). From dates written by Schelling in the margins, we can surmise that the first portion (AA II/4: 15–28) was begun in August of 1792, and the latter portion (AA II/5: 133–142) was written in early 1794. To this latter portion is appended a substantial work, Schelling’s Timaeus-commentary, which is not included in the present translation. It appeared as “Timaeus (1794)” (translated by Adam Arola, Jena Jolissaint, Peter Warnek) in Epoché 12: 2. These notebooks offer a window into Schelling’s philosophical development and proclivities, in light of his engagement with various Platonic dialogues, most notably the Ion, Theaetetus, Meno, Timaeus, and Philebus. They include discussions of divine power, rapture, and genius, especially as these relate to poetry, prophecy, and ordinary forms of human knowledge. These topics are discussed in the first portion (AA II/4: 15–25). In the latter portion, Schelling discusses myth, its function and relation to human greatness, Socrates’s daimonion, and the authority of tradition (AA II/4: 25–28; II/5: 133–142).

The essay focuses on a paradox in the modern reception of tragedy: modernity foregrounds the Sophoclean tragic hero, in particular, but undermines the significance of heroic agency as autonomous deliberation. This gesture could be traced back to Hölderlin’s reading of Antigone as “divine fool,” and culminates more recently in Loraux’s gendered theory of tragedy as the feminine mourning voice that opposes the masculine politics of rational deliberation and action. For Loraux, tragedy’s ethical thrust is to highlight the distorted temporality of the political logos, which gives us a false sense of infinity through power and action; in contrast, the tragic voice exposes that mortal beings’ only infinity is the infinity of suffering and mourning. First outlined in her essay on Antigone, this thesis is later expanded in a book on tragedy as dirge, focusing on Sophocles’s Electra. By rereading both Sophoclean plays as mirroring each other on the topics of mourning, action, and revenge, I submit that, not only is action indispensable for tragedy, but the heroines’ infinitization of mourning affirms their disregard for mortal time in pursuit of their own glory. Their “intransigence” in mourning—to use Bernard Knox’s term—is the feminine equivalent to the war glory pursued by their male counterparts, though Electra’s inactive revenge fantasies lessen her heroic stature. Contra modernity’s emphasis on time, history, and finitude, I insist that Sophoclean heroes/heroines contest and reject time and its limits.

In his chapter “Wal-Mart and the Heavens” from Living with Indifference, Charles Scott compares the experience of gazing at the starry heavens to the glow of Walmart at night. In this remarkable analogy, Scott suggests that one encounters an experience of sublime indifference that interrupts our usual judgments about the life-world and invites an appreciation for the sheer appearing of things. Scott concludes his study, however, by reminding us that we must be careful to observe the limits between such appearances, raising a longstanding question about our ability to discern such boundaries. Following a close re-reading of Scott’s reverie then, I attempt to explicate the hermeneutic limit underlying this agonistic relationship between Walmart and the starry heavens, τέχνη and Θαυμάζειν, in order to demonstrate just what its violation might look like for human understanding today. In doing so, however, I also attempt to show just what is so significant about our ability to see the stars.

In Of Grammatology (1967), Jacques Derrida explains that Western culture undergoes a transformation of knowledge and discourses that unfolds as the gramma­tization of experience. By resorting to the code of writing (grammē), as the elementary code of experience, modern sciences call into question ontological regionalism, that is, their traditional subordination to a fundamental ontology that assigns them the region of being corresponding to their field of investigation. Within this framework, Derrida develops a twofold schematic reading of Heidegger’s question of being in light of the question posed by scientific research to ontological regionalism. In this article, I focus on this reading, which has been overlooked by scholarship and yet undergirds Derrida’s later engagements with Heidegger, and I show that it draws on the overall interpretation of Heidegger’s thought developed by Derrida in his 1964–65 lecture course.

Most interpreters of Heidegger’s reflections on the body maintain that—whether early, middle, or late in the Gesamtausgabe—Dasein’s or the mortal’s openness to being/beyng is the ground of the fleshly or bodily (das Leibliche), but not the reverse. In this paper, I argue that there is evidence from Heidegger’s own oeuvre demonstrating that this relationship is instead mutually reciprocal. That is to say, I contend that corporeal variability is constitutive of Dasein’s openness to being just as Dasein’s openness to being is constitutive of its corporeal variability. Understood in this way, Heidegger’s thinking puts forward what I call a corpoietic understanding of the body and of the meaning of ability. I show that, despite the ableist assumptions at play in much of Heidegger’s work, such an understanding is nevertheless grounded in the idea of access, a central concept in philosophy of disability and disability studies. After developing this idea of ability as access, I close by addressing the larger political stakes of using Heidegger’s work to think about embodiment and disability given the Third Reich’s mass slaughter of people with disabilities.

