More than any other of Emerson’s essays, “Experience” shows us a succession of states, moods, and “regions” of human life. It is not a “carpet” essay in Adorno’s sense, in which a set of themes is woven into a core idea, but a journey essay, which moves from region to region, and portrays life as a set of moods through which we pass. Like a piece of music, “Experience” is in motion. It provides an exemplary case of the essay as Montaigne describes the form: “something which cannot be said at once all in one piece.” Chapter 7 considers whether “Experience" is to be seen as what Cavell calls a “journey of ascent” – as in the journey up and out of the cave in Plato’s Republic; as a version of Plato’s myth of Er; or, with its praise of “the midworld,” as a return to the ordinary as Wittgenstein thinks of it.

While it is important to trace Emerson’s main positions, one misses the living nature of his philosophy unless one also takes account of the motions, moods, and patterns within his essays, and the ways he dramatizes instability, spontaneity, and inconsistency. This emphasis is found in Goodman’s discussions of “History” in Chapter 1, “Friendship” in Chapter 3, “Nominalist and Realist” in Chapter 4, “Manners” in Chapter 6, “Experience” in Chapter 7, “Nature” in Chapter 9, and “Illusions” in Chapter 10. Chapter 2 distinguishes the sheer variety of skepticisms in Emerson’s thought, about the world and other minds, but also about mystical experiences that refuse “to be named” or are “ineffable.” It also attends to the differences between the “modern” tradition of skepticism as doubt, and skepticism as a form of life, with Emerson’s essay on Montaigne a key source for his idea of a “wise skepticism.”

This chapter explores personal religion in some of Plato’s dialogues. First, focusing on the Apology and Euthyphro, it considers Socrates’ daimonic sign and how far Socrates expresses religious attitudes independent from, in line with, or opposed to those foregrounded or sanctioned in Athens. Second, it turns to Plato’s Laws and examines the Stranger’s vision for civic religion in the imagined city of Magnesia and his prohibitions of private worship. Finally, it considers how philosophical inquiry can itself constitute personal religion. Overall, it argues that Plato does not evince a single attitude towards all the phenomena we might classify as personal religion. That the Stranger outlaws some central aspects of personal religion does not mean that he proscribes all others; we should resist the old idea that Socrates would have fallen afoul of Magnesia’s laws. While the Stranger excludes a culture of free speech of which the Socrates of the early dialogues avails himself, Magnesia is not Athens. For Plato, how far expressions of personal religion should be countenanced, regulated, or proscribed by the city turns on the nature of the city in which that question is raised.

In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands tragedy to be, in essence, an imitation of the finest and noblest life. According to Plato, the only thing that is genuinely good and valuable is wisdom and virtue, and it is this life that tragedy imitates. This definition may seem deeply counterintuitive, lacking core tragic notions of loss, failure and suffering, but Plato would say these depend on prior conceptions of gain, success and flourishing. Ideal tragedy includes adversity, obstacles and limitations to living the best life – it is not an easy life of uninterrupted success – but it foregrounds the goodness and value of the life rather than dwelling on the obstacles. I formulate four constraints on ideal tragedy: the veridical constraint, which holds that only the life that is genuinely the best should be imitated as best; the educative constraint, which holds that tragic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to pursue virtue and wisdom; the emotional constraint, which holds that the tragic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; the political constraint, which holds that no living citizen should be portrayed as living the best life.

In this chapter, I provide an interpretation of the famous claim at the end of the Symposium that “the same man” ought to be able to write both comedy and tragedy, and a speculative reconstruction of the arguments that Socrates might have used to secure that claim in his discussion with Agathon and Aristophanes. I argue that ideal comedy and tragedy are unified in at least three ways. First, they constitute a teleological unity, in that their ethical imitations both aim at moral improvement; second, they constitute an ethical unity, in that they both rely on, and endorse, a single theory of value, according to which wisdom and virtue are good and ignorance and vice are bad; and third, they constitute an epistemic unity, in that the objects that they imitate – ridiculousness and seriousness in agents and actions – form opposite parts of the same branch of knowledge, such that one cannot know one without knowing the other. I further argue that actual comedy and tragedy are unified but in a much weaker sense that does not involve any knowledge. In the end, I discuss the possibility of tragicomedy and consider in what sense it might be correct to understand Plato’s dialogues as tragicomedies.

