In Plato’s dialogues we often find Socrates talking at length about poetry. Sometimes he proposes censorship of certain works because what they say is false or harmful. Other times we find him interpreting the poets or rejecting potential interpretations of them. This raises the question of whether there is any consistent account to be given of Socrates’ practice as a literary critic. One might think that Plato himself in the Ion answers the question that I have raised. Rhapsody, at least (...) in the Ion , is portrayed as the activity of interpreting and evaluating the works of the poets. At first glance at least, Plato seems to conclude that this activity cannot meet the standards of a τέχνη. Rhapsodes are divine madmen. Thus, there cannot be a systematic Platonic account of literary criticism because this activity is inherently irrational and, subsequently, not something that one could engage in in a systematic way, guided by a theory of any sort. In the first part of the paper I argue that the Ion does not simply consign the Interpretation of poetry to the irrational and, as a result, does not pose an obstacle to the possibility of a Platonic literary criticism. In the second part of the paper I turn to the task of finding an account of the purpose of reading poetry and strategies for fulfilling this purpose that make systematic sense of Socrates’ multifarious remarks about poetry. (shrink)

Suzanne de Castell; On Writing of Theory and Practice, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 23, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 39–49, https://doi.org/10.1111.

This paper explores some of the constructive dimensions and specifics of human theoretic cognition, combining perspectives from (Husserlian) genetic phenomenology and distributed cognition approaches. I further consult recent psychological research concerning spatial and numerical cognition. The focus is on the nexus between the theoretic development of abstract, idealized geometrical and mathematical notions of space and the development and effective use of environmental cognitive support systems. In my discussion, I show that the evolution of the theoretic cognition of space apparently follows (...) two opposing, but in truth, intrinsically aligned trajectories. On the epistemic plane, which is the main focus of Husserl’s genetic phenomenological investigations, theoretic conceptions of space are progressively constituted by way of an idealizing emancipation of spatial cognition from the concrete, embodied intentionality underlying the human organism’s perception of space. As a result of this emancipation, it ultimately becomes possible for the human mind to theoretically conceive of and posit space as an ideal entity that is universally geometrical and mathematical. At the same time, by synthesizing a range of literature on spatial and mathematical cognition, I illustrate that for the theoretic mind to undertake precisely this emancipating process successfully, and further, for an ideal and objective notion of geometrical and mathematical space to first of all become fully scientifically operative, the cognitive support provided by a range of specific symbolic technologies is central. These include lettered diagrams, notation systems, and more generally, the technique of formalization and require for their functioning various cognitively efficacious types of embodiment. Ultimately, this paper endeavors to understand the specific symbolic-technological dimensions that have been instrumental to major shifts in the development of idealized, scientific conceptions of space. The epistemic characteristics of these shifts have been previously discussed in genetic phenomenology, but without devoting sufficient attention to the constructive role of symbolic technologies. At the same time, this paper identifies some of the irreducible phenomenological and epistemic dimensions that characterize the functioning of the historically situated, embodied and distributed theoretic mind. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

What matter who's speaking, someone said what matter who's speaking. Beckett, Texts for Nothing (in Stories and Texts for Nothing) 111 “What does it matter who is speaking”, someone said, “what d...

To understand the impact which the newly self‐conscious technology of information is likely to have, and to develop that technology effectively, it is necessary to appreciate two previous revolutions in information technology, those which followed the introductions of writing and of printing. Understanding the role which these technologies have in our intellectual lives may help to avoid the misconceptions which are generated by the temptation to think of the instruments of communication as having a life independent of the use to (...) which humans put those artifacts. (shrink)

This essay advances an interpretation of early Christian codex books, which goes beyond Catherine Pickstock’s critique of Jacques Derrida. Firstly, it summarizes Derrida’s deconstruction of Plato’s Phaedrus and introduces his understanding of writing as différance. Secondly, it outlines Pickstock’s After Writing in order to understand her emphasis upon the liturgical nature of platonic dialogue. It is here that an ambiguity emerges between writing and codex books in Pickstock’s account. In response, the insights of book historians such as Roger Chartier will (...) be brought to bear in order to understand the longer history of the codex, which sees the printing press as a continuation of the early transition from roll to codex in the second century of the Common Era. It has long been noted that Christians of this period were early and pervasive adopters of codex binding for their sacred literature. By summarizing the reasons why, it will be shown how the codex expressed early Christian religious concerns. (shrink)