Images permeate and propel archaic thinking in diverse ways. How do philosophic texts from the Greek archaic period (ca. eighth through early-fifth centu­ries BCE) conceive of images and what do images accomplish in archaic philosophies? In what ways can attention to images in philosophic texts open perspectives onto the relations of myth, poetry, and philosophy in the archaic Greek period? With these questions guiding the inquiry, this paper explores texts from various traditions jointly related within the archaic Aegean cultural matrix. Texts from what might be termed philosophy’s prehistory, such as the ancient Egyptian Leiden Hymns and Odysseia, pro­vide important context for understanding the continuity and development of images.

Heidegger’s thinking of the human way to be unavoidably concerns itself with a distinctive human possibility of being. It is argued here that the early Heidegger, who engaged Aristotle’s philosophy via what Heidegger calls “phenomenological interpretations,” learns from Aristotle’s method of definition but goes beyond it to conceive the idea of possibility—Dasein’s being-possible (Seinkönnen)—differently. It is reasonable to argue that the early Heidegger accomplishes a productive interpretation of Aristotle in this case while being indebted to Aristotle’s understanding of ‘definition’ as both “genuinely indicative” and “indeterminate.” Despite Aristotle’s ontological commitment to a metaphysics of presence (Anwesenheit) with its linkage of “possibility-actuality” (“dunamis-energeia/entelecheia”), Heidegger appreciates that there remains an important possibility of phenomenological interpretation in both Aristotle’s concept of zóon lógon echon and the expression ‘tò tí en einai’. This interpretive move is discussed here.

This is a translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 1988 essay, “Musik und Zeit: Ein philosophisches Postscriptum.” The essay, although brief, is noteworthy in that it contains Gadamer’s philosophical reflections on music—reflections which are largely absent in his masterwork, Truth and Method. In the essay, one finds several important Gadamerian hermeneutical themes such as the notion of art as performance or enactment (Vollzug), the linguisticality of understanding, the importance of lingering with an artwork or text, and how our absorption in the work gives rise to a particular experience of time.

The following examines Hannah Arendt’s interpretations of Greek thought, specifically her phenomenological reading of Homer and Socrates as proto-phenomenological thinkers of objectivity, plurality, and logos. Drawing inspiration from these thinkers, Arendt finds the means of preserving and actualizing plurality as the existential truthfulness that emerges from the conflict in speaking and acting with others. She does this by contrasting how, after the trial and death of Socrates, thinking became professional philosophy and shifted its focus from the reciprocal interdependence of thinking, speaking, and acting well in the polis and towards a reflection on truth, unity, and necessity that takes its start from an ontological order that is either prior to or beyond the world of appearances. Engaging with the literature, this article examines and assesses Arendt’s claims and focuses on the themes of plurality, conflict, and speaking, as set out in her interpretations of Homer and Socrates.

Being can no longer be thought, for Plato, in accordance with Parmenides’ either/or; rather, it is both/and, both present in and absent from things, which is how they can come-to-presence and go-out-into-absence. But as the Parmenides demonstrates, Greek grammar hints at a fundamental ontological truth: the expression, “one one,” ἓν ἕν, shows that being can be implied, neither present nor absent—for being is an implication. But then participating must be rethought in terms of implying: being is implied in everything that is and is one, which is how it is present in beings and absent therefrom. But this understanding of participation—as Aristotle insists—is contradictory. Luckily, there is another way: implication qua belonging—being no longer participates-in, but belongs-to things, which is how it is one with them, distinct but inseparable. But this too, betrays implication, fails to grasp being’s way of being, and the meaning of being qua implied, and so cannot illuminate how being and beings are and are one—for as the suspension of presence and/or absence, implying is irreducible to participating or belonging. Rather, if being is implied, it is because implication is suspension, which is why it is so suspenseful.

