ABSTRACT: People have inferred that our lives are absurd from the supposed fact that nothing we do will matter in a million years. In this article, I critically discuss this argument for absurdity. After explaining how two refutations in the literature fail to undermine the best version of the argument, I produce several considerations that together do take much of the force out of the argument. I conclude by suggesting that these considerations not only refute this argument for absurdity, but (...) also constitute a motivation to be moral.RÉSUMÉ: On a pu déduire que nos vies sont absurdes en supposant que rien de ce que nous faisons n’aura d’importance dans un million d’années. Dans cet article, j’évalue cet argument en faveur de l’absurdité. Après avoir expliqué comment deux réfutations formulées dans la littérature sur le sujet sont impuissants à contrecarrer la meilleure version de cet argument, je formule plusieurs considérations qui concourrent à réduire de beaucoup la force de cet argument. Je conclus en suggérant que ces considérations non seulement réfutent l’argument en faveur de l’absurdité, mais aussi justifient l’agir moral. (shrink)

Some critics of Don Marquis's ‘future‐like‐ours’ anti‐abortion argument launch what has been called the Identity Objection. The upshot of this objection is that under a psychological theory of personal identity, a non‐sentient fetus lacks precisely what Marquis believes gives it a right to life – a future like ours. However, Eric Vogelstein, in a recent article, has argued that under this theory of personal identity a non‐sentient fetus, in fact, has a future like ours, which he believes dissolves the Identity (...) Objection. But Vogelstein is mistaken. Even if he is correct that there is a sense in which a non‐sentient fetus has a future of value under a psychological theory of personal identity, the sense in which it has one is importantly different from the sense in which we have one, meaning that, under such a theory, a non‐sentient fetus does not have a future like ours. (shrink)

David Benatar, in Better Never to Have Been , sets out two arguments in support of the view that coming into existence is always a net harm. Remarkably, the first argument seems to imply that coming into existence would be a net harm even if the only bad we experienced in our lives were a ‘single pin-prick’. This argument hinges on a purported asymmetry: that whereas the absence of pains in non-existence is good, the absence of pleasures in non-existence is (...) not bad (rather than bad ). It also hinges on the non-badness at issue here being relative (no worse than the presence of pleasures in existence) rather than intrinsic (value neutral). To establish the crucial claim that the non-badness of absent pleasures in non-existence is relative rather than intrinsic, Benatar constructs an analogy involving two people, Sick and Healthy. In this paper, I show the inaptness of the analogy and also provide positive reason to doubt the soundness of the argument as it stands. What emerges from this critical analysis of the analogy is a plausible theory of value at odds with Benatar’s argument as a whole. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: People have inferred that our lives are absurd from the supposed fact that nothing we do will matter in a million years. In this article, I critically discuss this argument for absurdity. After explaining how two refutations in the literature fail to undermine the best version of the argument, I produce several considerations that together do take much of the force out of the argument. I conclude by suggesting that these considerations not only refute this argument for absurdity, but (...) also constitute a motivation to be moral.RÉSUMÉ: On a pu déduire que nos vies sont absurdes en supposant que rien de ce que nous faisons n’aura d’importance dans un million d’années. Dans cet article, j’évalue cet argument en faveur de l’absurdité. Après avoir expliqué comment deux réfutations formulées dans la littérature sur le sujet sont impuissants à contrecarrer la meilleure version de cet argument, je formule plusieurs considérations qui concourrent à réduire de beaucoup la force de cet argument. Je conclus en suggérant que ces considérations non seulement réfutent l’argument en faveur de l’absurdité, mais aussi justifient l’agir moral. (shrink)

