Through the two Blumenberg's concepts of meaninfulness and reception, analized in his Work on Myth, this article aims to explore the problem of distance as an ontological guarantee inherent in several narratives of the myth of Prometheus.

The aim of this work is to offer the reader a tour through the most significant interpretations of the Prometheus myth, attempting to contribute from their standpoint to the clarification of the relationship between moral law and political law. In especial, it aims to highlight in Prometheus’s attitude something that betrays the presence of a strongly individualized conscience, whose dictates lead him to clash with power in its highest expression. On the other hand, different interpretations of the Greek concept of (...) law are examined, where its highest expression is indebted to the idea of destiny. Based on Law, a common order that connects gods and humans is established, although not with the same degrees of subjection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 509 Mytheli Sreenivas Birth Control in the Shadow of Empire: The Trials of Annie Besant, 1877–1878 In March 1877, two London activists provoked a debate about poverty and overpopulation that reverberated across metropole and colony. These activists, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, republished a book by the American physician Charles Knowlton that outlined methods to prevent conception. TheFruitsofPhilosophy,which (...) Bradlaugh and Besant provocatively subtitled An Essay on the Population Question, had been in limited circulation in Britain since 1833, but the book’s legality was called into question when its previous publisher was charged with obscenity in early 1877.1 Determined to establish the legal right to publish information about contraception, on March 23rd, 1877, Bradlaugh and Besant delivered copies of The Fruits of Philosophy to the police department, the city solicitor, and local magistrates, and they announced their intent to sell the book from their premises at the Freethought Publishing Company on Stonecutter Street in East London. The following day, a crowd filled the narrow space outside the publishing house, and the two activists sold hundreds of copies of Knowlton’s book. When no arrests were made, Besant and Bradlaugh renotified the authorities that they were selling a supposedly obscene book and were informed in turn that papers were 1. S. Chandrasekhar, “A Dirty, Filthy Book”: The Writings of Charles Knowlton and Annie Besant on Reproductive Physiology and Birth Control and an Account of the Bradlaugh-Besant Trial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 26. 510 Mytheli Sreenivas being prepared for their arrest and prosecution. On the 7th of April, 1877, Besant and Bradlaugh were arrested and taken into custody.2 In their subsequent trial, the two activists linked birth control advocacy to a Malthusian worldview. They argued that the urban working classes and the rural poor in Britain labored under the burden of overpopulation. Humanitarian concern for impoverished people, and not intent to promote obscenity, drove them to disseminate information about birth control. Besant and Bradlaugh were eventually acquitted on a legal technicality, and Bradlaugh moved on to other issues. Besant, however, was dissatisfied with The Fruits of Philosophy because its methods were outdated by the science of the day. She was determined to write a more up-to-date guide explaining contraceptive methods and went on to found a Malthusian League to disseminate birth control information. These events—the trial and Besant’s further campaigns promoting contraception —mark a watershed moment in the history of birth control activism.3 They would shape how reproduction came to be understood not as a private matter, but as a particular sort of social problem, whose implications reverberated from London to the empire in India and back again. To outside observers, Bradlaugh and Besant may have seemed an unlikely pair to set these events into motion. Bradlaugh, at age forty-four, had a long history of association with radical causes. A celebrated atheist and antimonarchical republican, he helped to shape a tradition of mid-nineteenth-century English radicalism that developed in the wake of Chartist decline. As a member of the National Reform League in the 1860s, he had participated in public demonstrations to extend the franchise. His leadership of the National Secular Society made him a popular lecturer among Freethinkers on issues of political democracy, anticlericalism, and occasionally on neo-Malthusianism.4 2. Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 110–12. 3. The term “birth control” was coined in a meeting of Margaret Sanger and her associates in 1914, and thus would not have been in use in the late nineteenth century. The term contraception was not unknown, but had only limited circulation in scientific discourses. Nevertheless, I use both “birth control” and “contraception” interchangeably to mean methods to prevent conception. See Peter C. Engelman, A History of the Birth Control Movement in America (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), xviii. 4. Taylor, Annie Besant, 80–81. Mytheli Sreenivas 511 In comparison to Bradlaugh’s prominence, Besant was relatively unknown. Her public career began after a separation from her husband, the Anglican vicar Frank Besant. Perhaps the couple were ill-suited to each other from... (shrink)

