_Provocative reinterpretation of Plato's Symposium._.

Author Steven Berg offers an interpretation of this dialogue wherein all the speakers at the banquetwith the exception of Socratesnot only offer their views on ...

The Argument of the Action is a collection of essays by Seth Benardete on Greek poetry and philosophy selected and introduced by Ronna Burger and Michael Davis. We must be grateful to the editors for making these remarkable essays available to readers once again. The collection encompasses the greater part of the most significant authors of Greek antiquity: Homer and Hesiod, the tragedians, and Plato and Aristotle. Each essay opens up the work under consideration and illuminates its essential concerns in (...) such a new and yet convincing way that the reader is forced to experience simultaneously a shock of surprise and a sense of recognition. In interpreting these works, Benardete never repeats himself, never foists an alien schema upon the text, and never merely rests upon the laurels of an insight previously won. Yet, and this is one of the most admirable aspects of the book, despite the range of their topics and the individuality of each interpretation, the essays exhibit a rare unity of intellectual purpose. They constitute an exploration of a single terrain of reflection which includes, on the one hand, the character and meaning of Socrates’ “turn to the speeches” or his “second sailing” and, on the other, the setting and preconditions of that turn displayed in the works of the Greek poets. (shrink)

As in the case of his predecessor Machiavelli, Nietzsche presents his interpreter with the problem of how to understand his rhetorical calls to arms: are they stimulants to action or part of the action of an argument that is ultimately in the service of a cognitive end? In his study on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Stanley Rosen initially appears to wish to combine these two interpretive approaches. He understands the intention of the book to be both theoretical, as “a critical (...) commentary on the history of European culture,” and political or practical, as a rhetorical “incitement to revolution” or the creation of a radically new order of things. According to Rosen, however, in the interest of his practical intention Nietzsche adopts a rhetorical “mask” that is, as it were, Janus faced: he employs a “double rhetoric” that includes both a destructive and a creative moment. Within each of these distinct moments the same doctrines, namely, those of the will to power and the eternal return, are employed, but to contrary ends. In the former case they serve as the chief weapons in Nietzsche’s assault on the regnant tradition—“Platonism” in both its philosophical and popular guises—and in the latter, they are redeployed in an effort to found the new epoch of the Zarathustrian superman. Rosen argues, however, that these doctrines ultimately prove to be fatal not only to the old tradition, but also to the creation of any novel order as well. For, on the one hand, the historical and cosmological necessity of recurrence renders all so-called production merely reproduction and all apparent freedom of the will illusory and, on the other, what Rosen takes to be the truth behind the doctrines of the will to power and eternal recurrence—namely, nature as the random “accumulation and discharge of points of force” —reduces all life, human or superhuman, to the status of an insubstantial expression of this underlying and unintelligible ground: “chaos”. (shrink)