Eric Vogelstein has defended Don Marquis’ ‘future-like-ours’ argument for the immorality of abortion against what is known as the Identity Objection, which contends that for a fetus to have a future like ours, it must be numerically identical to an entity like us that possesses valuable experiences some time in the future. On psychological accounts of personal identity, there is no identity relationship between the fetus and the entity with valuable experiences that it will become. Vogelstein maintains that a non‐sentient (...) fetus nonetheless has a future like ours because it is numerically identical with a future organism that has a mind that bears valuable experiences. Skott Brill, drawing on Jeff McMahan’s embodied mind account, denies that human organisms directly have experiences, claiming that they only have experiences derivatively by virtue of their thinking part, and the loss of a future like ours is not transferred to the organism. I show that on McMahan’s account, a strong case can be made for the organism having experiences directly, and the subject having these experiences derivatively. This negates Brill’s reasoning, although it does imply that non-sentient fetuses do not have a future like ours in quite the same way as we do. I conclude this is not problematic for Marquis’ argument. (shrink)

All capitalist economies experience fluctuations in employment and economic activity around a long-term growth rate. How is this cyclical pattern of growth to be explained? Are the causes of fluctuations in output and employment to be found outside the system or are they intrinsic to the system? Will the long-term growth rate correspond to the growth of the labour force? It is the search for answers to these questions which motivates Peter Skott's analysis. The book develops a theory of (...) dynamic interaction between three types of agent: firms, households and banks. Firms are profit-maximisers operating under conditions of imperfect competition and their production and investment decisions are influenced by monetary and financial factors as well as by the state of the labour market. Households hold financial assets, supply labour and have a direct influence on nominal wage rates. Banks set interest rates on bank loans and deposits. No assumptions are made about nominal price rigidities and the capital-output ratio is determined endogenously. Using a framework of analysis which is rigorous and which does not exclude traditional neoclassical mechanisms, this book demonstrates the validity of important Marxian and Keynesian insights into the growth process. (shrink)

Through the examination of anti-psychiatric theory and literary texts, this timely and thought-provoking volume explores the possibilities of liberating our habitual patterns of perception and consciousness beyond the confines of a capitalist era. In Post-Capitalist Subjectivity in Literature and Anti-Psychiatry, Skott-Myhre asks the question, how might we be different if we didn't live in a capitalist society? By drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and conducting nuanced analysis of the professional writings of anti-psychiatrists including Basaglia and Laing, and the (...) work of fiction writers Kafka and Garcia Marquez, the text identifies alternative conceptualizations of the self. Focusing in particular on portrayals of institutions and the family, Skott-Myhre proposes that these social systems offer new modes of reading the world and ourselves which will transform social organization and free subjectivity from dominant capitalist structures. This transdisciplinary text responds to a revitalized interest in alternatives to traditional psychology, an interest in life beyond capitalism, and the crisis in the traditional family. Post-Capitalist Subjectivity in Literature and Anti-Psychiatry will offer timely reading for graduate students, researchers, and scholars in the fields of cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, family studies, and interdisciplinary studies. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore the meaning of experience for home‐care nurses in a multicultural area of Sweden. Interviews and group discussions with a team of five home‐care nurses were interpreted in accordance with a hermeneutical perspective. The meaning was expressed in connection with the complexities of place, and space for care. Contradictions developed from diversities of perspectives incorporated in this particular multicultural area. Nurses saw themselves as mediators and allowed complexity to be considered in order to (...) manage care. They took on responsibility of creating a ‘space of care’, while the organizational structures of home care were perceived as something outside the care praxis. Making contradictions evident renders an intermediary caring strategy feasible. (shrink)

This book offers an intervention into the process of decolonization through the re-subjectification of the settler subject. The authors draw on what Deleuze and Guattari call minor threads of philosophy, pedagogy, spirituality, and healing practices rooted in neglected lineages of European thought and ceremony. The book proposes a methodology for unontologizing the settler subject, which they term 'desettlering.' Rather than fetishizing indigenous theory and practice as a mode for resubjectifying settlers to facilitate land-based decolonization, it offers a fresh approach by (...) looking towards alternative sets of traditions and identity. These alternatives are used to interrogate minoritarian European philosophies, practices, and beliefs, which the authors propose could be deployed to unontologize the settler within current historical conditions. Asserting that such a process is not volitional but a historical necessity, the book offers a novel and timely investigation into who settlers become if they intend to engage seriously in decolonization. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and researchers in psychological science, social psychology, counseling, philosophy, indigenous studies, and sociology. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to discuss narration of ethical themes in nursing care. The text represents part of the findings of an ethnographic study aimed at description of everyday work on an oncology ward. Nurses on this ward are constantly involved in ethical care issues and narratives are told to share experiences. Of vital importance in ethical decision making is the perpetual creation of a mediating moral world constituted by daily experience. The need for making space in nursing (...) for a continual learning conversation is expressed and in this I include writings of nursing theorists. (shrink)

