Full-text resources of CEJSH and other databases are now available in the new Library of Science.
Visit https://bibliotekanauki.pl

Results found: 5

first rewind previous Page / 1 next fast forward last

Search results

help Sort By:

help Limit search:
first rewind previous Page / 1 next fast forward last
1

The Poetics of Mind and Matter: Some Remarks on Ancient Images and Imagination

100%
Thein K.
Eirene. Studia Graeca et Latina
|
2015
|
vol. 51
|
issue 1-2
303-334
EN
Discussing two recent monographs (STIJN BUSSELS, The Animated Image: Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power, and ANNE SHEPPARD, The Poetics of Phantasia: Imagination in Ancient Aesthetics), the review essay develops some salient points made by both authors, especially regarding the relation of images, material and mental alike, to the power and activity of imagination. It suggests that ancient authors tend to connect the much-discussed issue of the animated images to precisely this activity, which typically operates on the borderlines between the sensible world and its intellectual reflection. The latter need not acquire the shape of a theory: it can as well, perhaps better, translate back into the imaginative activity of the arts themselves. To show in more detail how this imaginative process works, the essay choses one text that speaks about painting, and another that treats sculpture. In the first case (which elaborates upon Bussels’ book), the focus is on Pliny’s Historia naturalis XXXV and its discourse on how the origins of art that will become painting consist in constructing an absent life, be it one imprinted in the ancestral portraits (imagines), or one evoked through a subtly traced silhouette. In the second case (which finds its point of departure in Sheppard’s book), the essay revisits Flavius Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana and its discourse on phantasia, with a special concern for Phidias’ statue of Zeus at Olympia. It concludes that, pace Sheppard and others, Philostratus’ dealing with imagination and the arts need not assume the Neoplatonic filiation. In its conclusions, the essay submits that both material images and verbally induced visualizations reveal themselves as images only if we recognize their power to animate our consciousness of not only the world, but ourselves as human beings.
2

ARTEFACTS, NON-PARTICULARS AND MODEL PARTICULARS

100%
Thein K.
Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
|
2009
|
vol. 16
|
issue 4
510-528
EN
The paper comments and elaborates on five pages of P. F. Strawson's 'Individuals' (1959, 230-234), together with his 'Entity and Identity' and 'Universals'. The focus is on Strawson's understanding of individual non-particulars as types or universals, and on his contention that the most obvious non-particular entities ('well-entrenched non-particulars') are the broadly conceived artefacts including the works of art. The narrow focus is on the implications of Strawson's suggestion that 'an appropriate model for non-particulars of these kinds is that of a model particular - kind of prototype, or ideal example, itself particular, which serves as a rule or standard for the production of others' (1959, 233). The paper analyzes the relation between Strawson's position and the issue of artefacts and their (largely missing) ontology. It also asks about some less obvious affinities between the problem of the non-particulars (and their entrenchment) and Strawson's concept of a person.
3