Las tragedias clásicas griegas narran conflictos y confrontaciones entre tradiciones transmitidas y moldeadas por los poetas trágicos tipificadas en los antiguos mitos que ellos han recibido. Las nacientes ciudades griegas, con su nuevo orden y sus nuevas instituciones, se enfrentan a través de las obras trágicas a las viejas tradiciones e instituciones que son ahora cuestionadas y discutidas, y con ellas las nociones de responsabilidad y voluntad humanas son reclamadas ante el imperio de los dioses y su corolario acerca del (...) destino del hombre. Nociones que a su vez son exigidas por la creación del derecho y el gobierno de las leyes, ya no de los dioses ni de los hombres. El ensayo indaga, por el estatuto de estas tesis en dos obras trágicas de la literatura griega: “Prometeo Encadenado” de Esquilo y las “Bacantes” de Eurípides. (shrink)

An « instal-action », by Rolf and Heidi Abderhalden, Prometeo Acto I, performed in 2002 in a Bogota neighborhood in process of « modernisation », provides a prism through which the social stakes of urban transformation are revisited. The interaction between the Promethean myth and personal trajectories marked by precariousness and degradation reveals a whole series of splits and areas of political interventions which currently shape the restructuration of a metropolis like Bogota.

El presente artículo está dedicado al trabajo de Hans-Georg Gadamer titulado “Prometeo y Pandora”, publicado originalmente en español en 1949 en el volumen Goethe. 1749 - 28 de agosto – 1949, editado por la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Cuyo, Argentina. En primer lugar, se ofrece una introducción en la que se presenta el contexto original histórico-intelectual de su edición, traducción y publicación, los antecedentes filosóficos del texto dentro de la obra de Gadamer (conferencias y (...) artículos previos sobre el tema), una presentación breve de las fuentes y de los temas que trata el texto, así como una serie de aclaraciones sobre las correcciones que se realizaron para esta edición crítica. En segundo lugar, se ofrece una nueva edición de “Prometeo y Pandora”. Este ensayo es uno de los dos primeros trabajos de Gadamer que fueron traducidos al castellano y, a su vez, una de las primeras traducciones de las producciones de Gadamer a una lengua extranjera. //--// The following investigation focuses on the article of Hans-Georg Gadamer entitled “Prometheus and Pandora”, originally published in Spanish in 1949, in the book: "Goethe. 1749 – 28th August – 1949", edited by the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Cuyo, Argentina. Firstly, an introduction is offered in which is presented the original historical-intellectual context of its edition, translation and publication, the philosophical background of the text within Gadamer’s work (conferences and previous articles on the subject), a brief description of the sources and topics encompassed in the text, as well as a series of clarifications on the corrections made for the current critical edition. This essay is one of the first two works by Gadamer that were translated into Spanish and, in turn, one of the first translations of Gadamer's productions into a foreign language. (shrink)

El mito de Prometeo, proveniente de la Grecia clásica, fue transformado desde fines de la Edad Media -especialmente a partir del Renacimiento-, en uno de los grandes mitos de la modernidad. Su importancia es tal que puede decirse que constituye el espacio mítico de todas las utopías de la modernidad desde la Utopía de Tomás Moro. Excede dichas utopías, y es su raíz mítica. Más aún: aparece también en los grandes pensamientos críticos de la modernidad burguesa, por eso, también (...) contiene una clave para comprender el pensamiento utópico de Marx. Este mito moderno de Prometeo se vincula estrechamente con la crítica del cristianismo, que surge desde el Renacimiento y, a la vez sirve como trasfondo mítico en el surgimiento de nuevos enfoques de la ética. El texto destaca este papel clave del mito de Prometeo. Empieza analizando la forma que éste adquiere en el pensamiento de Marx, porque responde críticamente a las imaginaciones prometeicas anteriores. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the limits of (...) knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)

Il contributo discute la lezione προμηθέως del v. 86 del Prometeo Incatenato. Se ne discute la genuinità in rapporto alla fortunata congettura προμηθίας proposta da Peter Elmsley.