This article follows Deleuze in investigating the ways in which the symptom as a form of representation can be collapsed into immanence. Exploring the symptoms of schizophrenia and autism, it examines what implications such a collapse may have for the production of the symptom in its double articulation as representation and immanent production. The argument follows Deleuze and Guattari in asserting that symptoms hold an implicit limit for the social forms that deploy them. Arguing that schizophrenia, as one such limit, (...) has been successfully appropriated and deferred by postmodern capitalism, it is proposed that the proliferating symptom cluster of autism may indicate a new form of limit and that ‘‘becoming autistic’’ thus may have potential as revolutionary practice. (shrink)

How can we imagine a future not driven by capitalist assumptions about humans and the wider world? How are a range of contemporary artistic and popular cultural practices already providing pathways to post-capitalist futures? Authors from a variety of disciplines answer these questions through writings on blues and hip hop, virtual reality, post-colonial science fiction, virtual gaming, riot grrrls and punk, raku pottery, post-pornography fanzines, zombie films, and role playing. The essays in Art as Revolt are clustered around themes such (...) as technology and the future, aesthetics and resistance, and ethnographies of the self beyond traditional understandings of identity. Using philosophies of immanence – describing a system that gives rise to itself, independent of outside forces – drawn from a rich and evolving tradition that includes Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Braidotti, the authors and editors provide an engrossing range of analysis and speculation. Together the essays, written by experts in their fields, stage an important collective, transdisciplinary conversation about how best to talk about art and politics today. Sophisticated in its theoretical and philosophical premises, and engaging some of the most pressing questions in cultural studies and artistic practice today, Art as Revolt does not provide comfortable closure. Instead, it is understood by its authors to be a “Dionysian machine,” a generator of open-ended possibility and potential that challenges readers to affirm their own belief in the futures of this world. Contributors include Timothy J. Beck, Mark Bishop, Dave Collins, David Fancy, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Malisa Kurtz, Nicole Land, Eric Lochhead, Douglas Ord, Joanna Perkins, Peter Rehberg, Chris Richardson, Hans Skott-Myhre, and Kathleen Skott-Myhre. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Culture of LiteracySusan B. BrillThe Culture of Literacy, by Wlad Godzich; 317 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994, $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.This is a collection of essays that spans the range of Wlad Godzich’s work in the 1980s, including several pieces on Paul de Man and a number of others that served as introductions to works by Jauss, Maravall, Nerlich, and Certeau. Even though most of the (...) essays in this volume have already seen the light of publication (only one is new), grouping them together in one volume recasts them into an interdiscursive realm. Rather than being narrowed by their initial venues of publication, they are arranged around the subject of The Culture of Literacy, eliciting new and different questions.In the introduction, Godzich emphasizes that literacy programs in American universities, which developed out of the “New Vocationalism” of the seventies and eighties, “evince a profound distrust of interpretation and other critical functions in relation to language, and proclaim mastery and competence as their goals” (p. 14). Within this framework, theory has raised the voice of difference, challenging the established organization of knowledge as displayed in the academic disciplines and sub-disciplines. Writing programs are one example of the extent to which theory’s original hope of destabilizing [End Page 385] hierarchies of power through greater accessibility to university education has been co-opted and transformed into the commodity of the New Vocationalist literacy programs.This discussion poses the larger problem of the entire collection. Godzich perceives an “epochal shift” in concepts and practices of literacy not only in regards to writing programs but in the struggles over theory, in the reception of de Man, and in the challenge offered by emergent literatures whose voices raise new questions about the literary and critical presuppositions within which all university scholars function.Reprinted alongside such essays as “In-Quest of Modernity,” “The Further Possibility of Knowledge,” “The Changing Face of History,” and “After the Storyteller,” Godzich’s earlier essays on de Man are recontextualized beyond the debates concerning de Man’s wartime writings. The question whether it is possible to consider de Man’s later work divorced from his earlier writings is elided. I almost wish that Godzich had simply brought together his already published essays without the inclusion of the one new piece, “Paul de Man and the Perils of Intelligence,” which largely serves as Godzich’s defense of de Man and of Godzich’s own earlier writings on him. A footnote appended to one of the other articles would have been sufficient. Most readers would place Godzich’s articles on de Man in the context of the years when they were written—prior to the public knowledge of de Man’s collaborationist work. But when Godzich writes, “I doubt whether de Man was personally antisemitic—certainly nothing in his postwar life suggests it—but he certainly was culturally antisemitic during the war and probably before as well” (p. 136), he mires his subsequent essays even more deeply in the very difficulties he attempts to set aside. Even if de Man were antisemitic throughout his life, that in no way invalidates his criticism. We might read de Man differently, but we would read him nevertheless. Godzich’s discussions of Blindness and Insight and The Resistance to Theory demonstrate de Man’s contribution to the poststructural “overturning of