The Sublime, Nature’s Eloquent Gift: A Review Essay

100%
Thein K.
Eirene. Studia Graeca et Latina
|
2017
|
vol. 53
|
issue 1-2
9-75
EN
Discussing two recent books on the sublime (James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, and, in part, Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant), the review essay takes a closer look at the theoretical implications of, especially, Porter’s reading of Longinus. The main virtue of this reading is found to be twofold. First, avoiding the trap of a too narrow conceptualization of sublimity, it brings in an unusually broad range of texts that deal with sublime phaenomena from all the relevant points of view. Second, emphasizing the place of Longinus in the rhetorical tradition, it offers an archeology of the sublime’s fundamental relation to language. Demonstrating that no experience of sublimity is possible without speech that makes it articulate – and therefore shareable and teachable –, Porter enables us to rethink what Longinus has to say about nature, human nature, and art. The sublime emerges here as a unique yet variegated mental habitat where superhuman nature and the art of eloquence can connect and make us “see” what is incomparably greater than our shape and size that usually limit both our experience and the way we analyze it. The sublime reverses this experience and makes the universe bounce back on us by suddenly revealing its most distance vistas, but also its possible internal cracks and ruptures. Longinus himself does not theorize this situation as such: if he quotes and discusses a number of sources (Homer’s sublime mind looms large in his account), he is equally open to a form of Platonism and to those cosmic intervals or voids that originate with Lucretius whose theoretical stance is the most anti-Platonic imaginable. This is no contradiction: at the heart of the expressible sublime, there is a subtle and ongoing negotiation between what Porter labels the material and the immaterial sublime. If the former finds its expression in the poetics of the Presocratic authors and also in Lucretius, whereas the latter reaches its peak in various Platonic images of the soul’s ascent, neither kind of the sublime is a pure form and their difference is a matter of degree and scale. Regardless of theoretical orientation of different authors, the projection of their premises into the material universe leads the reader’s imagination towards the unachievable whole of reality as “sublime reality” (Porter). Compared to Porter’s enterprise, Doran’s book is less concerned with the rhetorical issues and focused on the sublime as a self-transcending psychological state that is more or less independent on the rhetoric of its expression. Instead, Doran’s sublime has a history that is intertwined with the culturally co-determined morality: especially the modern sublime thus shifts towards bourgeois rather than aristocratic values. The question is to know whether we find such a shift anticipated in the last chapter of Longinus’ treatise, which offers various views on the progressive disappearance of truly great and sublime natures. Longinus himself connects this process to the issue of political freedom and the world (imperial) peace, but leaves the matter of the true cause of the decline unresolved. Political progress or decline notwithstanding, to learn the appropriate rhetorical art of the sublime enables us to recover sublimity through the imitation or re-enactment that helps us to literally saturate our soul with the effluences of the great minds of the past.
4

Soul and Incorporeality in Plato

100%
Thein K.
Eirene. Studia Graeca et Latina
|
2018
|
vol. 54
|
issue 1-2
53-95
EN
This article takes a closer look at what Plato’s dialogues tell us about the incorporeality of the soul as one of the well-established Platonic doctrines, on a par with the soul’s immortality and its self-moving nature. What motivates the proposed rereading is Plato’s timidity in describing the soul, human or not, as being entirely without body of any kind. The aim of the article is not to contest the obvious fact that Plato treats souls as essentially distinct from bodies, but to understand why the assumption of incorporeality receives no detailed discussion of its own. One possible answer is that such a theoretically rigorous discussion is always less important to Plato than his emphasis on the variety of actions and experiences ascribed to the soul both here and in the afterlife. While having an essential moral dimension that connects to the soul’s activity of thinking, these actions and experiences contribute to the description of the soul as a fully individual agent, akin to that of a person. To highlight the immortality of this agent, it is more opportune for Plato to start from various facets of the soul’s natural self-motion, while leaving aside possible arguments in favor of the soul’s full ontological bodilessness. In any case, the Platonic soul is introduced as a fundamental part of reality. Its natural agency can therefore be tackled separately from its explicit ontology. By this means, the agency –akin to human agency – that is attributed to the soul can retain its provisional ontological neutrality.
5

Aristotle on Why Study Lower Animals (De Partibus Animalium, I,5, 644b22–645a36)

100%
Thein K.
Eirene. Studia Graeca et Latina
|
2014
|
vol. 50
|
issue 1-2
208-229
EN
The paper comments upon On the Parts of Animals I,5 and its leading question of why a naturalist should study all animal species, including those that are perceived as worthless and more or less repugnant. It analyzes different reasons produced by Aristotle in order to justify a systematic biological inquiry and argues that a common feature of these reasons consists in their connection with Aristotle’s understanding of human nature as situated at the juncture of perishable individual substances and intellectual activity that “shares in the divine.” Starting from the epistemic contrast between our conjectures about the most valuable celestial region and the more easily available knowledge about the sublunary world, Aristotle emphasizes not only the sum of what we can learn about the animals that live around us but, especially, the possibility to grasp the teleological structure shared by the latter and mankind alike. Learning about nature and its inner workings implies learning about human nature, including its capacity to imitate the works of nature in art and to understand them through science. The parallel between the pleasure obtained by understanding art and the pleasure gained by scientific inquiry only confirms that the latter offers us some independent value which is irreducible to the superior but not quite attainable knowledge of the divine.
first rewind previous Page / 1 next fast forward last
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.