L'opera sviluppa una riflessione politico-simbolica sul rapporto identità-alterità per rintracciare le valenze, che favoriscono il riconoscimento dell'incontro, al di là del possibile scontro alternativo escludente. Due i simboli politici esaminati, Prometeo e Cristo, che danno di che pensare, sollecitando a ri-pensare, il rapporto con l'altro. Aut aut: da una parte la croce di Cristo che simbolicamente, con i suoi bracci che si intersecano l'uno attraverso l'altro, rappresenta l'apertura della dimensione immanente, nella sua orizzontalità, a quella trascendente, nella sua verticalità, (...) ossia la tensione al supra e al prius quale esigenza di progresso ascensionale di ricerca del massimo bene umano; dall'altra la rupe di Prometeo, espressione dell'attaccamento ctonico al piano immanente, che, se assolutizzato, opprime e mortifica l'essere incatenandolo e affossandolo. Con un'originale apertura della politica alla pedagogia, l'autrice affronta la questione cruciale del la libertà che, intesa come liberazione responsabile dall'insignificanza all'infinito, richiede di essere educata per rendere concretamente possibile il progetto di una convivenza più autenticamente umana. (shrink)

This article endeavours to prove that there were creation myths of human beings or certain things, but there were seldom creation myths of ontological cosmology in ancient China. This will be warranted through the distinction between the concepts of ‘to create’ and ‘to beget’, the distinction between ‘Cosmology I of creationism’ and ‘Cosmology II of begetting’, and the relationship between the One and Many. The only exception is the myth of Nüwa 女娲 as the creator of human beings, but not (...) the creator of the cosmos. Therefore, in ancient Chinese tradition, there were mainly myths of begetting rather than myths of complete creation in the sense similar to creatio ex nihilo.Contribution: Previous research frequently underscores the profound differences between ‘Cosmology I of creationism’ and ‘Cosmology II of begetting’. Based on the discussion of concepts of ‘to create’ [zao 造] and ‘to beget’ [sheng 生], this article argues that, there were mainly myths of begetting rather than myths of complete creation in the sense similar to creatio ex nihilo. (shrink)

Pedagogical situations require white lies: in teaching philosophy we make decisions about what to omit, what to emphasise, and what to distort. This article considers when it is permissible to distort the historical record, arguing for a tempered respect for the historical facts. It focuses on the rationalist/empiricist distinction, which still frames most undergraduate early modern courses despite failing to capture the intellectual history of that period. It draws an analogy with Michael Strevens's view on idealisation in causal explanation to (...) distinguish between myths and caricatures. Myths are distortions of the historical record that undermine students' understanding of the past, despite having other pedagogical benefits. Caricatures are distortions that either increase or are indifferent to understanding of the past. Mythmaking, the article argues, is unjustified. (shrink)

This book explores the dynamic relationship between myth and philosophy in the Presocratics, the Sophists, and in Plato - a relationship which is found to be more extensive and programmatic than has been recognized. The story of philosophy's relationship with myth is that of its relationship with literary and social convention. The intellectuals studied here wanted to reformulate popular ideas about cultural authority and they achieved this goal by manipulating myth. Their self-conscious use of myth creates a self-reflective philosophic sensibility (...) and draws attention to problems inherent in different modes of linguistic representation. Much of the reception of Greek philosophy stigmatizes myth as 'irrational'. Such an approach ignores the important role played by myth in Greek philosophy, not just as a foil but as a mode of philosophical thought. The case studies in this book reveal myth deployed as a result of methodological reflection, and as a manifestation of philosophical concerns. (shrink)