modernity” and to our linguistic reconceptualizing of our notions of the self and the social. De Man becomes the pivotal focus that frees the reader from the seductive narratives of written history, official or state-sanctioned culture (specifically Spanish literary history), storytelling authority, disciplinary specialization, and the New Vocationalism. As Godzich says, “de Man’s remapping has liberated praxis from the hold that theory has had over it” (p. 169).There is courage in this collection—the courage to republish that which in a new context takes on a significance other than what the original articles bespoke. In this way, The Culture of Literacy itself exemplifies the “further possibility of knowledge” that Godzich’s essays celebrate and describe.Susan B. BrillBradley UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Culture of LiteracySusan B. BrillThe Culture of Literacy, by Wlad Godzich; 317 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994, $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.This is a collection of essays that spans the range of Wlad Godzich’s work in the 1980s, including several pieces on Paul de Man and a number of others that served as introductions to works by Jauss, Maravall, Nerlich, and Certeau. Even though most of the (...) essays in this volume have already seen the light of publication (only one is new), grouping them together in one volume recasts them into an interdiscursive realm. Rather than being narrowed by their initial venues of publication, they are arranged around the subject of The Culture of Literacy, eliciting new and different questions.In the introduction, Godzich emphasizes that literacy programs in American universities, which developed out of the “New Vocationalism” of the seventies and eighties, “evince a profound distrust of interpretation and other critical functions in relation to language, and proclaim mastery and competence as their goals” (p. 14). Within this framework, theory has raised the voice of difference, challenging the established organization of knowledge as displayed in the academic disciplines and sub-disciplines. Writing programs are one example of the extent to which theory’s original hope of destabilizing [End Page 385] hierarchies of power through greater accessibility to university education has been co-opted and transformed into the commodity of the New Vocationalist literacy programs.This discussion poses the larger problem of the entire collection. Godzich perceives an “epochal shift” in concepts and practices of literacy not only in regards to writing programs but in the struggles over theory, in the reception of de Man, and in the challenge offered by emergent literatures whose voices raise new questions about the literary and critical presuppositions within which all university scholars function.Reprinted alongside such essays as “In-Quest of Modernity,” “The Further Possibility of Knowledge,” “The Changing Face of History,” and “After the Storyteller,” Godzich’s earlier essays on de Man are recontextualized beyond the debates concerning de Man’s wartime writings. The question whether it is possible to consider de Man’s later work divorced from his earlier writings is elided. I almost wish that Godzich had simply brought together his already published essays without the inclusion of the one new piece, “Paul de Man and the Perils of Intelligence,” which largely serves as Godzich’s defense of de Man and of Godzich’s own earlier writings on him. A footnote appended to one of the other articles would have been sufficient. Most readers would place Godzich’s articles on de Man in the context of the years when they were written—prior to the public knowledge of de Man’s collaborationist work. But when Godzich writes, “I doubt whether de Man was personally antisemitic—certainly nothing in his postwar life suggests it—but he certainly was culturally antisemitic during the war and probably before as well” (p. 136), he mires his subsequent essays even more deeply in the very difficulties he attempts to set aside. Even if de Man were antisemitic throughout his life, that in no way invalidates his criticism. We might read de Man differently, but we would read him nevertheless. Godzich’s discussions of Blindness and Insight and The Resistance to Theory demonstrate de Man’s contribution to the poststructural “overturning of modernity” and to our linguistic reconceptualizing of our notions of the self and the social. De Man becomes the pivotal focus that frees the reader from the seductive narratives of written history, official or state-sanctioned culture (specifically Spanish literary history), storytelling authority, disciplinary specialization, and the New Vocationalism. As Godzich says, “de Man’s remapping has liberated praxis from the hold that theory has had over it” (p. 169).There is courage in this collection—the courage to republish that which in a new context takes on a significance other than what the original articles bespoke. In this way, The Culture of Literacy itself exemplifies the “further possibility of knowledge” that Godzich’s essays celebrate and describe.Susan B. BrillBradley UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The medical profession is steeped in traditions that guide its practice. These traditions were developed to preserve the well-being of patients. Transformations in science, technology, and society, while maintaining a self-governance structure that drives the goal of care provision, have remained hallmarks of the profession. The purpose of this paper is to examine ethical challenges in health care as it relates to Big Data, Accountable Care Organizations, and Health Care Predictive Analytics using the principles of biomedical ethics laid out by (...) Beauchamp and Childress. Among these are the use of Electronic Health Records within stipulations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Clinicians are well-positioned to impact health policy development to address ethical issues associated with the use of Big Data, Accountable Care, and Health Care Predictive Analytics as we work to transform the doctor–patient relationship towards improving population health outcomes and creating a healthier society. (shrink)