In this paper, I show that the Parmenides provides important insight into how to properly engage in philosophical discussion—or, more accurately, how not to engage in it. From references to age, love-of-winning and love-of-honor, and a paral­lel to the Phaedo, I show that Parmenides is ruled by the spirited part of his soul in a way that compromises his ability to philosophize, and that the Parmenides is a warn­ing about doing philosophy from a love of honor. Ideally, we should do philosophy from a love of wisdom. When we are honor-loving, we are not only motivated by the wrong kind of thing, but our love of honor can also blind us to the specific ways in which we might be falling short of ideal philosophical engagement, such as missing the potential dangers of engaging in philosophy with certain kinds of interlocutors.

In this paper, I focus on Luigi Pareyson’s interpretation of Schelling, arguing that it must be read in continuity with Pareyson’s early engagement with the philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers. Firstly, I argue that Pareyson shapes his existentialism on Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s thoughts, and particularly in relation to that which he considers the fundamental question of philosophy, namely ‘why is there Being rather than nothingness?’ Secondly, I demonstrate how Pareyson reads Schelling’s philosophy in light of his interpretations of Jaspers and Heidegger, i.e., in relation to the ‘fundamental question of philosophy’. Finally, I show how Pareyson’s reading of Schelling is centered on the notion of ‘awe of reason’, and how he defines Schelling as a ‘post-Heideggerian thinker’, since Heidegger’s philosophy allows us to innovatively reinterpret Schelling’s philosophy in an existentialist way.

This paper aims to discuss the coherence and consistency of the Stoic and the Nietzschean “art of dying at the right time”. Throughout this paper, we will use this expression to refer to the Stoics’ and Nietzsche’s treatment both of involuntary and voluntary death, inasmuch as both seem to be strongly connected to and grounded on the notion of timeliness. Taking this notion as a guiding thread, we will emphasize the several similarities that link their approach to suicide. Indeed, as will be shown, it is plausible to assume that Nietzsche’s understanding of voluntary death is particularly influenced by the Stoic tradition. At the same time, we will point out the relevant differences that make these two approaches differ. In dealing with the Stoic and the Nietzschean attitude towards suicide, the underlying question will be whether the legitimization and defense of voluntary death is compatible—and if so, to which extent—with their teachings, in particular, with their notions of happiness and affirmation of life, on the one hand, and their ideals of living in accordance with nature and amor fati, on the other.

In order to revise interpretive prejudgments, it is important to first recognize them for what they are. Problematically, the habitual overreliance on deficient prejudgments can make such recognition difficult. An impasse appears: How can one intervene on deficient interpretive resources if those very same resources conceal their deficiencies? I analyze James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” in which the protagonist Gabriel is highly resistant to internalizing experiences that might otherwise prompt him to revise his interpretive projections. I argue that Gabriel only becomes aware of his interpretive shortcomings after an experience of profound hesitation that allows him to affectively sense the limitations of his prejudice. Drawing from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kristie Dotson, and Alia Al-Saji, I argue that Gabriel’s experience of hesitation temporarily denaturalizes his deeply entrenched sexism, circumventing the hermeneutical impasse described above. Read in this way, “The Dead” illustrates the power of affective experiences to unsettle highly resilient ways of seeing the world.

In this essay, I argue that Socrates adopts a philosophical stance of indifference that is particularly unique to the Protagoras. The peculiarity stems from Socrates’s (or perhaps Plato’s) significant interest in dealing with Protagoras as a certain kind of thinker rather than merely a sophist in general. The stance of indifference is shown to be a dramatic reaction to the attitude sophists like Protagoras take toward philosophical problems, specifically, thinkers who understand solutions to philosophical problems as commodities. The stance is shown to anticipate certain Academic skeptical methods, to embolden Socratic ignorance, and shore up defenses against the sophistic insecurity of needing to succeed for the sake of success. This stance is elaborated upon in three specific aspects of Socrates’s dramatic portrayal culminating in a re-reading of the poem of Simonides and the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus. I resist readings that try to see the Protagoras as a simple takedown of sophistry or as a catalog of platonic doctrine, and instead treat Protagoras as a “philosopher in decline,” a significantly dangerous type of thinker who is savvy enough to repurpose genuine insight for the sake of easy answers to immensely difficult problems.

Situating the Philebus within the greater context of Plato’s late-period reconsideration of his own “theory of Ideas,” this essay offers a coordinated interpretation of two of the dialogue’s central passages—the discussion of the God-Given Method and that of the Fourfold Ontology. These passages prove to be interested not in Ideas apart from their material instantiations, as often seemed the case in the middle period dialogues, but in Ideas as they work on and even in materiality as such, producing an intelligible and even beautiful order in the sensible world. This entails, the essay suggests, something like a shift in the direction of Plato’s philosophical gaze and interest toward material being, and thereby a sort of return home to the embodied human condition.

