It is well-known that as a term, Nietzsche’sÜbermenschderives from Lucian of Samosata’shyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances by reflecting on the context of that origination from Lucian’sKataplous– literally, “sailing into port” – referring to the soul’s journey (ferried by Charon, guided by Hermes) into the afterlife. TheKataplous he tyrannos, usually translatedDownward Journey or The Tyrant, is a Menippean satire of the “overman” who is imagined to be superior to others of “lesser” station in this-worldly (...) life and the same tyrant after his (comically unwilling) transport into the underworld. As a reflection on the life and the death of Zarathustra, this essay also explores the politics of kingship for Empedocles as reformer in terms of Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles and Nietzsche’s unpublished drafts on the same topic. InThus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche points to a perspective beyond the here and now, including the “values” of our all-too-worldly and all-too-human concerns, no matter whether in terms of perceived political/economic advantage, or indeed in the pursuit of more trivial satisfactions. (shrink)

This paper explores Lucian's presentation of the philosopher as a creator of discourse. In particular, the paper argues that the lack of control over the discourse, once it is passed on, is at the core of Lucian's treatment of philosophers. An analysis of this eminently Platonic problem allows the interpretation both to go beyond the simplistic view that Lucian has no real philosophical interest at all but merely follows the Second Sophistic trend of subordinating philosophy to rhetoric, and to qualify (...) the idea that the dissolution of the authorial voice represents a sense of rupture experienced on the margins of the Roman empire. More importantly, this approach opens up new possibilities to understand two portraits of philosophers in Lucian's oeuvre that stand out for their positive character, Nigrinus and Demonax. While the latter work depicts a philosopher who uses words sparingly, but ideally enables a cognitive progress in the interlocutor, the former—a portrait of a “Platonist”—stages the breakdown of philosophical teaching by focusing on the impact of the philosopher's discourse on an underprepared student. The paper argues that Lucian, while posing as a reader of Plato in shaping his characters, raises the question of whether Plato himself succeeded as a philosophical writer, or whether in Lucian's eyes Plato's success as a writer was perhaps also his failure as a philosopher. But rather than shaping his own texts in opposition to philosophy, Lucian, like Plato, explores untrodden literary ways of addressing the most fundamental of philosophical problems, namely philosophy's expression in language. (shrink)

Continental philosophies of science tend to exemplify holistic themes connecting order and contingency, questions and answers, writers and readers, speakers and hearers. Such philosophies of science also tend to feature a fundamental emphasis on the historical and cultural situatedness of discourse as significant; relevance of mutual attunement of speaker and hearer; necessity of pre-linguistic cognition based in human engagement with a common socio-cultural historical world; role of narrative and metaphor as explanatory; sustained emphasis on understanding questioning; truth seen as horizonal, (...) aletheic, or perspectival; and a tolerance for paradoxical and complex forms of expression. Continental philosophy of science is thus more comprehensive than philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, including (and as analytic philosophy of science does not tend to include) perspectives on the history of science as well as the social and practical dimensions of scientific discovery. Where analytic philosophy is about reducing or, indeed, eliminating the perennial problems of philosophy, Continental philosophy is all about thinking and that will mean, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche emphasize, making such problems more not less problematic. (shrink)

This paper offers an example of what may be called ‘an aesthetic history of legal and political thought’. Such a task engages in theorising historically the features of aesthetic traditions that enable and further normative inquiry, i.e. an exploration of the norms and values that might contribute to the good life and the common good. The three features offered in this paper as useful to identifying such aesthetic traditions are communality and interactivity, experimentalism, and exemplarity. The paper shows how each (...) of these features is present, in particular ways, in one specific aesthetic tradition, namely the declamatory tradition. Tracing the declamatory tradition back to Ancient Rome, and examining its influence in the English Renaissance, especially in Sir Thomas More’s response to Lucian’s declamatory thema, Tyrannicide, the paper argues that the particular ways in which declamatory practice combines the above three features enables those engaged in it to pursue normative inquiry. The paper argues that the integration of these three features is especially visible in one aspect of declamatory practice, namely the introduction and exchange of colores, i.e. changes in the narrative, introduced by declaimers and their audiences, which shed light on the possible motivation of a character, and thereby also invited shifts in affective allegiance and evaluative perspective. The paper argues that it is in large part through such introduction and exchange of colores that the declamatory tradition enables and furthers normative inquiry, and thus also offers a good reason for including the declamatory tradition in ‘an aesthetic history of legal and political thought’. (shrink)

Famous philosophers and their conceits became the target of Lucian's satirical verve in many of his works. However, in Philosophies for Sale, Lucian offers an original view of philosophy. Just like a marketing expert would, Lucian treats philosophy as a product that is designed to satisfy the customers' needs, and whose nature is decisively influenced by consumer forces. My discussion is inspired by the main analytic tools and the basic core concepts of marketing. I argue that in Philosophies for Sale (...) Lucian revolutionized the established concept that philosophy as well as human sciences in general are not governed by market rules. On the contrary, he has shown that philosophy, just like any other activity involving a trade of values between two parties, can be assessed from an economic perspective and that, consequently, must be viewed as customer-creating value satisfactions, being subject to the law of supply and demand. (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between Achilles Tatius' novel Leucippe and Cleitophon and the Platonic corpus. I have searched for Platonic allusions of various natures and purposes and grouped them into thematic chapters. I have also compared instances of similar uses of Plato in contemporary authors in order to classify both the individual cases and the place of Achilles Tatius' novel in its literary environment, including the intended readership. In my introduction I have argued that (...) through the combination in his works of philosophy and literary excellence Plato was an extremely important figure to the Greeks of the second sophistic. However, despite the increasingly influential opinion that Greek novel readership was not dissimilar to that of other works, the possibility that the Greek novelists used Plato in a more than cosmetic fashion has been relatively neglected. The uses of Plato on which I have concentrated are the employment of Platonic names as allusions to their namesakes; Platonic narrative technique as the model for the dialogue form and open-endedness of Leucippe and Cleitophon with the integration of this technique into the broader question of the discrepancies between the beginning and the end; the allusion to a particularly famous passage of the Phaedrus in the name of the heroine; the repeated allusions to the Phaedran flow of beauty, their purposes and the light they shed on the characterisation of Cleitophon; and the Phaedran scene-setting, indulged in by many other writers, which Achilles Tatius uses in two significant passages. The conclusions I have reached are that Achilles Tatius uses Plato far more extensively and imaginatively than hitherto realised; that such an intimate engagement can shed light on other issues, such as psychological characterisation and the question of humour; that Achilles Tatius wrote something of an "anti-Platonic" novel; and that his work displays many similarities with other works whose sophistication is less in doubt. (shrink)

En Menipo o Necromancia, el encuentro entre el filósofos cínico Menipo de Gádara y su interlocutor sirve como marco para que este relate su peripecia infernal. En la obra no se especifica dónde tiene lugar dicho encuentro; no obstante, pensamos que el samosatense incluye un sutil juego literario mediante el cual el auditorio podría identificar el escenario de dicho encuentro con la polis beocia de Tebas.