The Greek Manuscripts Of Aristotle's Poetics Review

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(More customer reviews)I read these works for a graduate seminar on Aristotle.
Poetry appeals to human passions and emotions. Powerful beautiful language and metaphor really appeal to emotion. This idea really disturbed Plato, who takes on Homer in the Republic. Plato thought that early Greek poetry portrays a dark world; humans are checked by negative limits like death. Tragedy has in it a character of high status brought down through no fault of his own. Plato says this is unjust. Republic is about ethical life and justice. It starts with the premises that might makes right and then moves onto the idea much like modern religions that justice comes in the afterlife. Plato hates the idea that in tragedy bad things can happen to good people. He wanted to ban tragedy because he found it demoralizing.
Aristotle's Poetics is a defense against Plato's appeal to ban tragedy. Tragedy was very popular in Greek world so Aristotle asks can it be wrong to ban it? Yes, it is wrong thus he decides to study it. Plato says Poetry is not a technç because the poets are divinely inspired. Aristotle disagrees Poetics is a handbook for playwrights. Mimçsis= "representation or imitation." Plato uses it in speaking of painting, thus art is imitation. Another meaning is to mimic, like actors mimicking another person. Plato and Aristotle use it to mean psychological identification like how we get absorbed in a movie as if the action were real, eliciting emotions from us. We suspend reality for a while. Aristotle says this is natural in humans; we do this as children, we mimic. If imitation is important for humans then tragic poetry is worthwhile for Aristotle to study.
Definition of tragedy- "Through pity and fear it achieves purification from such feelings. This is a famous controversial line. Katharsis= "pity and fear" thus the purpose of tragedy is to purge katharsis. Katharsis can also mean purification or clean. There is a debate if it means clarification, through which we can come to understand katharsis. Aristotle thinks tragedy teaches us something about life. Tragedy is an elaboration on Aristotle's idea that good or virtuous people sometimes get unlucky and in the end, they get screwed. Tragedy shows this so we can learn to get by when life screws us. The whole point of tragedy is action over character. Action is the full story of the poem like the Iliad. Character is only part of the action.
Aristotle distinguishes between poetry and history. Poetry is concerned with universals, history is concerned with particulars.
I recommend Aristotle's works to anyone interested in obtaining a classical education, and those interested in philosophy. Aristotle is one of the most important philosophers and the standard that all others must be judged by.


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Evil In Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy Review

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(More customer reviews)"Evil in Modern Thought" is a well-written and thought-provoking review of Western philosophy's struggles with the problem of Evil. Susan Neiman views this problem "as the guiding force of modern thought." Recognizing the controversiality of her contention she sub-titles her book, "An Alternative History of Philosophy." Neiman takes us along on her philosophical journey into the writings of important 17-20th century Western thinkers. She groups these thinkers under chapter titles that neatly summarize their attempts at understanding evil. While presenting the salient features of their ideas, she asks them questions you'd want to ask yourself.
Neiman states that what constitutes evil has changed - evil today stands for "absolute wrongdoing that leaves no room for account or expiation." The author asks: "How can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms"?
Chapter 1, "Fire From Heaven" includes the thinkers who stole God's fire for man: Leibniz; Pope; Rousseau, Kant; Hegel and Marx. We start with the words of an 11-th century Castilian king embodying man's growing urge to independent thinking: "If I had been of God's counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better." At first, faith reigns supreme; we meet Leibniz, who thinks God has ordered all things for the best. His work, the "Theodicy" attempts the conformity of faith with reason. But the poet, Pope, nudges God aside with:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Rousseau was the first thinker to treat the problem of evil as a philosophical one. He states evil "is a catalog of mistaken acts that can be rectified in the future." Knowledge, not penance is needed. His account of evil was naturalistic because it required no reference to supernatural forces or sin.

Kant followed through on Pope by setting limits to mortal reasoning about God: questions about God and his purposes are out of bounds and speculating on
God is idolatry; he believed in the existence of a "Moral Law" that is supreme - and that we are duty-bound to obey. Purpose is not in nature but in Reason (we define our purposes).
For Hegel and Marx there are forces at work that drive humanity - not God but the force of History (Hegel) toward greater freedom and knowledge and the forces
of human creative work (Marx). Mankind must take responsibility for the world rather than explain it. God is man (Marx). Hegel wanted to eliminate the contingent; perhaps he epitomized, better than any other philosopher, man's quest for certainty.