Readings of Plato’s Ion are usually guided by one of two broad assumptions about the nature of the text. The Romantic school sees the dialogue as making explicit the idea of Genius, and of the artist as a privileged seer of hidden truths. The Rationalist tendency sees the dialogue as a Socratic attack on poetry, of a piece with other dialogues—most notably, the Republic—that also critique the art. In this paper, I claim that applying a phenomenological method to the dialogue uncovers a way beyond the impasse between these two schools. Specifically, I argue that we must turn our attention away from the question of whether poetry is a human art or divinely inspired, and toward the phenomenon at the heart of the dialogue, which is poetry itself, or better put, the creative act that generates poetic language. Moreover, the Ion itself calls for such a reading.

When the Cynic philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope, coins the term ‘cosmopolitan,’ he invites an expansive understanding of the ethical and political commitments one should endeavor to challenge and uphold. Whereas the politics of the day privileged one’s status and role in the polis as foundational for rights, entitlements, duties, and allegiances, the cosmopolitan perspective highlights the arbitrary nature of political boundaries and benefits. This permits virtue, nature, and reason to supplant law and custom as the standards for judgment. After grounding the invention of cosmopolitanism in its political and ethical context, this paper explores what is salient in the notion by attending to it in its own right and as a foil for a different kind of ethically driven political structure, here represented by Plato’s kallipolis.

In this paper I explore the connections between shame and embodiment in Euripides’s play Helen. The paper focuses on the play’s underlying theme of sexual violence and rape, and on the descriptions of metamorphoses that the mythological female victims often undergo in the face of rape. In my analysis on shame and embodiment I apply two insights from Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the phenomenon of victim shame in The Remnants of Auschwitz. These are, first, the definition according to which shame is “to be consigned to what cannot be assumed”—that is, to be consigned to one’s self, being and physical body—and second, the claim that in shame one is affected by one’s own (bodily) passivity. Building on these definitions, I explore the intimate connection between shame and embodiment at work in Helen. As a result we can see how the female metamorphoses before or after sexual violence—in Euripides’s play and in Greek mythology in general—can be read in terms of victim shame. Furthermore, I suggest that this shame of the victims of sexual violence originates from the very nature of the crime itself: from being forced to experience the body’s abject passivity.

Double speak refers to two parallel devices that are often deployed together: simple repetition, which is frequently used as both emphasis and as an indicator of double speak, and ambiguous syntax such that the phrase uttered may have multiple meanings at once. This paper explores the use of double speak in early Ancient Greek poetic texts, beginning with Homer and tracing its use through the texts of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles. Double speak seems to be employed in order to mediate between mortal and divine, creating a double audience: a god or goddess is capable of speaking in two registers at once, so a mortal listening will infer one meaning, while from the perspective of the god or goddess speaking, the statement will have another meaning supplemental to the first. This paper demonstrates the manner in which these Presocratic thinkers employ double speak as a means of disrupting human binary habits of thinking and creating a “quantum awareness” where the subject is able to perceive the relationships and paradoxes that exist between the knower and the seeming objects of knowledge, as well as the habits of thinking and perceiving that nourish the repetition and growth of those patterns.

This essay seeks to understand Gorgias’ reflections upon language and perception in the Encomium of Helen through the threefold vocabularies of medicine, enchantment, and oratory that were often taken together in the fifth century. I demonstrate that the two modes of sorcery to which Gorgias refers have to do with language and its effect on opinion, on the one hand, and perception and its effect upon one’s affective bearing, on the other. Both effects, I claim, are grasped through their forceful means of physically impressing and deforming the soul such that its reliance upon memory and habitual forms of dwelling in the world are subject to oblivion. Further, such conceptual and practical unmooring can be understood as forms of disease that rob an individual of her agency, either temporarily or permanently, and therefore reflect the problematic status of language in early democratic Greece.

