This paper explores Sean Kirkland’s thesis that relation is the fundamental concept in Aristotelian political philosophy. While substance is prior to relation in Aristotle’s metaphysics, Kirkland argues that since the human exists only in the context of a city which is defined by the essential diversity of views on the human good, relation precedes substantial unity in politics. I argue that the priority of the substantial unity of the city should not be seen to threaten the importance of political relations. Already in his theoretical ontology, Aristotle sees relation as absolutely essential and integral to the identity and existence of any mortal individual. Because of the essentially dynamic and relational activity of any mortal substance, the city as political substance must include and preserve deep diversity and difference within itself. The priority of the substantial over the relational, which makes possible the constitutive power of relations in the life of substances, is as operative in politics as it is in metaphysics.

According to Aristotle’s reply to what I call the divine wish aporia (NE VIII.7 1159a5–12), perfect friendship entails wishing many great goods for one’s friend, but precludes wishing that one’s friend become a god—“the greatest of goods”—for the realization of this wish would destroy the friendship. Counter both to this reply and to the slim body of existing commentary, which appeals to the external criterion of equalizable reciprocation, I demonstrate how the perspective internal to the virtuous activity of perfect friendship affords properly Aristotelian grounds for retaining the divine wish as its constitutive limit. While the practicable scope of perfect friendship remains circumscribed within human limits, its characteristic wishing at once reaches beyond the human—and the friendship.

This paper explores a type of poetry, music, and theater that is said to be responsible for the birth of participatory democracy. While Aristotle and Nietzsche briefly mention a similar genealogy of democracy in their work, Book III of Plato’s Laws archives a remarkable history of how participatory democracy emerged in Athens’s theater. After connecting Plato's account to a participatory style of music and poetry that is associated initially with the term polyphōnia, I consider a line of philosophical commentary on this type of music from Plato to Rousseau to Derrida. For these philosophers, I claim, polyphōnia disrupts the political hierarchy of those with and those with bare voices and encourages equal participation. If the phenomenon of polyphōnia is indeed behind Plato’s historical account of democracy in the Laws, then it may tell us how democracy was first performed in the theater and how it was initially critiqued by philosophers.

Quietly nestled in Catullus’s early love poems, there are two grammatical ambiguities that, although provoking heated grammatical discussion in the commentary tradition, have been completely overlooked by more literary and theoretical writers. In these brief moments, the distinction between man and women, lover and loved, vir and irrumatus, becomes problematized, to say the least. Moving through and unpacking the form of Roman masculinity that is so prevalent in Catullus’s poetry, this paper looks to ultimately understand the place of these ambiguities in our collection of Catullus’ work. In so doing, it explores and uncovers a fundamental engagement with the gender-political situation in Rome, and ultimately attempts to show how Catullus not only bests his male counterparts through his poetry, but also deconstructs the very idea of what it is to be a vir in the first place.

In this paper, I begin with the most basic tenet in Aristotelian metaphysics, namely that ousia or ‘substance’ is ontologically prior to the nine other categories of being, including the pros ti, the condition of being literally ‘toward something’ or what is sometimes called 'relation' or ‘relationality.’ Aristotle repeats this frequently throughout his works and it is, I take it, manifest. However, in the Politics, so I argue here, Aristotle’s dialectical study of common appearances leads him to describe ‘human being’ in a way that runs contrary to this. That is, insofar as the human being is the zoon politikon or ‘political animal,’ it seems to be constituted as the being it is precisely by way of its relatedness to other human beings in the polis. I then try to determine the moment of ‘birth’ for this essentially relational being, and find that it may not be the emergence of the human from the womb, but rather, at least according to this interpretation of the Politics, the moment when we enter into the logos together with others in posing, discussing, debating, and re-posing the abidingly open question of the human Good.