Aun más que cualquier contenido de la comunicación, sus estructuras influyen en la teología puesto que proporcionan el marco para el pensamiento y la reflexión de la experiencia religiosa. Este ensayo examina tres estructuras características de la comunicacion, que son a menudo pasadas por alto: la comunicación oral v/s la escrita e impresa y la tendencia contemporánea hacia los estilos "orales secundarios"; el sentido del lugar en la comunicación tecnológica; y los usos de espacio visual como guías de la interpretación (...) de la experiencia. Puesto que cada una de estas estructuras moldean la teología, esta debiera asumir el desafío de tomar mayor conciencia de ellas y asumir el rol de la comunicación más seriamente. (shrink)

This article inquires whether and to which degree some fundamental traits of the World Wide Web may encourage us to revise traditional conceptions of what constitutes scientific information and knowledge. Turning to arguments for `open access' in scientific publishing and its derivatives (open content, open archives, etc.), contemporary tendencies in `social software' and knowledge sharing, the authors project a new look on knowledge, dissociated with linear notions of cumulation, progression, and hierarchy (e.g. of scientific argument), but related to circularity, heterarchy, (...) and evolution. Arguing from a medium theoretical perspective, they illustrate their ideas with developments in library science, current debates in epistemology and theories about information architecture, with a particular focus on `unsystematic' folksonomies. (shrink)

What are the implications of taking seriously Chaïm Perelman's proposition that “definitions are rhetorical”? Efforts to find Real Definitions are dysfunctional to the extent they direct argumentation toward pseudo “is” claims and away from explicit “ought” claims about how words are to be used. Addressing definitional disputes explicitly as propositions ofought rather thanis could put on the agenda the pragmatic concerns of definitional choice that might otherwise remain tacit.

_Discusses philosophers Mencius and Aristotle as socio-ecological thinkers._ Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Artistotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of energy (...) and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of _pistis_, “persuading-and-being-persuaded,” in Aristotle and _zhi_, “governing-and-being-governed,” in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess’s “ecosophical” deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle. (shrink)

Dreams are used figuratively throughout Greek literature to refer to something fleeting and/or unreal. In Plato, this metaphorical language is specifically used to describe an epistemological distinction: the one who has false knowledge or opinion is said to be dreaming while the one who has true knowledge is said to be awake. These figures are also central to Philo of Alexandria's philosophical language in De somniis 1-2 and De Iosepho. Although scholars have documented these epistemological metaphors in Plato and related (...) treatments of the concept of sleep in Heraclitus, it has not been discussed in any detail in relation to Philo's treatment of Joseph in these two treatises. In De somniis 1-2, Philo primarily emphasizes his role as a dreamer and thus one incapable of true knowledge. In De Iosepho, Joseph is a dream interpreter who is not only awake but also capable of interpreting the figurative dream of life to which most people are subject. Although some scholars have considered these treatises contradictory in terms of their treatments of Joseph, an analysis of Philo's figurative use of sleep and dreaming reveals that they are a part of a coherent exegetical framework. (shrink)

A passage in Plato’s Laws (719c) offers a fresh look at Plato’s theory of poetry and art. Only here does Plato call poetry both mimêsis “imitation, representation,” and the product of enthousiasmos “inspiration, possession.” The Republic and Sophist examine poetic imitation; the Ion and Phaedrus (with passages in Apology and Meno) develop a theory of artistic inspiration; but Plato does not confront the two descriptions together outside this paragraph. After all, mimêsis fuels an attack on poetry, while enthousiasmos is sometimes (...) used to attack it, sometimes to praise it. The explanation evidently lies in Plato’s understanding of drama, which in the Laws has grown more precise, from simply the presentation of characters to the presentation of multiple characters engaged in dramatic conflict. (shrink)