In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce argues that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed. At the heart of ordinary moral judgements is a notion of moral inescapability, or practical authority, which, upon investigation, cannot be reasonably defended. Joyce argues that natural selection is to blame, in that it has provided us with a tendency to invest the world with values that it does not contain, and demands that it does not make. Should we therefore do away with morality, as we (...) did away with other faulty notions such as witches? Possibly not. We may be able to carry on with morality as a 'useful fiction' - allowing it to have a regulative influence on our lives and decisions, perhaps even playing a central role - while not committing ourselves to believing or asserting falsehoods, and thus not being subject to accusations of 'error'. (shrink)

This article presents a systematic examination of matrilineal succession in Greek myth. It uses MANTO, a digital database of Greek myth, to identify kings who succeed their fathers-in-law, maternal grandfathers, step-fathers, or wives’ previous husbands. Analysis of the fifty-four instances identified shows that the prominence of the ‘succession via widow’ motif in archaic epic is not typical of the broader tradition. Rather, civic mythmaking more commonly relies on succession by sons-in-law and maternal grandsons to craft connections between cities and lineages, (...) and to claim panhellenic prestige. We show that matrilineal successors are not treated as necessarily illegitimate or inferior within the overwhelmingly patrilineal conventions of Greek myth. In fact, matrilineal calculations afford certain advantages, like the ability to integrate heroes from elsewhere, or to champion local kings with divine fathers. Matrilineal succession reveals the gendered dynamics inherent to Greek myth; we argue that, although in these instances regnal power is transferred through female relatives, the heroines involved are typically treated simply as nodes for this power and their roles in these stories do not necessarily correlate to a greater visibility or autonomy. (shrink)

This book is a defense of the methods of analytic philosophy against a recent empirical challenge to the soundness of those methods. The challenge is raised by practitioners of “experimental philosophy” and concerns the extent to which analytic philosophy relies on intuition—in particular, the extent to which analytic philosophers treat intuitions as evidence in arguing for philosophical conclusions. Experimental philosophers say that analytic philosophers place a great deal of evidential weight on people’s intuitions about hypothetical cases and thought experiments. This (...) book argues that this view of traditional philosophical method is a myth, part of “metaphilosophical folklore.” Analytic philosophy makes regular use of hypothetical examples and thought experiments, but philosophers argue for their claims about what is true or not true in these examples and thought experiments. It is these arguments, not intuitions, that are treated as evidence for the claims. The book discusses xphi and some recent xphi studies; critiques a variety of other metaphilosophical claims; examines such famous arguments as Gettier’s refutation of the JTB theory and Kripke’s Gödel Case argument against descriptivism about proper names, and shows that they rely on reasoning rather than intuition; and finds existing critiques of xphi, the “Multiple Concepts” and “Expertise” replies, to be severely lacking. (shrink)

