Appetitive: A Plato Scholar on Beauty

This is not a particularly classics related post, but it is a great video anyway. Alexander Nehamas, a philosophy professor at Princeton who writes about Plato, gave a lecture a few days ago for Big Ideas on "Individual Character and Ideas of Beauty," which I found very enjoyable. About a third of the lecture argues against Kant's theory of aesthetics (which I am ashamed to say I have not read), about a third is about Manet's Olympia, and another third talks about Plato. Enjoy!

Reasoning: Great Plato Scholarship in Unusual Places

Plato is a figure who constantly appears in Western culture. Much of the interpretation of Plato takes his work out of context or extrapolates it so it no longer has anything to do with the work in question (usually the Republic). Even classics/classical philosophy scholars I respect and adore sometimes fall into problematic musings for the masses, e.g. Alexander Nehemas' "Plato's Pop-Culture Problem and Ours" [1]. Yet sometimes the opposite phenomenon occurs: great Plato scholarship and commentary comes from unexpected places, such as professors of English or political science.

I thought I would discuss (briefly) some of the most unusual of the sources for awesome Plato scholarship: the Tolkein scholar. No, I'm not kidding. I did not seek this out, Propertius II found it when he was searching for Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's Music [2] in the library catalog. "Saving the Myths: The Re-creation of Mythology in Plato and Tolkein," by Gergley Nagy in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader is very impressive.

Gergley Nagy, apparently, teaches classes on Plato, Tolkein, and is an English professor in Hungary. One of the wonderful things about his writing is that he is not burdened by some of the scholarship that classicists learned as cannon. To me, he seems to truly understand the way that Plato's work intereacts with myth. Plato's characters disparage myth and especially the heroes in specific myths (especially in the Republic, but in other works also). However, Socrates spins elaborate myths out of elements from traditional mythology and rewrites them into persuasive speeches. He recycles themes in an original and educational way for his audience. It seems to be that Gergley Nagy accurately captures the reverence that I believe Plato must have felt  for myth and dramatization (or at least this is what I can imagine from his work). If you happen across the book, I think he captures this spirit incredibly well, and you should absolutely read it.

Catherine Zuckert, a political philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, spent twelve years writing Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. I was not sure about the book when I first encountered it because it was not by a Plato scholar, but rather by a Leo Strauss scholar. However, Zuckert is brilliant. I have minor disagreements throughout, but she chose an extremely controversial view of the dialogues and made it persuasive. For more information, read my recent set of posts discussing her book.

 

Endnotes

1. I meant to discuss this article when it came out but, for some reason, I didn't get around to it. I do however love Nehamas in his article "Eristic, Antilogic, Sophistic, Dialectic" (JSTOR) or in The Virtues of Authenticity and in the Philoctetes roundtable which I mentioned in my recent blogpost.
2. While speaking of Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's Music, I thought I might mention that Propertius II recommends it. I have not read it yet, but it's now on my list.

Appetitive/Reasoning: The Origins of Tragedy

I found an amazing lecture (although I have not listened to much of it yet) on the Origins of Tragedy. It is a round table discussion with (in alphabetical order) Joseph LeDoux, Gregory Nagy, Alexander Nehamas, Steven Scully, and Gareth Williams put together by Philoctetes. It looks really interesting, although the large size of the video seems to be messing with my computer and/or my internet connection.

I was absent for this weekend because I was at an Indo-European Studies conference. The conference was enjoyable and the people were friendly and interesting. I will blog a little about the conference here over the next two days. However, because it strayed quite far from my area of expertise, I will not pretend to be able to capture the gist of all the talks, and much of my blogging about the conference will be descriptions of the colorful people, which I will try to put on my personal blog, as character sketches (even those from a related field) are not entirely classics related.

Update: 11/08/10

I watched the blog later last night. The guy who speaks at the beginning advertising Philoctetes is really obnoxious, but you can skip through his speech. I also don't mind so much because Philoctetes seems to provide some pretty cool lectures and roundtable discussions. I was also amused by a few choice moments, including Gregory Nagy (to whom I was introduced this weekend!) refers to Aristotle as "Mr. A."

You can also find a version of the discussion on youtube.