In this chapter, I show how Plato’s conception of and norms for comedy provide a framework for understanding the Euthydemus as an ideal comedy, and I argue that Plato employs techniques of comedic characterization, in particular borrowing from Aristophanes’ Clouds, in order to portray the enemies of philosophy as ridiculous and self-ignorant. In particular, I argue that he portrays the sophist brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, as imposters, who wrongly believe that they possess deep and important wisdom because of their skill in eristic argumentation, that is, argument that uses any means necessary to win. Socrates inhabits the role of the ironist, who ironically praises his interlocutors and then ultimately exposes them as ridiculous and self-ignorant. My analysis of the dialogue in terms of the interplay of these comedic character types not only allows us to see the nature, scope and function of Socratic irony in a new light, but it also shows how the dialogue’s overt concern with fallacy and argument ultimately is a question of character and virtue. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal comedy articulated in Chapter 1.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato borrows from Euripides’ Antiope, in order to frame the terms of the debate between Socrates and Callicles in the last part of the Gorgias about whether the philosophical or the political life is best. I argue that Plato’s engagement with this tragedy is an instance of paratragedy, that is, the non-parodic adaptation of a work of tragedy in order to enrich the dramatic situation. What redeems the Antiope in Plato’s eyes is its endorsement of the superiority of the intellectual over the political life. In adapting the Antiope for his own purposes, Plato defends an account of good life as spent in the cooperative pursuit of wisdom and virtue. This life runs up against two limits that are thematized in the Gorgias: human obstinacy, the refusal to cooperate and recognize the force of argument; and endemic uncertainty due to our finite capacity for argument. Since Socrates is portrayed as both defending the life of philosophy in argument, and actively living it, then the Gorgias itself counts as an ideal tragedy. This reading of the dialogue sheds important light on the arguments concerning the nature and value of rhetoric. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal tragedy articulated in Chapter 4.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s depiction of the last day of Socrates in the Phaedo is not only a tragedy in Plato’s ideal sense, but it also repeatedly contrasts its own presentation of the death of Socrates with how a traditional tragedy might portray it. This contrast brings into stark relief the intellectual, moral and emotional gap between ideal and actual tragedy, in addition to an important disagreement about the nature and goodness of death. For actual tragedy, death is the worst thing that can happen. In the Phaedo, death is presented as a kind of liberation from the body, but this conception of death reveals the insurmountable limitations on the attainment of knowledge that living embodiment entails. The problem is not with argument itself, but with our all-too-human grasp of it. This means that, because of our embodied finitude, we can never actually be certain that the arguments for Socrates’ optimistic picture of divine redemption really are sound. My interpretation highlights Socrates’ epistemic uncertainty and the role of hope, and it makes misology passage more central to the dialogue’s argument than usually recognized. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal tragedy articulated in Chapter 4.

In this chapter, I interpret Plato’s Cratylus as an ideal comedy and argue that Plato employs the comedic technique of parody in order to expose rival methodologies as sources of ridiculous self-ignorance. Socrates’ extended parody of etymology shows that words cannot be a guide to the nature of being, since we have no reason to think that their analysis can teach us anything about reality. Etymology is, in short, a source of laughable self-ignorance because it provides its practitioners with the illusion of wisdom. Parody generally involves the use of an imitation that exaggerates or distorts some feature of the original, often in order to undermine its claim to authority. In the case of etymology, Plato’s parody not only exposes etymology as a false path to wisdom, but it also articulates specific criticisms of etymology regarding its methodology, its scope and its alleged systematicity. The function and purpose of the very long etymological section has proved highly puzzling to interpreters who are generally unsure what to make of it, and my account reveals the etymologies to be playing a central, and previously unnoticed, role in the overall argument of the dialogue. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal comedy articulated in Chapter 1.