In previous work I urged that the perceptual experience we rational animals enjoy is informed by capacities that belong to our rationality, and - in passing - that something similar holds for our intentional action. In his Presidential Address, Hubert Dreyfus argued that I thereby embraced a myth, "the Myth of the Mental". According to Dreyfus, I cannot accommodate the phenomenology of unreflective bodily coping, and its importance as a background for the conceptual capacities exercised in reflective intellectual activity. My (...) paper responds to this accusation. Dreyfus misreads my invocation of Aristotle, and is thereby led to suppose, wrongly, that I conceive rationality as detached, brought to bear on practical predicaments from a standpoint other than one of immersion in them. I urge that even unreflective bodily coping, on the part of rational animals, is informed by their rationality. Dreyfus mentions Heidegger's distinction, which is picked up by Gadamer, between being oriented towards the world and merely inhabiting an environment. But he sets it aside, whereas it is crucial for the issue between us. Engaged bodily coping involves responsiveness to affordances, and responsiveness to affordances on the part of rational animals belongs to their relation to the world. I explain how the idea that conceptual capacities are actualized in our perceptual experience is connected with the thought that our perceptual experience opens us to the world. Finally, I suggest that the real myth in this area is the conception of rationality underlying Dreyfus's resistance to my picture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Myth, Song, and Music Education:The Case of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Swann's The Road Goes Ever OnEstelle R. Jorgensen (bio)In this article I explore how myth and song intersect in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King—and Donald Swann's song cycle setting of Tolkien texts, The Road Goes Ever On.1 (...) In so doing I am drawn back to Tolkien's The Hobbit, the novel from which The Lord of the Rings grew,2 and in the way of myth, I go back to the beginning to see what is there. After sketching some important themes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and commenting as I go on Swann's musical setting of Tolkien's poems,3 I note several implications for music education.Why this particular tale? There are several reasons for my interest. Penned as a novel a half century ago, it was reborn at the turn of the twenty-first century in a widely circulated and highly acclaimed film trilogy. Its pagan and northern European roots are likewise intriguing, pointing back to a distant and imagined past. This extended historical tale can be seen as an epic journey in the genre of The Iliad and Beowulf.4 Such stories of other times were often sung as well as spoken, and Albert Lord describes the process whereby the telling and retelling of stories would be accommodated to the needs and interests of listeners, all of whom could be presumed to more or less know the story and identify with its characters.5 In a mass-mediated and technologically driven society in which attention is often focused on the present, evocations of the past fill a human need to know, individually and collectively, the story of how we came to be here. They prompt important philosophical questions such as those regarding the nature of good and [End Page 1] evil, ways to live a happy life, the role of supernatural events in human existence, and our responsibility to technology and the environment. And when studied in the context of a song cycle, we may better understand how myth and song intersect and be able to better reflect on what can be learned from this intersection for music education and its place in general education.Swann's song cycle evokes the cyclical journeys undertaken by Bilbo and Frodo, beginning with a party at home and ending triumphantly at home, although their pilgrimages generate yet others as ends become new beginnings. There is no end to this story; its beginning culminates yet others chronicled in The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, and its end commences another tale yet to be told. The rings in Tolkien's novel are figurative of these cycles: three rings for the elves, seven rings for the dwarves, and nine for mortal men. Bilbo's ring chronicled in The Hobbit is unveiled in The Lord of the Rings as the strategically most powerful one. Numerology, or the ancient study of numbers and their mythic significance, serves as a frame for the dense narrative that follows in Tolkien's texts. Swann sets a song cycle comprised of six songs, offering yet another number (whether intentional or not) in counterpoint to Tolkien's.The HobbitWithin this narrative are to be found various mythic qualities: a pilgrim on a quest, the band of travelers bound together in friendship by a common objective, the climactic but eventually successful journey, the struggle between good and evil, the crucial role of elemental natural forces and the interventions by powerful supernatural persons and forces in shaping events, the blurring of the natural and supernatural worlds, the inevitable tests that must be overcome in order to achieve the journey's objectives, the frailties of character demonstrated by the protagonist and his fellows, and the transformative quality of the journey on all those who undertake it.6 The action is set at a particular time and in a particular place with its own languages and kinds of writing (including runes or archaic angular writing that... (shrink)

This paper explores the influence of transpersonal thinking, including the mythological perspective of Joseph Campbell and the holotropic perspective of Stanislav Grof, on actor training using the neutral mask. An outline of training in the neutral mask is given, focusing on the approach of David Latham, as experienced by the author in his own training. Points of correspondence with the vision of Campbell and Grof, and their influence, are discriminated and discussed. These correspondences open up two areas of inquiry: the (...) transformative effect of the mask work when conducted in a transpersonally-oriented set, and the use of the neutral mask as an approach to the study of myth and archetype. Both are discussed, and some preliminary conclusions drawn based on experiences reported by student-actors and the author’s observations during his own research and his practice as actor and teacher. (shrink)

