In cases in which many causes together bring about an effect, it is common to select some as particularly important. Philosophers since Mill have been pessimistic about analyzing this reasoning because of its variability and the multifarious causal and pragmatic details of how it works. I argue Mill was right to think these details matter but wrong that they preclude philosophical analysis of causal selection. I show that analyzing the pragmatic details of scientific debates about the important causes of the (...) Bhopal Gas Tragedy can illuminate causal reasoning about disasters and shed new light on causality and causal selection. (shrink)

This essay argues that R.G. Collingwood's remarks about genre are implausible, and that they stem, despite their apparent origin in his wider account of art, from his failure to take some of his own most important insights seriously enough. Some possible reasons for that failure are suggested; and it is shown that, once the relevant insights are given their proper weight, Collingwood's account commands the resources from which a plausible story about genre might have been constructed. To this extent, the (...) present essay constitutes a defence of Collingwood's philosophy of art. (shrink)

A critical account of "Humanism" and some of its extreme forms and manifestations; reflection on some of the important challenges these raise in relation to higher education in the 21st century.

In an analysis of 47 U.S. journalism ethics codes, we found that although most consider images, only 9 address a gripping issue: how to treat images of tragedy and violence, such as those produced on the battlefields of Iraq, during the 2005 London bombings, and after Hurricane Katrina. Among codes that consider violent and tragic images, there is agreement on what images are problematic and a move toward green-light considerations of ethical responsibilities. However, the special problems of violence and (...) truth telling in wartime and issues of how to handle graphic images across media platforms receive virtually no attention. (shrink)

본문의 목적은 유학적 사유와 삶의 양식에서 비극적인 상황은 어떻게 이해되고 극복되는지를 탐색하는 데 있다. 특히 세월호 참사와 그에 연관된 사건들을 논의의 중심에 둔다. 세월호 참사 피해자들의 비통함은 양심의 가책과 공동체에 관한 도덕적 문제의식을 불러일으킨다. 본문에서는 유학적 사유의 재료들을 세월호 참사란 구체적 비극에 적용하여, 유학을 배우고 익히는 이들이 자신들에게 닥쳐온 비극적 상황을 해석하고 다시 보편화하는 사유의 방법론을 탐문한다. 유학에서 발견되는 비극의 테마들은 유학이 금욕적이고 지성적인 태도만을 사람들에게 요구하지 않음을 보여준다. 비극을 보편적인 사건으로 받아들이고 극복하고 치유하는 원동력은 ‘만물일체(萬物一體)’에 기초한 ‘공감의 연대’에서 찾을 (...) 수 있다. 나아가 세월호 참사란 사례에서 중화(中和)라는 개념은 어떻게 읽힐 수 있는지에 대해 숙고한다. 중화 공부란 개인 정감의 수양을 넘어 공동체적 차원의 회복으로까지 확장되어야 한다. 결론적으로, 유학은 현대의 비극에 대해 시의성과 절실함을 담아 응답해야 하며, 유학자들은 세계적으로 발호하는 증오와 폭력에 맞서 무슨 일을 할 수 있는지 모색해야 한다. (shrink)

Human rights have made mass murder and genocide more, rather than less, likely. -/- Posted 21 December 2022. A previous version of this paper appears as chapter 3 of my Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).

The paper offers a disjunctivist solution to the paradox of tragedy. The first part of the paper defends a version of disjunctivism as that doctrine is understood in the epistemology of perception, and contrasts it with its rival, conjunctivism. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that the traditional paradox of tragedy—the question why tragedy gives pleasure—can be solved by adopting a disjunctivist approach to the relevant felt emotions. The tragic audience does not really (...) feel ‘sorrow, terror, anxiety’ (so Hume), but simulacra thereof, emotions which resemble the originals in certain respects but which have quite different connections with action. A conjunctivist approach to the paradox discerns a ‘highest common factor’ in both non-fictional and fictional scenarios: but this is not only phenomenologically implausible; it decouples the agent from the actions that are essentially keyed to particular emotions, and so splits the self. (shrink)

This article discusses Nietzsche's response in The Birth of Tragedy to what he calls the wisdom of Silenus, that “the very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is to die soon.” I begin by analyzing the view that Silenus expresses a proto-Schopenhauerian truth about the world as “Will.” I then review Bernard Reginster's interpretation of the wisdom of Silenus as an (...) early form of Nietzschean nihilism. As an alternative to these readings, I argue that, for Nietzsche, Silenus's wisdom addresses a crucial, existential dimension of ancient Greek tragic culture. I conclude by pointing out that, in BT, Nietzsche locates nihilism not in the wisdom of Silenus, but in the advent of Socratism. (shrink)