In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Philebus, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands comedy to be, in essence, an imitation of laughable people, where the notion of the laughable, or to geloion, is a normative one that picks out what genuinely merits laughter, and not necessarily what people actually laugh at. According to Plato, the only thing that merits laughter is moral vice, in particular the vice of self-ignorance. I formulate four constraints on ideal comedy on Plato’s behalf: the veridical constraint, which holds that only what is genuinely laughable, that is, moral vice, should be imitated as laughable; the educative constraint, which holds that comedic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to reject vice in their own lives; the emotional constraint, which holds that the comedic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; and the political constraint, which holds that only moral and political enemies should be portrayed as laughable.

Reading was one of Debussy’s favourite occupations, without doubt one of the activities that nourished and sustained him the most. Still, any attempt to uncover greater detail about the kind of reader Debussy actually was, remains a complicated, almost archaeological task. Although the sale of scores, manuscripts and several books sent to Debussy offers some leads, it does not make it possible to reconstruct their precise importance or to show their full diversity. In order to understand Debussy’s literary inclinations as fully as possible, it is thus necessary to examine other sources, such as letters, books sent to him, testimonies of friends, as well as the diaries and notebooks that have been miraculously preserved – notably those in which he noted references to works likely to interest him and even specific sentences that he particularly liked. By cross-checking these various elements, I sketch a portrait of a composer through one of his most essential passions.

This chapter, the first of two devoted to Julian’s Against the Galileans, begins by mapping the narrative structure of Julian’s text. It then traces Julian’s first major step in re-narrating the Christian tradition: casting the ancient Hebrew tradition as existing harmoniously within the broad contours of the Hellenic tradition. Focusing on Moses’s teachings about the creation of the cosmos and about its governance by a hierarchy of gods, Julian shows that the Hebrew tradition, though not terribly impressive, has teachings compatible with Julian’s Hellenic tradition

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on clusters of re-narrated episodes in Cyril’s response to Julian. Chapter 5 is organized by one of Julian’s own categories: the “gifts of the gods” which, he had argued, were given in surpassing quality and quantity to the Hellenic people. This chapter groups Julian’s various iterations of gifts and Cyril’s sprawling responses in three, interrelated categories: exemplary characters, intellectual superiority, and military and political domination. In Cyril’s responses, Minos was no legendary hero but rather imitated the fallen angels’ lust for domination; the Attic language itself (not to mention the convention of writing) derived from proto-Christian sources; and the Jewish people’s turbulent history and the present ascendance of Roman superiority equally reflect the Christian God’s management of the cosmos.

Fifth-century Greek tragedy and visual art centres on interaction between people, including antithetical relations, reflecting a society shaped by monetised exchange and commerce. Platonic metaphysics is focused on unchanging being, placing supreme value on the possession of money and devaluing or excluding exchange and interaction. Although dialogues such as the Phaedo contain the idea of the unity of opposites, and binary opposites such as body and soul, Platonic metaphysics aims at the negation of opposites, and thus of antithesis. The contrast between being and seeming emerges in fifth-century tragedy and philosophy, but it is given much greater prominence by Plato and is linked with the theory of Forms. One of the Platonic accounts of the relationship between Forms and particulars is in terms of original (Form) and copy or image (particulars). Plato is the first to offer a theorization of the idea of the image (in the Sophist) and to define the idea of mere image (not reality). Plato’s treatment of the being-seeming relation, like the theory of Forms generally, expresses the reification of the value of money, treated as the basis of possession, excluding exchange.

The human being is freely ‘self-determined’ rather than determined through some external authority (whether theological or teleological). This dichotomy conveniently expresses the usual understanding of modern political thought’s divergence from preceding tradition. By comparison, pre-modernity is teleological, anthropomorphic, realist; in a word, naïve – with its substantively rational nature, dictating essential ends to which we are subject. These received truths are past due for a re-examination. Just how naïve or dogmatic was the Greek understanding of freedom and nature? In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s view of man as naturally political is more complex and multivalent than our historical categorizations allow. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which, for him, politics does indeed depend upon a natural model. That model, however, is the Idea of the Good. And here, where Plato seems furthest from us, lies his greatest challenge to contemporary understandings of nature and freedom.