Mary Midgley argues in her powerful new book that far from being the opposite of science, myth is a central part of it. In brilliant prose, she claims that myths are neither lies nor mere stories but a network of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of epochal and ongoing progression in interaction between mind and the built environment. Since early antiquity, the present study suggests, Benjamin’s notion has been manifest in metaphors of gender in city-form, whereby edifices and urban voids have represented masculinity and femininity, respectively. At the onset of interaction between mind and the built environment are prehistoric myths related to the human body and to the sky. During antiquity gender projection can be (...) detected in western perceptions linking natural and built environments, commencing with Plato’s Atlantis and his Myth of Er, and later as a likely import of the Chinese yin-yang mythology. Culminating with the Age of Discovery, alongside advances in experiential awareness of the Earth’s sphericity, respective feminine and masculine earmarks can be detected in early modern perspicacity of the Earth’s southern and northern hemispheres. Our conceptions of natural and built environments inherently continue to contain gender traits. Yet urban voids, as the feminine face of city-form, have been severely understated in the built environment. Through design and configuration of urban voids, allegories of femininity in city-form ought to be celebrated, not discarded. (shrink)

Jordan Peterson has attracted a high level of attention. Controversies may bring people into contact with Peterson's work, but ideas are arguably what keep them there. Focusing on those ideas, this book explores Peterson’s answers to perennial questions. What is common to all humans, regardless of their background? Is complete knowledge ever possible? What would constitute a meaningful life? Why have humans evolved the capacity for intelligence? Should one treat others as individuals or as members of a group? Is a (...) single person powerless in the face of evil? What is the relation between speech, thought, and action? Why have religious myths and narratives figured so prominently in human history? Are the hierarchies we find in society good or bad? After devoting a chapter to each of these questions, Champagne unites the different strands of Peterson’s thinking in a handy summary. Champagne then spends the remaining third of the book articulating his main critical concerns. He argues that while building on tradition is inevitable and indeed desirable, Peterson’s individualist project is hindered by the non-revisable character and self-sacrificial content of religious belief. This engaging multidisciplinary study is ideal for those who know little about Peterson’s views, or for those who are familiar but want to see more clearly how Peterson’s views hang together. The debates spearheaded by Peterson are in full swing, so Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism should become a reference point for any serious engagement with Peterson’s ideas. (shrink)

By accepting that the formal structure of human language is the key to understanding the uniquity of human culture and consciousness and by further accepting the late appearance of such language amongst the Cro-Magnon, I am free to focus on the causes that led to such an unprecedented threshold crossing. In the complex of causes that led to human being, I look to scholarship in linguistics, mythology, anthropology, paleontology, and to creation myths themselves for an answer. I conclude that prehumans (...) underwent an existential crisis, i.e., the realization of certain mortality, that could be borne only by the discovery-creation of the larger realm of symbolic consciousness once experienced as the sacred (but today we know it as "the world" – as opposed to our immediate natural environment and that of other animals). Thus, although we, the human species, are but one species among innumerable others, we differ in kind, not degree. This quality is our symbolically enabled self-consciousness, the fortress of cultural identity that empowers but also imprisons awareness. (shrink)

This article argues that rape myths and domestic abuse myths constitute hermeneutical injustices. Drawing on empirical research, I show that the prevalence of these myths makes victims of rape and of domestic abuse less likely to apply those terms to their experiences. Using Sally Haslanger's distinction between manifest and operative concepts, I argue that in these cases, myths mean that victims hold a problematic operative concept, or working understanding, which prevents them from identifying their experience as one of rape or (...) of domestic abuse. Since victims in this situation lack the conceptual resources needed to render their experience sufficiently intelligible, they are suffering a form of hermeneutical injustice. Attending to this distinctive case sheds new light not only on the functioning of social myths of this kind but on the nature of hermeneutical injustice itself, since the case of the victim who accepts myths is importantly different from other cases of hermeneutical injustice discussed in the literature to date. In practical terms, this analysis supports calls for juries in rape trials to be warned about rape myths at the start of the trial, and may have implications for calls for statutory Sex and Relationships Education in schools. (shrink)

