This paper explores the Greek conception of theoria, Gadamer’s interpretation of it, and how he applies it to his own hermeneutics. In particular, the transition that Gadamer makes from traditional metaphysical perspectives of theoria in ancient thought towards the activity of theoria within human life is explored, and the role that his aesthetics plays in this process. The importance of the intertwining of theory and practice for Gadamer is considered and what the practice of theoria may consist in. It is suggested that Gadamer’s approach, which emphasizes heightened experiences of interconnection to promote self-transformation, is a productive transformation of theoria relevant to contemporary points of view.

Scholars have cited the influence of Lucretius on Machiavelli as important to framing Machiavelli’s position on the freedom of political agents. Some scholars like Roecklin (2012) and Rahe (2007, 2008) argue that Machiavelli was a determinist based on Machiavelli’s rejection of the clinamen; others argue with Brown (2010, 2013, 2015) and Morfino (2006, 2011) that Machiavelli’s affirmation of Lucretian natural principles left room for the freedom of agents. However, this paper takes a different approach by arguing that Machiavelli successfully resists identification with either of these positions. I argue here that Machiavelli affirms a notion of agency that reflects the influence of the Lucretian notion of mixed bodies where human actions emerge from an irreducible multiplicity of subjective and objective factors. I also argue that Machiavelli structures the narratives describing the actions of his agents in a way that supports interpreting their actions as both contingent and necessary.

In the study of the history of philosophy, there is a long-standing question as to whether works produced between the mid-fourteenth century and the end of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance, can be rightly understood as philosophy or as primarily literary and rhetorical in character. The latter view is prominently held by Paul Oskar Kristeller but has precedent in Hegel’s treatment of this period in his History of Philosophy. That the works of major figures of this period are essentially philosophical is a view held, in quite different ways, by Ernst Cassirer and Ernesto Grassi. This essay examines the origin and nature of these views and advances a general perspective through which they may be brought together.

This article presents a reading of Nietzsche’s use of rhetoric as inseparable from his philosophical project. I provide an exegesis of Nietzsche’s own reflections on rhetoric and consider its actual deployment, arguing that Nietzsche’s rhetoric is often deliberately dissonant and oriented toward facilitating receptive effects. The aim, I suggest, is to shift politics of possibility—to alter what can and cannot be done and said politically. Dissonant rhetoric, rhetoric that marries aesthetic attunement with affective turbulence, helps to accomplish this end by shaping the way that rhetoric is received by audiences. I conclude by suggesting that Nietzsche’s rhetoric has implications for contemporary theory, shifting how we might view critical political engagement in the public sphere. Understood in this way, Nietzsche’s rhetoric provides a perhaps surprising model for a critically robust form of rhetoric.

This article attempts to draw out and to clarify a tension at the core of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift (1809). This tension can be put as follows. On the one hand, Schelling insists quite strongly throughout this text upon the inherent goodness of creaturely selfhood—not simply in the negative sense that selfhood is not intrinsically evil, but in the positive sense that each created self is loved by God and destined to play a singular part in God’s self-revelation. On the other hand, Schelling depicts selfhood in terms that seem to link it inextricably—perhaps constitutively—to sin and evil. It is my contention in this article that this tension arises as a result of Schelling’s attempt, in the Freiheitsschrift, to embed an essentially Kantian account of radical evil within the broadly Neoplatonic framework he had sketched five years earlier in his Philosophy and Religion (1804).

I propose that Hannah Arendt’s hermeneutical philosophy can make important contributions to ongoing debates in the study of epistemic injustice. Building on Kristie Dotson’s concern that Miranda Fricker’s formulation of hermeneutical injustice is needlessly restrictive, I argue that Arendt’s concept of ‘thinking’ challenges us to imagine a form of hermeneutical virtue that is rigorously self-critical. The self-destructive tendency of Arendtian thinking may help to guard against the specific danger that Dotson identifies - namely, that an overly rigid approach to hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical virtue can itself generate situations of epistemic injustice. Despite important differences that emerge, it is productive to bring together Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical virtue and Arendt’s concept of self-undermining thinking in order to reveal the ways in which these two corrective strategies might enrich and pose important challenges for the other.

