Platonic Psychology: Appetitive: Books-- a Valentine's Day Tradition

Monday, February 14, 2011

Appetitive: Books-- a Valentine's Day Tradition

The summer before my junior year in college, I almost entirely stopped eating chocolate. When Valentine's Day came, a package arrived for me. Inside the package was a box-- which looked very much like a chocolate box-- wrapped in white paper with a pink ribbon. I opened it, thinking I would have to figure out which of my friends I could convince to eat it. To my great pleasant surprise, it was a copy of the hardcover copy of Being and Time which I later used to start my Heidegger study group. The books-wrapped-like-chocolate have now become a tradition, and they are usually dense texts. This year my parents got me Hans-Georg Gadamer's Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato and a study of Dionysus by Richard Seaford titled DIONYSOS. I am quite excited to read both of them. Being by far the lighter of the two, I read the introduction to DIONYSOS earlier today and it looks great. Richard Seaford is brilliant; I read on of his essays from Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State in a Greek class I took on tragedy and the Oresteia.

Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato

Happy Valentine's Day!

No comments:

Why Platonic Psychology?

Entry types into this blog are divided into three categories: appetitive, spirited, and reasoning to correspond with the three parts of the Platonic conception of the soul. The appetitive portion will most often be humorous content with a classical bent. However, Plato's understanding of appetitive is much broader than that, encompassing the general pleasures of spectacle-- such as theater, both comedy and tragedy-- as well as emotions and bodily pains and pleasures. Sometimes I will stray into one of the more Platonic uses of appetitive. If I can manage it, I will post a weekly translation of a joke or funny phrase into Latin or Greek. The spirited portion (literally timophillic i.e. honor loving) will be my own ideas about Greek and Roman ideas. This section attempts to put me on the map as a classicist with a point of view. The reasoning part will be commentary and reviews on classical texts. I will also try to post a passage for Latin or Greek prose composition, as well as translations of prose passages or poetry in Latin or Greek. I will offer my take on the passage, and if anyone would like to offer their own attempt at the passage, or corrections or criticisms of mine, they will be welcome to do so in a comment on the blogpost or email me at sulpicia3@hotmail.com.

Bread, Roman Poetry, and Other Frivolity

If you're interested in me as well as my commentary about classical texts, visit my personal blog Fragments of Sulpicia (III), in which I discuss my general day-to-day existence, alongside bread recipes, pedagogy, and Roman Love Elegy.

The Roman love elegists, writing at the end of the Roman Republic wrote beautiful poems about their experiences in love, creating the persona or changing the name of a real person on whom to center their poetry. The only extant female poet calls herself Sulpicia, daughter of Servius and constructs her poems around her lover, Cerninthus. In order to write freely, I have taken up her name, Sulpicia, and the names of her characters and the characters of her contemporary love elegists, to refer to people in my own life. A reference list of characters can be found on the righthand side of Fragments of Sulpicia (III).

Monday, February 14, 2011

Appetitive: Books-- a Valentine's Day Tradition

No comments:

Post a Comment

History of Philosophy

Followers

Contact the Author

Interesting Links