This paper begins with a brief examination of the contemporary American political landscape.  I describe three recent events that illustrate how attempts to control the narrative about events that transpired threaten to undermine our shared reality.  I then turn to Book I  of Plato’s Republic to explore the potentially tyrannizing effect of  Socrates’s narrative voice.  I focus on his descriptions of Glaucon, Polemarchus and his slave, and Thrasymachus to show how Plato presents Socrates’s narrative activity as a process that controls how the auditor  understands the events that follow.  I then turn to an alternate understanding of  Socratic narrative which extols its philosophically and politically liberatory possibilities.  I use  my own previous work on  Socratic narrative,  Jill Frank’s  Poetic Justice,  and Rebecca’s LeMoine’s Plato’s Cave  as three examples that emphasize the more positive dimensions of  Socratic narrative. Finally, I  end with a brief exploration of Cornel West’s Democracy Matters, and bell hooks’ works on pedagogy to argue for the possibility a Socratically-informed public space for political discourse.

Shortly before the first publication of The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche identified his philosophy as an “inverted Platonism.” Although, as Martin Heidegger warns, “we may not overlook the fact that the ‘inverted Platonism’ of his early period is enormously different from the position finally attained,” nonetheless, Nietzsche’s suspicion about otherworldly truths and optimistic faith in reason runs as a strong current throughout his works. I argue that Nietzsche’s view of Plato as the initiator of the “true world”—the world that must be overcome on Nietzsche’s valuation—and of Socrates as a proponent of logicality suffers from the same overly rationalistic thinking that Nietzsche himself impugns in Plato. To account for Nietzsche’s interest in setting up Plato as the origin of the system of thought he seeks to overcome, I analyze Nietzsche’s remarks on Plato’s Phaedo in the Birth of Tragedy.

Scholars often take purification (κάθαρσις) to be a concept that persists the same throughout Plato’s dialogues. Generally, they take it to mean the separation of the soul from the body, picking up on Socrates’s account at Phaedo 67c–d. I do not find that this account of purification endures throughout the dialogues. In this paper, I argue that in Symposium Diotima describes purification differently. I argue that her account of purification emphasizes preparedness for encountering the forms, not the eradication of the corporeal. I present this account in three steps. First, I discuss Diotima’s lower and higher mysteries, focusing on the lower mysteries. Next, I examine Diotima’s use of the Eleusinian mysteries as an analogy for her own mysteries. Here, I overview the historical rites at Agrai and the Eleusinian Mysteria. I argue that, mirroring the Agrai rites, Diotima’s lower mysteries are purificatory, and therefore provide an account of purification. Finally, I explain the account of purification Diotima presents in the lower mysteries as the desire to possess the deathless deathlessly. Diotima’s account of purification is importantly distinct from the Phaedo account. In the former, the separation of the soul from the body is in no way important for purification. We must confront the discrepancies between these accounts and recognize that purification is not a doctrine that persists throughout the dialogues.

The Protagoras exhibits several traits of metatheatrical comedy. Through the use of role-playing and intertextual reference, I argue that the Protagoras exhibits metatheatrical comedy which Socrates uses to expose the pretension at the heart of philosophical dialogue itself. In this way, Socrates pulls back the curtain of philosophical dialogue to expose the theatricality of such dialogue and, in doing so, offers the audience a unique opportunity to laugh at ourselves.

Water, hydōr: it is the first word of ancient Greek philosophy, the word used by Thales, the first philosopher, to describe the material principle subtending all things. By the time of Plato, philosophers were proposing other kinds of non-material principles to explain diverse phenomena, principles like soul, mind, or ideas. But Plato would continue to be interested in—even fascinated by—water, water in every imaginable form, at once pure and impure, transparent and troubled, drinkable and undrinkable, flowing and still, fresh and salt, shallow and deep. In this paper, I look at Plato’s fascination with and fundamental ambivalence toward water, his understanding of water as both a political question (in his depiction of the island of Atlantis and the city of Athens) and a philosophical problem (in the myth of the cave and the divided line in the Republic and the myth of the earth in the Phaedo). I suggest by the end of the paper, using the work of Jacques Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy” to guide my argument, that, for Plato, water was at once the greatest danger for philosophy and its most powerful resource.

This essay argues that the fundamental premise of Aristotle’s political philosophy is that free citizens are those who rule and are ruled in turn. The virtuous community sustains a mean between these two dimensions of political life, and the decadent regime errs by excess or deficiency from this ideal. Aristotle sees the production and exercise of law as essential to preserve the continuity of the arrangements between citizens. In the production of law, the process of ruling together is best exemplified, and, at the same time, the citizens give themselves over to be ruled by the principles that have been laid down. Since living well is carried out in the realm of the political, we have to learn how to express our life in relationship to the whole that is shared with others. The life of law is achieved when the citizens become lawful.