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61. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Drew A. Hyland To the Verge: On the Work Of John Sallis
62. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Alessandra Fussi Love of the Good, Love of the Whole: Diotima’s Response to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium
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Diotima criticizes, but does not refute, Aristophanes’ thesis that love is desire for completeness. Her argument incorporates that thesis within a more complextheory: eros is desire for the permanent possession of the good, and hence also desire for immortality. Aristophanes cannot account for the aspirations entailed in the desire for fame or in the desire for knowledge. Such aspirations can be understood only with reference to the good. However, the paper shows how time plays a fundamental role in the original pursuit of wholeness at the center of Aristophanes’ myth of the two halves. Diotima appropriates his thesis when she describes the urge to leave behind something similar to what one has been. The desire for immortality is nothing but a desire for completeness pursued by mortal nature against the never-ending destruction of time.
63. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Danielle A. Layne Refutation and Double Ignorance in Proclus
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Regardless of the inconsistencies between Plato and his inheritors, the late neo-Platonist Proclus offers poignant answers to several contemporary debatesimbedded in Socratic scholarship. In the following, we will concentrate on Proclus’s interpretation of the Socratic elenchos and the provocative concept of double ignorance by clarifying their appearance in The Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides and The Commentary on the Alcibiades I. In this endeavor we shall unpack how Proclus characterizes the elenchos as an authentic dialectic purifying its recipients from an evil caused by the conceit to knowledge, a condition which unfortunately almost all men suffer and require treatment.
64. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Russell Winslow On the Life of Thinking in Aristotle’s De Anima
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In “On the Life of thinking in Aristotle’s De Anima,” the author offers an interpretation of the tripartite structure of the unified soul in Aristotle’s text. The principleactivity that unities the nutritive, sensuously perceptive and noetically perceptive parts of the soul into a single, continuous entity is shown by our author to be genesis (or the sexual begetting of offspring). After establishing this observation, the paper provides the textual grounds to understand how both sensuous and noetic perception can be understood as a kind of embodied genesis. A further consequence of this argument will be an interpretation of “thinking,” of noetic perception, as a kind of open and passive reception of the primary forms of other beings. As such, Aristotle’s conception of thinking, qua nous, is a refreshing, if strange, contrast to the more common modern vision of “thinking” as the activity of an agent mentally seizing hold of beings in the service of the mastery of nature.
65. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Phil Hopkins Weaving the Fish Basket: Heraclitus on Riddles and the Relation of Word and World
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Heraclitus stands in opposition to the general systematic tendency of philosophy in that he insisted that the contents of philosophy are such as to requireexpositional strategies whose goal it is to do something with and to the reader rather than merely say something. For him, the questions of philosophy and, indeed, the matters of the world such questions take up are not best approached by means of discursive propositions. His view of the relation of the structures of reality to the structures of language requires procedures for understanding the world and talking about it that recognize and exploit the essentially riddle-like nature of both things and words.
66. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou Plato and Hegel on an Old Quarrel
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This paper addresses the relationship of ancients to moderns by focusing on the “quarrel” between art and philosophy that has led to two articulations of the endof art—one in antiquity, another in modernity: Plato, who expelled the poets from his city on account of art’s irrationality, and Hegel, for whom art was no more the necessary vehicle for truth. Following Giorgio Agamben’s cue in The Man Without Content, I opt for a symptomatic reading of Plato’s condemnation of art, by foregrounding his ambivalence toward poetry. I conclude that, whereas Hegel found poetry wanting, Plato understood poetry’s truth to be tragically excessive.
67. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
James Risser Discourse, Dialectic, and the Art of Weaving
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This paper explores the way in which the art of weaving, as it is initially presented in Plato’s Statesman, serves to configure both the fundamental character ofdiscourse and the limit experience of discourse for Plato. The problem that arises in relation to this configuration pertains to the possible unity of discourse (and with it the acquisition of knowledge). In relation to the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and his reading of Plato, it is argued that the unity of discourse follows “the arithmos structure of the logos” with its distinctive dialectical character. It is concluded that this character expresses the finitude of knowing in which oppositions remain in tension.
68. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Walter Brogan Letter from the Editor
69. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
John Sallis Speaking of the Earth: Figures of Transport in the Phaedo
70. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
M. Ross Romero, S.J. Without the Least Tremor: Ritual Sacrifice as Background in the Phaedo
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Sacrifice haunts the Phaedo. In this article, I argue that the mise-en-scène of the death scene of the Phaedo, as well as other sacrificial elements in the background of the dialogue, creates a nexus that positively integrates the birth, philosophical practice, and death of Socrates into the ritualized rhythm of the life of the city of Athens. A close reading of the death scene presented as a synopsis with Walter Burkert’s well-known analysis of Greek sacrifice reveals convergences and divergences between the Phaedo and Greek sacrificial practice. Socrates appears as a willing victim who accepts the city’s sacrificial practice while remaining on his own terms.
71. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
John Sallis In the Open of the Question
72. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Walter Brogan Generosity and Reserve: The Choric Space of the Good in Plato’s Philosophy
73. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 1
Anthony Kammas Homo Deus and the Dice Throw: Courage and Chaos in Greek Antiquity
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What lessons are there yet to learn from the works of Homer and Hesiod for political life? These ancient texts vividly illustrated an ethic which insisted that one must strive to maintain a consistent character against a chaotic world and one’s own inconstant human nature. This essay, therefore, recovers a long dismissed conception of the world, as well as a notion of virtue that was cultivated to steel one’s self against the tragic turns of radical, ironic chance that are always a possibility in a kosmos sprung from chaos.
74. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 1
William S. Wilkerson In the World but Not Of the World: The Relation of Freedom to Time in Kant and Sartre
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Kant’s and Sartre’s theories of freedom are both famous and controversial. Kant requires the subject to be both in time and not in time in order to be fully free, while Sartre seemingly requires that the subject continually reinvent itself each moment. I argue that these peculiarities stem from the similar way each thinker conceives of the relationship between freedom and time. A full and meaningful account of human freedom requires both continuity and rupture in the flow of time, and the paradoxes in both philosophers’ theories of freedom originate in their attempt to satisfy both of these temporal requirements.
75. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 1
Robert Metcalf The Trial of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium
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While many scholarly interpretations of Plato’s Symposium express skepticism toward the content of Alcibiades’ speech, this essay argues Alcibiades’ portrait of Socrates is credible on the whole, is consistent with the portrayal of Socrates elsewhere, and is of great significance for our understanding of philosophical eros as exemplified in Socrates’ philosophical activity. Furthermore, by putting Socrates on trial for hybris, Alcibiades’ speech raises important philosophical questions as to whether the contempt with which he treated Alcibiades is not part and parcel of the wholesale contemning of human particularity implicit in Diotima’s teaching about eros.
76. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 1
Brian Harding The Virtue of Suicide and the Suicide of Virtue: A Reading of Cicero’s On Ends and Tusculan Disputations
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This paper argues that suicide is very important for Cicero’s articulation and defense of the philosophical life. Happiness, according to Cicero, is dependent upon a willingness to commit suicide. I explain why this is the case through a discussion of On Ends and the Tusculan Disputations. I conclude with some critical remarks about Cicero’s argument, with reference to book XIX of Augustine’s City of God.
77. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 1
Juan Manuel Garrido Jean-Luc Nancy’s Concept of Body
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This article carries out a systematic exposition of the concept of the body in Jean-Luc Nancy, with all the risks of reduction that such an exposition entails. First it is necessary to return to Western philosophy’s founding text on living corporality, that is, Aristotle’s treatise on the soul. The oppositions that can be established between the Greek thinker’s psyche (soul) and Nancy’s dead Psyche are not so radical as may at first be thought: In both it is a question of thinking the soul as the difference, the retreat or departure in which the exposition of bodies consists. The article continues with an analysis of touch and the self and concludes with an elaboration of the idea of the body within the general program of the deconstruction of Christianity.
78. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 1
Ashley Pryor Socrates in Drag: Images of Helen of Troy in Plato’s Phaedrus
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By way of the complex topography of the Phaedrus, Plato raises the question of his authorship and the consequences it has for the reader’s reception of Socrates, by likening Socrates’ changing status in the text to the complex mythological traditions surrounding the rape and abduction of Helen of Troy (amidst a grove of plane trees). As Socrates is likened to the excessive and “duplicitous” Helen and her various “eidolic” apeareances, the question of the dialogue appears to shift from “who is Socrates?” to a more postmodern formulation: which Socrates?
79. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 1
Christopher Eagle Right Names: On Heidegger’s Closet Cratylism
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In the Cratylus, Soc rates discusses with Cratylus and Hermogenes the question of whether names are merely arbitrary or in some sense ‘right,’ that is, motivated by the nature of the things they designate. In this article, I examine Heidegger’s controversial project of unearthing archē Greek terms in the specific light of the Cratylus and the tradition of “Cratylisms” which it has fostered. Having demonstrated the underlying Cratylist tendencies behind Heidegger’s conviction in the inherent ‘appropriateness’ of many Greek keywords, I point out some of the problems posed by this closet Cratylism for Heidegger’s conception of primordial language as well as his critique of the correspondence theory of truth.
80. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 1
Andrea Rehberg The World and the Work of Art
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One of the central notions running through Heidegger’s oeuvre, early and late, is that of ‘world.’ By examining some issues and problems surrounding Heidegger’s statements relating to ‘world’ in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” both aspects of Heidegger's broader trajectory of thought, as well as the workings of the artwork essay itself are thereby illuminated. Several, partially competing senses of ‘world’ are discovered in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and their provenance traced to specific concerns of Heidegger. In a hermeneutic strategy of immanent critique, the artwork essay is shown to harbour the resources for its own deconstruction, and to do so precisely at certain aporetic textual points centred around the concept ‘world.’