Ancient Philosophy Commons^™

The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics And The Discourse Of Friendship In The Faerie Queene, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

From Michel de Montainge’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontology have begun to shift our attention to the ways both human and nonhuman bodies inter-animate in the making of political, interpersonal, and artistic life worlds. Together with these investigations, I argue that an aquacentric account of relation is necessary to think the subject of friendship …

Unhinged: Kairos And The Invention Of The Untimely, Robert Leston

Publications and Research

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge from the timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as the potential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation? This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints because it has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print, the apparatus of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating …

Mousike Techne: The Philosophical Practice Of Music In Plato, Nietzsche, And Heidegger, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

After retracing the breadth of the definition of music in antiquity to the end of justifying the sense in which one may speak of 'the music of philosophy' as Plato's Socrates does, this essay re-reads the Platonic distinction between philosophy as the highest kind of music and performative, as heard or played sung music as a lower form. It then turns to an exploration of Nietzsche's writing style conceived on a muscial model precisely qua aphoristic and concludes with a review of Heidegger's thought as musically composed or adumbrated.

Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary

Research Resources

In the history of science perhaps the most influential Aristotelian division was that

between mathematics and physics. From our modern perspective this seems like an unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided Kepler and Galileo towards the modern scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle’s sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was not adopted by later astronomers because …