Scholars have advanced many different interpretations of Aristotle’s discussion of “the naturally just” in the Nicomachean Ethics. Most of these interpretations, however, pay insufficient attention to the context into which Aristotle introduces the concept, and in particular to Aristotle’s discussion of political justice, of which “the naturally just” is only a part. This paper seeks to recover that context and to offer a new interpretation of “the naturally just” as the part of political justice that is derived from the nature of republican politics, rather than from the agreement of fellow citizens.

This essay addresses the following questions: How does the meta-sensory function of koine aisthesis (sensing-that-I-sense) relate to its other functions? How can a meta-level arise from the immanence of sensation? Can we give an account of meta-sensation that doesn’t assume a transcendental plane? My contention is that (a) the representationalist model doesn’t apply to Aristotle and that (b) Aristotle offers an alternative that is worth exploring. I propose to interpret the meta-sensory power of the koine aisthesis in terms of the sensing of the limits of perception. The sensing of the limit of sensation is the sensing of sensation itself qua potentiality as exemplified by Aristotle’s observations on the experience of seeing darkness or hearing silence. If it is so, sensing-that-I-sense doesn’t require an appeal to a transcendent faculty and arises from the immanent experience of sensation itself.

Paul Celan’s “Tenebrae” is a scandalous poem: it describes how “unity with the dying Jesus” (in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s words) is achieved by means of the Jewish experience of the concentration camps. In this paper, I provide a new interpretation of “Tenebrae” that breaks from the two traditional ways in which the poem has been viewed—on the one hand, as a Christian poem that suggests that Jesus, insofar as he suffers just like Jewish concentration camp victims do, can provide “hope and redemption for the faithful” (Gadamer), and, on the other hand, as an ironic criticism of this Christian idea. Rather, I suggest that “Tenebrae” is a modification of Christianity: preserving Christian belief about Jesus’s death, it destroys that belief, and does so for the sake of the defense against Christian persecution. Finally, I suggest that this view reveals the peculiar poetic form of “Tenebrae”—what I call “political form.”

Tensions between sentiments and reason are a well-known feature of Rousseau’s moral theory. To explain these tensions, this paper appeals to Rousseau’s moral foundationalism. In this foundationalism, I argue, feeling and reason operate jointly to establish the content and normativity of moral law. This joint operation is not always smooth, and additionally there is much leeway in this theory, which explains the theory’s ability to accommodate various interpretations and emphases as well as its struggle to delimit specific moral laws, choices, and actions. The most important element of this foundationalism is conscience, which does the work of voicing moral laws with content and normativity grounded in moral sentiments.

The Protagoras examines how community can occur between people who have nothing in common. Community, Protagoras holds, has no natural basis. Seeking the good is therefore not a theoretical project, but a matter of agreement. This position follows from his claim that “man is the measure of all things.” For Socrates community is based on a natural good, which is sought through theoretical inquiry. They disagree about what community is, and what its bases and goals are. But Plato illustrates the seriousness of Protagoras’s position through the repeated breakdown of their conversation. The dialogue leads us to question both speakers’ assumptions about community. Socrates must face the problem that not everything can be brought to language. Protagoras must recognize that there is a basis of community even in what cannot be shared. Community is grounded in an event that is both natural and not up to us, and cultural and articulate.

Greek tragedy, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, represents the performative realization of binary political difference, for example, “private versus public,” “man versus woman” or “nation versus state.” On the other hand, Roman comedy and French Revolutionary Terror, in Hegel, can be taken as radical expressions of political in-difference, defined as a state where all mediating structures of association and governance have collapsed into a world of “bread and circuses.” In examining the dialectical interplay between binary, tragic difference and comedic, terrible in-difference, the paper arrives at hypothetical conclusions regarding how these political forms may be observed today.

This paper is Part II of my study entitled “Approaching the Parmenidean Sublime: A New Translation and Resequencing of the Fragments of Parmenides.” What I seek to accomplish here is to elaborate on my resequencing/translation decisions, and take up the more thorny philosophical/juridical aspects of my position previously mentioned, yet condensed, in “Notes to Translator’s Introduction,” and “Notes on the Fragments.” I believe that this continued engagement with the fragments of Parmenides makes up the “dutiful apprenticeship” intrinsically represented in the poem’s teacher-student exchange, and in the request to convey the story. The request to convey the story is still alive and well in Parmenidean studies. This passing along of a teaching, its history, and its style, makes up the essence of an apprenticeship, whether artistic, philosophical, or as a social ontology. To streamline my references to the poem, I will use only my translated and resequenced fragment and line numbers found in my article, “Approaching the Parmenidean Sublime: A New Translation and Resequencing of the Fragments of Parmenides,” from Volume 23, Number 1, pages 1–18, Fall 2018, of this journal.