According to the terms of Aristotle's Politics, to be alive is to instantiate an operation of power. This volume addresses the intertwining of power and life in Aristotle's thought, offering a critical re-appraisal of the concepts of life, the animal, and political animality in his political theory.

The crucial point of Brill’s study is that of fit: which critical methods prove most useful towards opening up which texts? Close investigations into the parameters of the language games of texts, critics, and methods enable us to determine which paths to take towards more complete descriptive analyses and critique. Such an emphasis on the philosophical method of Ludwig Wittgenstein reorients literary criticism to involve a conjoint responsibility to both reader and text as the literary critic assumes the humbler (...) role of a guide who assists a reader in/to diverse literary texts. Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach provides us with a strong means of developing such a method for literary criticism—a method that points the way forward beyond postmodern criticisms and to a categorically new approach to literary texts. Brill’s work discusses at length the implications of Wittgenstein for literary criticism and theory. The volume specifically investigates the implications of Wittgenstein’s work for a number of contemporary critical orientations. In addition, the research includes actual applications of Wittgenstein for literary criticism: diverse literary texts are approached via a Wittgensteinian method as a means of discerning which critical approaches might be more or less efficacious. Not only does the book provide a solid introduction to Wittgensteinian philosophy for the critical scholars, but it also provides a clear methodology useful to critics seeking a means to navigate through the entanglement of contemporary criticism and theory. Brill argues that a reliance upon the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can enable literary critics to escape the seemingly endless dialectic between modern and postmodern theory. Instead of debating which theory is theoretically best, we need to describe when theories work—and when they do not. (shrink)

By focusing on the immortal character of the soul in key Platonic dialogues, Sara Brill shows how Plato thought of the soul as remarkably flexible, complex, and indicative of the inner workings of political life and institutions. As she explores the character of the soul, Brill reveals the corrective function that law and myth serve. If the soul is limitless, she claims, then the city must serve a regulatory or prosthetic function and prop up good political institutions against (...) the threat of the soul’s excess. Brill’s sensitivity to dramatic elements and discursive strategies in Plato’s dialogues illuminates the intimate connection between city and soul. (shrink)