A great contemporary German philosopher attacks the explosive problem of political myth in our day, and reveals how the myth of the state evolved from primitive times to prepare the way for the rise of the modern totalitarian state. "A brilliant survey of some of the major texts in the history of political theory."—Kenneth Burke, _The Nation._.

The employment of mythological language and imagery by an Epicurean poet - an adherent of a system not only materialist, but overtly hostile to myth and poetry - is highly paradoxical. This apparent contradiction has often been ascribed to a conflict in the poet between reason and intellect, or to a desire to enliven his philosophical material with mythological digressions. This book attempts to provide a more positive assessment of Lucretius' aims and methodology by considering the poet's attitude to myth, (...) and the role which it plays in the De Rerum Natura, against the background of earlier and contemporary views. The author suggests that Lucretius was not only aware of the tension between his two roles as philosopher and poet, but attempted to resolve it by developing his own, Epicurean poetic, together with a bold and innovative theory of the origins and meaning of myth. (shrink)

There is an undeniable tendency to dismiss women’s sexual assault allegations out of hand. However, this tendency is not monolithic—allegations that black men have raped white women are often met with deadly seriousness. I argue that contemporary rape culture is characterized by the interplay between rape myths that minimize rape, and myths that catastrophize rape. Together, these two sets of rape myths distort the epistemic resources that people use when assessing rape allegations. These distortions result in the unjust exoneration of (...) people we cannot conceive of as monstrous, while making it too easy to believe that some marginalized people could be rapists. I also argue that rape myths enable a novel kind of epistemic injustice. This injustice concerns how our assessments of trustworthiness and our assessments of plausibility interact. I argue that rape myths can result in runaway credibility deflations that can explain both why people fail to believe most women, and also why people may unjustly believe false allegations that white women have been raped by black men. (shrink)

Hatab's work is more than an interpretative study, inspired by Neitzsche and Heidegger of the historical relationship between myth and philosophy in ancient Greece. Its conclusions go beyond the historical case study, and amount to a defence of the intelligibility of myth against an exclusively rational or objective view of the world.

“Myth” comprises the first chapter of the book, The Logic of the Imagination, by Miki Kiyoshi. In this chapter Miki analyzes the significance of myth (shinwa) as possessing a certain reality despite being “fictions.” He begins by broadening the meaning of the imagination to argue for a logic of the imagination that involves expressive action or poiesis (production) in general, of which myth is one important product. The imagination gathers in myth material from the environing world lived by the social (...) collectivity. Its formation of images (Bilder) expresses the pathos of a people vis-à-vis their environment, but myth also contains elements of logos in the form of intellectual representations and figures. And their combination becomes expressed externally by stimulating and guiding action. In this way Miki argues that myths contain both emotive and kinetic elements, which by moving people to action, are capable of making history. Thus rooted in the symbiosis between individual and social and between society and environment, myth possesses a “historical creativity.” And he also argues that myths can be present with a sense of reality at any epoch in history, even today, wherever and whenever their primeval power is felt to function, “drawing out” a new reality, a new world, out of the natural world. (shrink)

What is the relationship between myths and the iconic? This paper analyzes a dialogue from an R.K. Narayan novel which suggests a criterion for belonging to a natural kind in the world of myth, a criterion which makes reference to the iconic.

Sellers explores contemporary women's rewritings of myth and fairy tale, asking why mythical paradigms continue to have such potency despite the distorted images of gender they often present. A series of readings of texts is given in illustration.