Monday, November 7, 2011
A. early efforts of a Greek "intelligentsia"
1. "preSocratic" philosophers: natural laws to explain structure and operation of the physical universe (vs. traditional ideas of supernatural interventions at unpredictable whim of anthropomorphic gods)
2. Xenophanes on religion: relativism; criticism of the mythological tradition
3. rationalization: prose mythographers of early 5th cent. (compare Plato, Phaedrus 229)
4. Hecataeus: "accounts of the Greek many and ridiculous"
5. Heraclitus: frr. 1 and 40
B. the concept of progress
1. traditional myth (Hesiod): a fall and a decline
2. traditional myth: gods as inventors, originators, givers (agriculture, wine, medicine, music, crafts)
3. the new view, arising from ethnographic comparison and advances in sciences and technology: rise from savagery to civilization, human inventions (Xenophanes 16; "ode to man" in Antigone)
C. the Sophists
1. the word sophistês can be neutral, almost a synonym for sophos, "wise", but also used in a pejorative sense, "contriver, trickster"
2. professional "higher education" in rivalry with unpaid association and apprenticeship and with cultural transmission through poetry
3. organization and transmission of knowledge, divided into distinct disciplines
4. concentration on human sciences and on language as essential characteristic of human beings: language, political science, anthropology, psychology, rhetoric, literary criticism all have origins in activities of sophists
II. Key dichotomies of the fifth cent. cultural crisis
A. physis and technê: nature and art/skill/craft
1. positive evaluation of technê: supplements deficiencies of nature; brings progress; opens opportunities for anyone who can learn
2. negative evaluation of technê: related to deception (worries about art of rhetoric); violation of natural order (seafaring); training inferior to inborn talent (from aristocratic perspective: Pindar and praise of athletes)
B. nomos and physis: law/custom and nature
1. Herodotus on nomos basileus (3.38): traditional respect maintained within recognition of diversity of nomoi
2. relativism as calling nomos into question: artificial, additional, unnatural; attractive view for dissidents of various political persuasions
3. emergence of concept of "human nature"
C. logos and ergon: word and deed
D. knowledge and belief/opinion/perceived appearance
A. law code for Athenian colony at Thurii in Southern Italy in 440’s
B. many visits to Athens, including the one used as dramatic setting of Plato’s Protagoras (433/2): characterized there as pompous but honorable
C. little survives but titles: some examples are Art of Eristics, Antilogies, On Government, On the Original State of Things, On Virtues
D. specific fragments
1. man the measure: although a general sense fits some aspects of fifth-century Greek culture, there is good evidence that a narrower sense was intended, the validity of the perception experienced by each individual (cf. Plato’s Theaetetus)
2. agnosticism about gods (compare Xenophanes)
3. stronger and weaker logos: reflected in agon of Aristophanes’ Clouds (lines 889-1104)
A. major influence as a rhetorician and teacher of rhetoric; handbook of rhetoric; distinctive style of balanced phrases, playing with sound-repetition and other repetitions (note fragments, esp. Funeral oration, and compare Agathon’s speech in Plato’s Symposium)
B. Encomium of Helen
1. argumentation: assimilating various causes to compulsion; legal and philosophical problem of ascription of responsibility
2. the stronger controls the weaker (§6)
3. the power of logos: §8 mighty lord, §9 effect of poetry (cf. "pity and fear" in Aristotelian theory of tragedy); §14 speech to soul as drug is to body
4. "opinion" (doxa) contrasted with knowledge (which is unattainable), §11
5. compulsive force of sight and sensation on the soul, §§15-19
6. "a plaything" §21
C. tragedy and deception: intimations of the idea of willing suspension of disbelief; in another fragment, Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes called "a play full of Ares"
D. "On being": related to serious speculations about the nature of being, as debated by Greek philosophers and moderns; primacy of sense-perception, puzzlement over link between sense-perception and mental concepts; puzzlement over relation of speech to reality
A. a leader of the oligarchic coup of 411, condemned to death after the ouster of "the 400" (Thuc. 8.68); brilliant but unpopular, an effective speaker
B. political speculations: compare Callicles’ argument for "might makes Right" in Plato’s Gorgias and the view of Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic Book 1 (justice is the advantage of the stronger)
C. "Truth" fragments
1. 1.A,i: compare story of Gyges’ ring in Plato’s Republic, Bk. 2
2. 1.A, ii-iv: nomos vs. physis: advantageous/disadvantageous, pleasure/pain
3. 1.A, v-vi: obedience to law and custom may be harmful
4. 1.B: conventionality of ethnic and national distinctions; men are naturally all the same
5. fr. 2: attack on the cooperative aspects of social system as in fact requiring injustice and danger
A. scholarly dispute whether the Sisyphos fragment was written by Critias or Euripides
B. context of fragment on gods is a play in which the speaker Sisyphus gets his comeuppance from the gods (yet in his speech Sisyphus claims gods are a human invention)
C. rise of mankind out of beastlike existence, importance of law
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
(an unperformed revised version completed within about a year after the defeat of the first version in the comic competition of the City Dionysia in 423)
A. name = "Twister"; reflects trickery, lack of scruples
B. represents boorishness against refinement, country against city, thrift against extravagance
C. generation gap
1. exploited in other plays (Wasps, Frogs, and lost ones)
2. controversy over changes in education: old music, poetry, gymnastics vs. new music/poetry and sophists
A. already well known in Athens
1. his public activity described in Apology: cross-examining people (date uncertain)
2. brave military service, and odd behavior (trance at Potidaea; bravery at Delion, and elsewhere: Symposium 219e-221b)
B. stereotypical prejudices against intellectuals: abstraction, impracticality, lack of physicality, filth, pallor, fakery
C. sophistic subjects and features
1. morally neutral: grammar (gender of nouns), metrics, biological science
2. potentially dangerous subjects: meteorology and physics
3. morally suspect subjects: unorthodox religion, scepticism, atheism; rhetoric and sophistic argumentation
A. Better (stronger, kreittôn) argument vs. Worse (weaker, hêttôn) argument (889-1104)
1. caricatured old vs. new contrast in music, physical training, comportment (note 1009-1023)
2. divine and mythological paradigm: 1047-70
3. compulsions of "nature": 1075
B. son vs. father (1321-1475)
1. shameless indifference to abusive names (1327-30)
2. poetry in the symposium as an index of character and lifestyle (1353ff.)
3. law as a human construct (1421ff.)
Nov. 11 is an academic holiday. Because of this, the lecture on Sophocles' Philoctetes will be held until Monday, Nov. 14, and the scheduled topics of the lectures of Nov. 14, 16, 18 will be somewhat compressed.