This paper proposes a solution to the apparent contradiction between Aristotle’s positions concerning the bees’ ability to hear in the Metaphysics and in the History of Animals. It does so not by appealing to external (chronological or philological) emendations, but by disambiguating the Ancient Greek verb akouein into three meanings: hearing of sound (psophos), of voice (phônê) and of speech (logos). Such a differentiation shows that, according to Aristotle, bees do hear other bees’ intermittent buzzes as meaningful and interested calls for cooperation. This differentiation also hints toward the specificity of human communication and community.

The Republic rarely speaks of piety; yet religious concerns inform more of its treatment of poetry than readers acknowledge. A pair of tripartite rankings in Book 10 has puzzled interpreters: first the triad Form-couch-painting, then the ostensibly equivalent triad of a flute’s or bridle’s user-maker-imitator. The tripartitions work better together if one recognizes the divinity at work behind Athena’s gifts the flute and bridle. This mythic reading reveals the imitator to stand, yet again, in opposition to the gods; but it also points toward an ambiguity about knowledge that Plato has forcibly excluded from his discussion.

I shall tell you the story, propose an overview, and show the structure, goal, and peculiarities of this monstrous edition that I undertook forty-four years ago: the Heraclitea, of which ten volumes have appeared since 1999. One volume was published in November 2011 and a few others are still in preparation. While telling you this story, I shall strive to show the radical differences between my approaches and the standard ones taught worldwide in the departments of classics and ancient philosophy in universities.

This paper examines the relationship between participation and motion with respect to the natural philosophy of the Phaedo. Aristotle’s criticism of participation and its failure to account for motion shows the relevance of the dialogue to this problem. Challenging Aristotle’s critique, I interpret the Phaedo as offering a possible solution to the question of how forms cause motion in material beings. The verb ὀρέγεσθαι at 65c8, 75a2, and 75b1, together with the active ὀρέγειν at 117b2, ground an account of ontological striving as a solution to the difficulties inherent in participation within the literary context of the dialogue.

Presocratic philosophy as a historical category was defined by Aristotle as physics, or physical philosophy, because φύσις (understood as a single genus of being, among others) was its object of study, its practitioners being since tagged accordingly as φυσικοί or φυσιόλογοι. The central part of the paper deals briefly with the four pioneering Heraclitean uses of the word φύσις (frs. DK B106, B1, B112, and B123), in which the sense of the only Homeric use of the term seems to be deepened and continued. Φύσις in Heraclitus has an ontological sense (covering the rationale of genuine and unitary being), and appears always in epistemic contexts, as the object of search, criterion of knowledge, basis for action and language, susceptible of show­ing and concealing. Contrasting with Aristotle’s outlook, Plato’s Phaedo 95e ff. sheds a different light on φύσις, suggesting Plato’s acknowledgement of a wider metaphysical reach of Presocratic thought, and stressing historical continuity of the philosophical project as such. In particular, the meaning of the word φύσις in Plato and Heraclitus isn’t natural or physical reality, but reality tout court, or the nature of things (their essential being: the what, how and why of things that are).

The traditional reading of Plato’s criticism of the poets and painters in Book 10 of the Republic is that they merely imitate. In light of Plato’s own image-making, the critique of imitation requires a more careful examination, especially in regards to painting. This paper argues that it is insufficient to view Plato’s critique of image-making by the painter solely in terms of the image replication that does not consider the eidos. In view of the context of Plato’s argument within Book 10 and elsewhere, other considerations, such as the ideas of measure and proportion, which pertain to the notion of the beautiful, are required for a complete understanding of the argument against the painter. In light of these further considerations I argue for a threefold distinction between mimesis as replication, mimesis as false resemblance, and mimesis as true resemblance. With respect to the third kind of mimesis, which directly pertains to Plato’s own image-making, one can see in Plato a different configuration of the relation between image and original portrayed in the image.

The intention of this article is investigate ways in which the image and metaphor of the garden open productive avenues for thinking the being of nature. The primary focus of this investigation is found in two instances in which gardens play significant roles in presenting, even if only tacitly, an image of nature: Homer’s Odyssey and Plato’s reference to the “Gardens of Adonis” in Phaedrus.