Sensemaking has recently been identified as a driver of society developments, in particular in the context of designing a reasonable, valuable, and fair life. Since the construction of meaning is a crucial momentum in sensemaking processes, the authors investigate how meaning can be constructed in a sustaining form by utilizing digital means of expression, articulation, sharing of information, and creation of artscience artefacts. The authors report on results of exploring cyber-physical-systems with performative methodologies in the context of sensemaking to identify (...) sensemaking processes of entering digital environments and share meaning-making activities through interaction. The collected data from two artscience studies reveal that activities beyond cognition facilitate sensemaking. Aesthetics and embodiment in performing actions are understood to play a role in sensemaking and subsequently effect on the construction of meaning. To investigate the role of the body and aesthetics in sensemaking in digital environments, we were particularly interested in sensemaking through embodied agency and aesthetic awareness, drawing from kinesthetic awareness of performance artists. In the performative activities digital behavior recognition and human task behavior were coupled, on the one hand by performers exploring digital environments actively reflecting on their performative process, on the other hand by a performance artist and choreographer creating performative experiences for audiences. It has been demonstrated in cyber-physical settings and can be utilized in upcoming developments further integrating virtual and physical worlds. (shrink)

Plato’s use of afterlife myths is often viewed as an abandonment of rational discourse for a coercive practice designed to persuade citizens to be concerned about the condition of their souls by appealing to their worst fears about the afterlife. But such interpretations overlook the frequently critical tenor of Plato’s myths. In this paper I develop the claim that Plato appeals to muthos as a means of critiquing various specific logoi by focusing upon the relationship between the myth of the (...) earth in the Phaedo and the four logoi about immortality that precede it. I argue that these logoi fail to be persuasive because they rely upon a construal of the relationship between body and soul that denies them meaningful reference to the lives and deaths of embodied beings. The myth of the earth provides a critical engagement with the perspective from which Socrates and his interlocutors have produced these logoi. (shrink)

Preface to the Seventh Edition Since the first edition of this work in 1986, enormous changes have occurred in professional ethics in Arkansas: the ...

As a standard, health has proven to be as fecund a source of philosophic interest as it is enigmatic. The metaphor of health peppers the history of Western philosophy from its inception, and brings with it a network of questions related to the highly problematic constructions of the relationships between body and mind with which this history is littered. In particular, the connection between medical and political discourses in archaic and classical Greece is well documented, and reveals the extent to (...) which the metaphor of health has proven operative in multiple realms of classical Greek thought. This intertwining of medical and political discourses is powerfully present in the dialogues of Plato as well, and in the Republic in particular. This dissertation addresses itself to the role of medicine within Plato's Republic, and takes as its overarching project the investigation of the role of doctors and medicine in this dialogue in order to indicate the manner in which medicine is used to make clearer the position of the philosopher within the city. The following pages attempt to show that, when faced in the Republic with the need to give an account of the philosopher within the city, Plato found the medical art indispensable to this enterprise. Thus medicine emerges as intimately connected to the paradoxical coincidence of philosophy and political power for which the Republic calls. (shrink)