The ability to think in abstractions depends on the imagination. An important evolutionary change was the installation of a suite of six imaginative activities that emerge at first in childhood, which include empathy, symbolic play, and theory-of-mind. These abilities can be built upon in adulthood to enable the production of oral and written stories. As a technology, writing has three aspects: material, skill based, and societal. It is in fiction that expertise in writing is most strikingly attained; imagination is put (...) to use to create simulations of the social world that can usefully be offered to others. Fiction is best conceived as an externalization of consciousness, which not only enables us to understand others but also to transform ourselves so that we can reach beyond the immediate. (shrink)

The ability to think in abstractions depends on the imagination. An important evolutionary change was the installation of a suite of six imaginative activities that emerge at first in childhood, which include empathy, symbolic play, and theory-of-mind. These abilities can be built upon in adulthood to enable the production of oral and written stories. As a technology, writing has three aspects: material, skill based, and societal. It is in fiction that expertise in writing is most strikingly attained; imagination is put (...) to use to create simulations of the social world that can usefully be offered to others. Fiction is best conceived as an externalization of consciousness, which not only enables us to understand others but also to transform ourselves so that we can reach beyond the immediate. (shrink)

Autopoietic societies have produced three major images of civilization: the Greco-Roman, the Eurocentric Western, and the Settler Society type. The most important incarnation of the latter to date has been America. This article explores the deep-going differences between American and European ideas of civilization. It examines how the American kind of autopoietic civilization expresses itself in preternaturally distinctive conceptualizations of nature and freedom, life and death, order and chaos, city and ecumene. The article discusses the political and social implications of (...) this. (shrink)

No Íon, a autoridade e a sabedoria de poetas e rapsodos são confrontadas por meios indiretos. O caráter oblíquo dessa estratégia impede o acesso direto ao conteúdo do diálogo e provoca inúmeros equívocos de leitura. Um fato contextual estimula mais ainda leituras equivocadas. A poesia tratada no Íon difere muito da forma como nós, modernos, a entendemos. Na Antiguidade grega, de base aural, a poesia era o modo privilegiado de conservação da tradição herdada, e permaneceu exercendo essa função capital até (...) mesmo quando a escrita passou a desempenhar papel relevante na forma de composição e transmissão cultural. Neste contexto, o rapsodo representa uma autoridade que cobre praticamente todos os campos do saber. Autoridade enciclopédica, contra a qual Platão travou uma guerra não sem ambiguidades. O presente artigo busca revelar a motivação profunda que anima o Íon: a contraposição entre dois modos de comunicação, o da poesia e o da filosofia. Defende, ainda, que Platão, ao atacar a performance poética, busca, além de rejeitá-la, substituí-la pelo élenkhos socrático como modo de comunicação ideal para instrução e guia da vida humana. (shrink)

Thucydides uses the first extended episode in the History, the Corcyrean conflict , to present the world of political discourse, deliberation, and battle. This episode is programmatic for a number of reasons: it is the first episode with a pair of speeches; Thucydides ties this episode directly to the outbreak of the war; certain questions, such as morality's relevance to foreign policy, are introduced here for the first time; and, most importantly, it is here that Thucydides establishes what the reader's (...) role is to be throughout the work. This paper argues that, for all the significance of Thucydides' Archaeology and Statement of Method , the "participatory" dimension of the History begins with the Corcyrean conflict. It is only with the introduction of speeches that the reader must address the ways in which speech and narrative confirm and undermine each other, as the historian's voice now alternates and competes with that of his characters in speech. From an authorial perspective we find that various techniques Thucydides employs-multiple perspective, authorial reticence, and episodic presentation-are used to recreate the political arena of fifth-century Greece. The various facets of the reader's extensive labor may be clustered under the heading of extrapolation and conjecture , as the reader must endeavor to see events from the perspective of the participants, evaluate claims made in speeches, experience battle vicariously, and consider events-which are past from the reader's perspective-as future in terms of the subsequent narrative. Analogous to what Plato did for philosophy, Thucydides has produced an interactive, open-ended, and participatory type of literature by appealing to the reader's involvement and by bringing written literature as close as possible to the live, extemporaneous, face-to-face debate of oral Greek culture. (shrink)