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) came to fame in 1798 with the first volume of her Plays on the Passions, which included her theoretical account of drama, including tragedy. This article reconstructs Baillie's theory of tragedy and shows how the theory informs the design of the Plays on the Passions. For Baillie, all human beings have powerful and dangerous passions that we need to learn to regulate. Tragedy can help with this and can serve an educative purpose by presenting (...) us with narratives in which the protagonists repeatedly fail to check the growth of a particular passion, such as jealousy or hatred. We witness this passion gain more and more hold over the character's mind until they are destroyed. This offers a warning and motivates us to watch out for the growth of our own passions and keep them in check. Baillie's theory of tragedy is original and combines a moral orientation, a voluntarist belief in free will, and optimism about the human condition. For her, the sufferings undergone by tragic characters could have been avoided had the characters made better choices. Thus the message of tragedy is not that suffering is inescapable but that suffering can be minimized if we cultivate self-knowledge and emotional self-control. (shrink)

: In 1999, Philosophy and Literature gave the top prize in its annual Bad Writing Contest to Judith Butler, and the national press echoed the journal in denouncing critical theory as overblown, jargon-ridden, and ungrammatical. Academic theorists reacted with pique, but not a soul in the public sphere came to their defense. Now, the professors have issued an anthology justifying their prose and denouncing Denis Dutton and other critics of bad writing. They claim that bad, or rather "difficult" writing has (...) a critical thrust: to break down common sense and dismantle unjust social notions.They fail to make their case. Much of the writing is, alas, bad. Entries offer tendentious, petulant reactions to the hubbub. Rarely do they address the basic point of the contest: that humanities professors no longer respect ideals of wit, eloquence, and learning. Instead, we have another parade of academic parochialism and radical chic passing itself off as adversarial culture and social justice. (shrink)

아폴론적인 것은 디오니소스적인 것과 함께 『비극의 탄생』의 핵심을 이루는 요소들이다. 그런데 『비극의 탄생』에서 니체는 아폴론적인 것을 고통의 근원인 동시에 고통으로부터의 구원이라 주장한다. 일견 모순적으로 보이는 이 두 가지 입장은 어떻게 생겨난 것이며, 이 모순은 해소 가능한 것일까? 우리는 이 모순을 아폴론적인 것의 변질이란 관점에서 살펴보고자 한다. 니체에 의하면 아폴론적인 것은 소크라테스주의, 즉 극단적인 지성중심주의로 변질되었다. 아폴론적인 것을 소크라테스와 동일시할 경우, 우리는 아폴론적인 것을 고통의 근원으로 간주할 수밖에 없다. 반대로 변질되기 이전의 순수한 아폴론적인 것은 디오니소스적인 것과 상호균형을 이루며, 삶을 미화함으로써 인간을 (...) 고통으로부터 구원할 수 있다.BR 더불어 삶의 미화 기능은 아폴론적인 것이 가진 가장 훌륭한 가치이다. 이 미화기능이 비극의 정신에서만이 아니라 우리의 삶에도 적용되기 때문이다. 이러한 가치로 인하여 아폴론적인 것은 디오니소스적인 것과 함께 『비극의 탄생』에서 필수적인 요소가 된다. (shrink)

