Suchergebnisse

Positionsbestimmung. Erhebt die Aufklärung zu Recht den Anspruch, zum ersten Mal eine kritische Erkenntnisbegründung gegeben zu haben? Der Autor geht diesem modernen Vorurteil und seinen historischen Gründen nach und zeigt, dass es angesichts eines großen Textcorpus antiker Erkenntniskritik nicht haltbar ist. Die Moderne hat nicht "die" Vernunft "entdeckt", sondern einen anderen Vernunftbegriff. Der Anspruch, allein dieser neue Vernunftbegriff garantiere Selbstbestimmung und Freiheit, hatte einen bis heute nachwirkenden Kulturbruch zur Folge. Das Buch öffnet den Blick auf andere Formen der Rationalität und auf neue Möglichkeiten der Verständigung mit der eigenen Geschichte

It is Aristotle to whom we owe the first philosophical theory of poetic art fully extant from antiquity. He recognized the origin of art and poetry in man's capacity for theory and his pleasure in it, for he considered imitation (mímēsis) as the beginning and basis of cognition. He understood imitation not as a mere act of copying but as the realization and re-implementation of a single person's general disposition to act, which is to say his or her disposition to turn towards the world aiming to seek pleasure or to avoid pain. The poet's task is to represent such a way of acting, real or fictitious, in some medium in a certain way. An orderly representation of this kind starts from an (again, real or fictitious) person's decision to prefer or avoid something. It closely follows this agent's 'quality' (poiótēs), which is to say his or her character. Thereby, the poet can achieve a congruence of all parts of the entire action with one another and with the whole. This is what, in Aristotle's view, is the poet's task. At the time of the reception of Aristotle's "Poetics" around 1500 AD, the understanding of poetry was widely shaped by Horace and Cicero and hence had a strongly rhetorical character. For Horace, it is true, the poet ought to be an imitator, as well, even though an 'erudite' imitator. In Horace's view, however, his knowledge regards the general manners of man. Therefore, the poet, gifted as such with 'prophetic eye' and 'wisdom,' has the ability to express this knowledge in vivid and concrete terms (communia proprie dicere). This knowledge, which men, parents, brothers, politicians, judges, military commanders, etc. use to act was considered to be learnable according to the rules of rhetoric, although it is only by the poet's individual talent that it can become art. It was believed that what Aristotle had called the 'probable' could be equated with this skill based on acquired experience and genius. As a consequence of this reinterpretation, Aristotelian probability, which makes a certain man talk ...

Modernity's break with the Middle Ages is distinguished by a comprehensive turn to a world of individual, empirical experience, a turn that was a repudiation of Plato's idea that there is a reality of rationality and intellect. Yet already in the Renaissance it was no longer thought necessary to seriously confront the 'old' concept of rationality that emanates from Plato. Arbogast Schmitt's book sets itself this until-now-unfulfilled task, comparing the arguments for a life based on theory and one based on praxis in order to provide a balance sheet of profit and loss. Showing that the Enlightenment did not, as often assumed, discover rationality, but instead a different 'concept' of rationality, the book opens one's view to other forms of rationality and new possibilities of reconciliation with one's own - that is, Western - history. 'Modernity and Plato' was hailed upon its publication in Germany (2003, revised 2008) as 'one of the most important philosophy books of the past few years,' as 'a book that belongs, without any doubt, in the great tradition of German philosophy,' and as 'a provocative thesis on the antiquity-modernity debate.' It is a major contribution to synthetic philosophy and philosophical historiography, in English for the first time. Arbogast Schmitt is Honorary Professor at the Institute for Greek and Latin Philology at Free University, Berlin and Emeritus Professor of Classical Philology and Greek at the University of Marburg, Germany. Vishwa Adluri teaches in the Departments of Religion and Philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York