This paper deals with a development of the ancient thought on mimesis in its modern reception as regards a certain idea of theatre. It defends the hypothesis that the figure of the character, as set up in Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien, has its source in a curious reversal of the Platonic mimesis. After presenting the main tenets of Plato’s reflection on mimesis and of Diderot’s theory on character, showing their convergences and contrasts, it is analyzed how such a conceptual (...) turnaround has historically taken place, by establishing a chain of reception from Plato to Diderot passing through Cicero and the Renaissance artists. (shrink)

The discovery of social phenomena by a discipline whose roots are abidingly psychological has been a singular development in American educational research. Formulations of situatedness are emblematic of this rethinking, and depending on our understanding of it, we have in situatedness the possibility of a distinctive set of analytic commitments. This paper discusses these possibilities and their development in the educational research literature, in the particulars of the Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) publication Situated Cognition. In the end, situatedness is (...) understood as a unifying formulation. And while it opens a huge domain of topics for inquiry, it also proves, as its inclusiveness, of no use whatsoever as a parsing device. Situated cognition, for example, could not be, nor has ever been, otherwise. (shrink)

Against any obscurantist stand, denying the interest of natural sciences for the comprehension of human meaning and language, but also against any reductionist hypothesis, frustrating the specificity of the semiotic point of view on nature, the paper argues that the deepest dynamic at the basis of meaning consists in its being a mechanism of ‘potentiality navigation’ within a universe generally characterized by motility. On the one hand, such a hypothesis widens the sphere of meaning to all beings somehow endowed with (...) the capacity of moving and/or perceiving movement. On the other hand, through a new evolutionist interpretation of the concept of generativity, such a hypothesis preserves the peculiarity of human meaning, meant as essentially founded on a certain intuition of infinity. Two corollaries stem from this hypothesis: first, religiosity can be considered as a matrix of grammars of infinity, aiming at regimenting its flight of potentialities. Second, non-genetic transmission of cultural information exerts determinant influence also at the level of that very deep mechanism of the human predicament that is the cognitive navigation of motor potentialities. A re-reading of the structuralist epistemology, scientific literature on the nervous cells of jellyfish, and some recent experiments on the mirror neurons of dancers, as well as certain intuitions of Teilhard de Chardin, are the main arguments of the paper. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the human, all too human vulnerability to mimesis (imitation) is a central and so far underdiagnosed element internal to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Supplementing medical accounts of viral contagion, the chapter develops a genealogy of the concept of mimesis – from antiquity to modernity to the present – that is attentive to both its pathological and therapeutic properties. If an awareness of the pathological side of mimetic contagion is constitutive of the origins of philosophy, in Plato’s (...) Republic, and crowd psychology called attention to the mirroring dynamic of affective contagion among crowds and publics in the modern period, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis highlights the pathological implications of hypermimetic conspiracies reloaded by new media, while also revealing the human ability to develop therapeutic patho-logies – that is, critical discourses (or logoi), on the contagious dynamic of mimetic pathos. Like a Janus-faced mirror, then, this genealogy of homo mimeticus calls attention to both the contemporary dangers of affective contagion and to the urgency of transformations or metamorphosis to counter future pandemic and environmental threats that loom large in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

In Historied Thought, Constructed World, Joseph Margolis identifies the philosophical themes that will dominate philosophical discussions in the twenty-first century, given the recognition of the historicity of philosophical thought in the twentieth century. In what follows I examine these themes, especially cognitive intransparency, and the arguments presented in favor of them, noting the extent to which they rest on a view of language that takes a written text, and not speech, as the paradigm of language. I suggest if one takes (...) speech as a mutual embodied action in a shared space as a model for language, the theme of cognitive intransparency—and the problems it brings in its wake—does not loom so large for those of us working in the history of philosophy. I conclude by showing that if we adopt this suggestion in relation to early Greek philosophy, that is, the period in the history of historied thought in which philosophy itself emerges as a linguistic and intellectual activity, we can better understand how and why philosophy emerged as it did—in the form of dialogues by Plato. (shrink)