An analysis of contemporay technological society through the lens of Greek tragedy"--Provided by publisher.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy by Mario TelòSean LambertTelò, Mario. Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy. Ohio State University Press, 2020. 344pp.In Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, Mario Telò takes aim at one of the most canonical (if also one of the most contested) features of Greek tragedy: its potential to deliver catharsis (12).1 Through careful close readings of (...) Greek tragedies informed by psychoanalytic theory and deconstruction, Telò makes a persuasive case that tragedy is anti-cathartic. “The Freudian take on catharsis is complicated, or even undercut,” he writes in the introduction, “by its own anti-cathartic latencies… We can accordingly look at tragedy as a form of dramatic poetry that finds its affective raison d’être… in these anti-cathartic feelings” (34).Telò states that the intent of Archive Feelings is mainly to intervene in the age-old debate, asking: “why do human beings enjoy tragedy?” (14). He suggests that the pleasure of tragedy is, in fact, a masochistic one: a denial of release or pleasure (such as would come from catharsis) that an audience or reader enjoys in its specifically joyless jouissance. At stake is “feeling material,” a “fantasy” of “merging into the impersonal, anorganic, universal matter of elemental life” (44) evoked in tragedy’s death-driven withdrawal from action. With this concept in mind, Telò goes beyond even his own ambitions for his project. More than merely intervening in debates about the pleasures of tragedy, he argues powerfully for the continuing relevance of Greek tragedy for critical theory today, particularly in light of the so-called “affective” and “material” turns in the humanities. Archive Feelings is thus a useful book for classicists conducting interdisciplinary and/or trans-historical research, but even more so for any scholar working within the constellation of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, queer theory, affect theory or critical race theory. Telò makes a persuasive case for tragedy as a lodestar within this firmament–a vital tool for thinking through problems within and across disciplines.In striking contradistinction to previous theorists of Greek tragedy, including Aristotle and Nietzsche, Telò locates the engine of Greek tragedy in the death drive. In so doing, he reads in ancient narratives a number of experiences such as “acceleration, hoarding, vertiginous suspension, [End Page 113] breathless looping, affective bulimia or binge-eating, serial cutting, trying to enter or fold in upon oneself, auto-immune inflammation” (14), and finds in “the orgasm as an unfinished, non-teleological pleasure,” a desire to return to a state of “inert matter” (13).2 Noting that the original meaning of the Greek word archê is “origin,” Telò connects this impulse to once again become “inert” with the desire to create archives. Thus, Telò sees Greek tragedies as both a model for projects of archival reconstruction as well as archival projects themselves: they are “anxious and debilitating” attempts to “re-create the past as it was” (13).3Telò’s study is divided into three parts: Archival Time, Archival Space, and Archival Endings, which attempt to “structurally reproduce the psychological temporalities of the archive” (49). In each of his five chapters, Telò elaborates the diverse narrative masochisms of Greek tragedy, exploring the various stakes and species of tragic anti-catharsis. In Chapter 1, Telò reads the “archive fever” of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus against the “archive fatigue” of Euripides’ Phoenissae, finding in both of these plays—near the end of the epoch of ancient tragedy—an impulse toward “textual hoarding” (76) that both undermines the possibility of catharsis and “exhausts” (106) the possibilities of the genre (107). In both the “synchronic gathering of disparate fragments of experience” into the body of Oedipus before his death and the aesthetics of boredom, fatigue, and inertia that suffuse the Phoenissae, Telò locates a desire to store up, rather than purge, emotions such as pity and fear, in a flouting of the normal formula for catharsis (73).In Chapter 2, Telò looks at the figures of Heracles and Medea in their original myths and tragic incarnations, seeing in both the compulsion to recircle around scenes of their respective “primordial traumas” (145). In Euripides’s Medea, this move manifests in repeated references... (shrink)

Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy employs Silvan Tomkins' Affect-Script theory of human psychology to explore the largely unacknowledged emotions of disgust and shame in tragedy. The book begins with an overview of Tomkins' relationship to both traditional psychoanalysis and theories of human motivation and emotion, before considering tragedy via case studies of Oedipus, Hamlet, and Death of a Salesman. Aligning Affect-Script theory with literary genre studies, this text explores what motivates fictional characters within the (...) closed conditions of their imagined worlds and how we as an audience relate to and understand fictional characters as motivated humans. (shrink)

_The Incident at Antioch_ is a key play marking Alain Badiou's transition from classical Marxism to a "politics of subtraction" far removed from party and state. Written with striking eloquence and extraordinary poetic richness, and shifting from highly serious emotional and intellectual drama to surreal comic interlude, the work features statesmen, workers, and revolutionaries struggling to reconcile the nature and practice of politics. This bilingual edition presents _L'Incident d'Antioche_ in its original French and, on facing pages, an expertly executed English (...) translation. Badiou adds a special preface, and an introduction by the scholar Kenneth Reinhard connects the play to Paul Claudel's _The City_, Saint Paul and the early history of the Church, and the innovative mathematical thinking of Paul Cohen. The translation includes Susan Spitzer's extensive notes clarifying allusions and quotations and hinting at Badiou's intentions. An interview with Badiou encompasses the play's settings, themes, and events, as well as his ongoing literary and conceptual experimentation on stage and off. (shrink)