Chapter 2, "Condemning the Architect" posits that God's creation is flawed. We are introduced to Bayle; Voltaire; Hume; de Sade and Schopenhauer. Voltaire railed against a benevolent world-view that tried to explain away the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 in which several thousand people died. Bayle said faith requires a crucifixion of the intellect and that God is responsible for all evil - Reason thus leaves God condemned. We commiserate with Voltaire's plaint: "we miserable little animals have the right to wonder about our misery!"

When we reach David Hume we're told the emperor has no clothes: reason is not up to the task its been assigned (reasoning about God and evil is doomed to frustration).

And what to make of de Sade: an original thinker who wrote violently pornographic works - and who rather than merely state that man is capable of horrifying and despicable acts, bestowed upon us horrifying human specimans as though to show God himself what his "wonderful" creation was capable of. As Neiman states: "he tried very hard to stop at nothing." And by doing so, he condemned the Creator himself: for how could a benevolent God create creatures the likes of those de Sade depicted.

Chapter 3, "Ends of an Illusion" recounts the condemnation of man's religious-based rationalizations by branding them anti-life (Nietzsche) and infantile (Freud). The Promethean Nietzsche thought the problem of evil was not given, but created by those unequal to life. He sought to revise our concept of guilt away from the Christian to something nearer and more accepting of the contingencies of life. Freud's view can be summarized as, "Attempts to seek some kind of sense in human misery are fueled by childlike fantasies. The need for a metaphysics is an obsessional neuroses."
When we arrive at the end of our journey, in Chapter 4, "Homeless" we seem bereft of hope. We are called to account with the horrors of the 20th century -Communism, Fascism, Stalinism, Islamism which have given us two unprecedently destructive world wars, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Holocaust and September 11. Philosophy has shut the door on further idealisms and can only peer dumbfounded at what Hegel's heirs have wrought. We cannot innocently walk past the death camps and philosophize as before. We can never go back to where we started; but have we reached a dead-end?
So what might the answer be to Neiman's opening question: "How can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms"? As de Sade's writings reveal, we should analyze the mind's capacity for extreme levels of anger: in de Sade's case, he spewed vitriol against the idea of a benevolent God, Hitler viciously scapegoated the Jews, bin Laden despises America and wants to make Islamism the dominant force in the world. Hitler's and bin Laden's powers to instill fanatical hatred in followers was and is terrible to behold. This anger, coupled with human aggrandizement, and the fires of fanaticism feeds off itself like a feedback loop that continuously increments its energy levels until the person spins out of any rational orbit, tosses aside the "Moral Law" and willingly commits, justifies and revels in the most horrifying acts.
"Evil in Modern Thought" is a compelling inquiry into the problem of evil and will certainly stimulate your own thinking on the subject while increasing your understanding of what some of the greatest minds in Western philosophy said on the subject.

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From Memory to Written Record: England 1066 - 1307 Review

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(More customer reviews)Moving from reliance on human memory to the written word was a long and interesting process which is fully explored by this book. Prior to Edward I's reign, the assumption was that "time out of mind" was about a century prior to the present. The date before which legal proof of rights was not required had previously been moved forward in time as required: the date of Henry I's death followed by Henry II's coronation followed by Richard I's coronation. But there it stayed fixed by Edward I's statutes. Time out of mind was prior to September 3, 1189. After that date, it was expected that written records rather than human memory would confirm legally valid grants of rights.
The development of a written culture of everyday affairs covers many sorts of artifacts and concepts. Tally sticks as bills and receipts, personal seals functioning as signatures, why we began signing with an "x", and the number of pounds of sealing wax used by the King's Chancery over time are all explored in this book. The development of heraldry as part of the shift from memory to written record is also commented on briefly.
The author carefully studies the question "Were laymen literate?" and tries hard to make the reader understand what being literate meant in this period. Our modern concept of someone who can read AND write simply doesn't fit with concepts held at the time about literacy. The author's conclusions on the pervasiveness of literacy in this period are surprising.
Throughout the book, the very different reasons for and processes surrounding the making of a record, the keeping of a record, and the using of a record are carefully differentiated. This is an outstanding work of history for the student of literacy, of medieval history, and of legal history.

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The second edition of Michael Clanchy's widely-acclaimed study of the history of the written word in the Middle Ages is now, after a much lamented absence, republished in an entirely new and revised edition. The text of the original has been revised throughout to take account of the enormous amount of new research following publication of the first edition. The introduction discusses the history of literacy up to the present day; the guide to further reading brings together over 300 new titles up to 1992. In this second edition there are substantially new sections on bureaucracy, sacred books, writing materials, the art of memory, ways of reading (particularly for women), the writing of French, and the relationship of script, imagery and seals.