Much of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can be brought to bear directly on the theoretical and critical determinations made by literature scholars. Like a language game which consists of a structural center in its essential grammar or rules and a temporal and contingent diversity in its actual uses or playing moves, Wittgensteinian philosophy as adapted herein for literary criticism points us toward a strategy of descriptive investigations whose coherence and usefulness is demonstrated in its circumstantial adaptability and responsiveness to (...) diverse texts . A reliance on Wittgensteinian philosophy adds to our work a means of discriminating among divergent critical perspectives insofar as certain perspectives will be more or less appropriate or useful in opening up different texts. For Wittgenstein, every path to a text may be different, but that does not make all equally useful or efficacious in every case. ;Chapter One discusses Wittgenstein's heuristic of the language game, his rejection of theory, and his methodology of descriptive investigations as they might be applied to literary criticism. The second chapter investigates the similarities and differences between Wittgensteinian philosophy and the deconstructive project. In the third chapter, a Wittgensteinian literary methodology is applied to the poetry of several women poets as the poems' language games and their "resemblances" are discussed. The fourth and concluding chapter points the way for future uses of Wittgenstein for literary criticism and theory: specifically regarding axiological determinations of literary and critical texts, deliberations of canonicity, and the parallels with and divergences from the poststructural critical approach of the New Historicism. The crucial point of the dissertation is that of fit: which critical methods prove most useful towards opening up which texts? Close investigations into the parameters of the language games of texts, critics, and methods will enable us to determine which paths to take towards more complete descriptive analyses and critiques. Wittgenstein's philosophical approach provides us with a strong means of developing such a method for literary criticism. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of the concluding myth of the Phaedo in the context of the dialogue as a whole, arguing that the myth's exploration of the relationship between action, condition of soul and form of life provides valuable information about Plato's conception of the kind of political environment necessary for human flourishing. It identifies three features of the myth essential to this exploration: its self-critical construction of the perspective of the makers of this myth, its focus on the (...) conditions under which violent deeds are committed and its envisaging of the form of human community necessary for the expiation of such deeds. El artículo examina el papel del mito final del Fedón dentro del contexto de la totalidad del diálogo y argumenta que la exploración que hace el mito de la relación entre acción, condición del alma y forma de vida brinda importante información acerca de la concepción platónica del tipo de entorno político que favorece el florecimiento del ser humano. Identifica tres rasgos del mito que son esenciales para dicha exploración: su construcción autocrítica de la perspectiva de los creadores del mito, su enfoque en las condiciones en las que se cometen actos violentos y su visión de una forma de comunidad humana necesaria para la expiación de tales actos. (shrink)

This paper argues that the creation of Kallipolis and the educational pro­gamme designed therein should be read in the context of one branch of Plato’s critique of Athenian democracy; namely, its employment of the Laconizing trope prominent in Politeia literature in order to identify and radicalize the desires innervated by an idealized vision of Spartan unity. In particular, it aims to show that the discussion of sexual difference in the famous first wave of Book 5, as well as the peculiar (...) concep­tion of phusis on which the foundation of Kallipolis rests and the account of familial discord so decisive for the distinct moments of its demise, should be read in light of the service they perform to Plato’s reframing of ownership. (shrink)

An essential reference source for cutting-edge scholarship on women/gender and philosophy in Greek antiquity. The volume features original research that crosses disciplines, offering readers an accessible guide to new methods, new sources, and new questions in the study of ancient Greek philosophy and its multiple afterlives.

The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy is an essential reference source for cutting-edge scholarship on women, gender, and philosophy in Greek antiquity. The volume features original research that crosses disciplines, offering readers an accessible guide to new methods, new sources, and new questions in the study of ancient Greek philosophy and its multiple afterlives. Comprising 40 chapters from a diverse international group of experts, the Handbook considers questions about women and gender in sources from Greek antiquity spanning (...) the period from 7th c. BCE to 2nd c. BCE, and in receptions of Greek antiquity from the Roman Imperial period, through the European Renaissance to the current day. Chapters are organized into five major sections: I. Early Greek antiquity – including Sappho, Presocratic philosophy, Sophists, and Greek tragedy – 700s–400s BCE II. Classical Greek antiquity – including Aeschines, Plato, and Xenophon – 400s–300s BCE III. Late Classical Greek to Hellenistic antiquity – including Cyrenaics, Cynics, the Hippocratic corpus, and Aristotle – 300s–200s BCE IV. Late Greek antiquity to Roman Imperial period – including Pythagorean women, Stoics, Pyrrhonian Skeptics, and late Platonists – 200s BCE to 700s CE V. Later receptions – including Shakespeare, the European Renaissance, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Harrison, Sarah Kofman, and Toni Morrison The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy is a vital resource for students and scholars in philosophy, Classics, and gender studies who want to gain a deeper understanding of philosophy’s rich past and explore sources and questions beyond the traditional canon. The volume is a valuable resource, as well, for students and scholars from history, humanities, literature, political science, religious studies, rhetorical studies, theatre, and LGBTQ and sexuality studies. (shrink)