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Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)Heidegger's Glasses is a dark, complex, and compelling novel by Thaisa Frank. Set in Germany at the turning point of World War II, Frank carefully constructs a convincing, yet surreal, setting for her characters and uses this to contrast the struggles of Nazis with those in the resistance, and captive Jews. The prose is written in an experimental style and is sparsely poetic--no doubt a turn off for some readers. Frank's results, however, are heart wrenching and the book when given a chance is a compelling read.

The premise of the book is somewhat complicated. Obsessed with the occult, Himmler has created a program to answer letters of concentration camp victims. By answering the letters of the dead, the dead will be able to rest and Germany will be able to win the war.
To this end, Jews who are able to read and write in many languages are diverted from concentration camps to answer these letters. To hide the project underground, a mine shaft is converted by a Nazi architect into an enclave for these scribes. Gerhardt Lodenstein is the Nazi officer commanding this outpost. He, and his partner Elie Schaten, are really part of the resistance. Using his command of the outpost as a cover, Elie and Lodenstein are able to help smuggle out Jews. Just as they seem to have reached a familiar pattern, a request comes from the high command. The philosopher Heidegger has sent a letter to a close Jewish colleague, Asher Englehardt, who is now in Auschwitz.
Englehardt lost his academic position when the Nazis first came to power and found work as an optometrist. Lodenstein has been charged to have his scribes answer this letter and return the last pair of glasses that Englehart made for Heidegger. What seems like a simple task becomes nearly impossible. Lodenstein biggest concern, at first, is whether his scribes would be able to mimic the abstruse style of a major philosopher. But when Elie uses Heidegger's letter as an opportunity to rescue Englehardt and his son from Auschwitz, it puts the whole project in danger.
Frank brilliantly weaves all this together into a seamless plot. We meet many of the denizens of the mine shaft and some Nazis on the outside as well. She paints the hopes and despairs of the captives in muted colors. We get hints of their backgrounds before the war and the depths to which they have sunk as they wait out the war in fear of being found. Frank is able to do this with the barest level of detail. She gives her reader just enough of the details. We fill in the blanks with our own imagination and it seems as though we really know Frank's characters. On some level, we know their hopes, their fears, and their dreams and in the end these are the most important facts.
More striking is that Frank's ability to use these sketchy images to really evoke belief in her reader. I was drawn in by Frank to the point that I started to do some searching the internet. Was there really a program to write letters to the dead? No, it is the product of Frank's imagination. Of course there was a Heidegger, but what about an Asher Englehardt? No, Englehardt is also pure fiction. He does not even seem to be based on a real, historical figure.
There is also a lot of subtlety and depth in Frank's writing. The whimsical setting of the mine, perhaps, alludes to many things: the Nazi's trying to bury their past, the mine's use as a way station for underground activities, or as a metaphor for death itself. It is not a coincidence that Heidegger is, at first, delivered the wrong pair of glasses or that Asher Englehardt became an optometrist. Heidegger, for all of his ability to sort out philosophical truths, is unable to see the the corrupt and amoral world that has sprung up around him. Only Asher Englehardt's glasses enable Heidegger's to see. The idea of the scribes writing letters to the dead is also something more than poetic irony.
Frank chose to write her book in a style that flouts conventional style. Dialogue is not placed in quotations. This can be disconcerting and makes the writing a little difficult to digest at times, but also lends a certain poetic style to the writing. But it may well be that she chose poetry over sheer readability--it is sad that many readers may find this difficult to read simply because she chose to go against the expected writing conventions.
The letters that are interspersed between the chapters are also a little mysterious. They start off innocently enough, but as the book progresses the letters and the translations thereof don't seem to match up.
I do not have a great facility for languages, but there were times where you could clearly see that the text above didn't quite match up with the translation below. In particular, one letter written in Hebrew letters was: 1) not written in Yiddish (which would be more typical for the time); and 2) was written in Hebrew, but written backwards (left to right instead of right to left); 3) the 'translation' had nothing to do with the Hebrew text of the letter. The Hebrew text of the letter is actually the introduction to the 12th Century, Jewish scholar Maimonides' Book of Knowledge (The Book of Knowledge: From the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides). Perhaps I am reading too much into this: I received a review copy, the letters may not have been completely translated, and this text may have simply been used as filler. It could also be another ironic touch by the author, as the quotation discusses the foundations of knowledge, which for Maimonides requires a total belief in God.
For those who can make it through the prose, the book is deeply moving and evocative. It is one of those books that sticks with you long after you read it. Highly recommended.

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