The multilayered Allegory of the Cave is a center point in Plato's metaphysical and epistemological framework. It is a synthesis of wisdom that finds practical application. Debates about the Myth's interpretation remain active nowadays, and its relevance continues as long as humans live. The abstract allegory of the Cave is Plato's philosophical outlook on human existence. Knowledge, as one of the allegory's central themes, is also a key element that bridges the abstract idea with the practical application (...) and manifestation into reality. The analysis of Plato's Forms of Good, hierarchy of knowledge, and their connection to the human soul will shed light on the central question of this essay – can Plato's Allegory of the Cave be interpreted as a map of reality, and if we use this map to guide intellectual and moral transformations? (shrink)

The Allegory of the Cave is a profound and influential reflection on the nature of education and philosophy found in Book 7 of Plato’s Republic. Socrates, the main speaker in the Republic, describes prisoners who have been chained in a cave all their lives, only able to see shadows cast on a wall by objects behind them. The allegory explores what would happen if one of these prisoners were freed and eventually taken into the world outside the cave. (...) The story illustrates how education can lead individuals from the shadowy darkness of ignorance and mere opinion to the light of knowledge and truth. This piece introduces the allegory and guides readers through the text, unpacking key concepts and wider implications. (shrink)

Bringing allegory into the light from the neglect into which it fell means focusing on the wondrous heights of the human spirit in its significance for culture. Contemporary philosophies and literary theories, which give pre-eminence to primary linguistics forms (symbol and metaphor), seem to favor just that which makes intelligible communication possible. But they fall short in accounting for the deepest subliminal founts that prompt the mind to exalt in beauty, virtue, transcending aspiration. The present, rich collection shows how (...) allegory, incorporating the soaring of the spirit, offers highlights for culture, with its fluctuations and transformation. This collective effort, rich in ideas and intuitions and covering a vast range of cultural manifestations, is a pioneering work, retrieving the vision of the exalted human spirit, bringing together literature, theatre, music and painting in a variety of revealing perspectives. The authors include: M. Kronegger, Ch. Raffini, J. Smith, J.B. Williamson, H. Ross, M.F. Wagner, F. Divorne, L. Oppenheim, D.K. Heckerl, N. Campi de Castro, P. Saurez Pascual, M. Alfaro Amieiro, H. Fletcher Thompson, R.J. Wilson III, and A. Stensaas. For specialists, students and workers in philosophy, comparative literature, aesthetic phenomenologists and historians of art. (shrink)

The idea that mythos and logos are incompatible, and that truth is a product of scientific and dialectical thinking, was certainly disproven by later Platonic philosophers. Deploying the works of Hesiod and Homer, Homeric Hymns and other such literature, they considered myth a valuable and significant augment to philosophical discourse. Plato’s denigration of myth gave his followers an incentive to read myth as allegory. The Stoics and first-century philosophers such as Philo, treated allegory as a legitimate interpretive strategy. (...) The Middle Platonists incorporated myth, for example, deifying the Monad and Dyad, as did 2nd century Platonists. Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris (2nd century CE), for example, equates Isis and Osiris with form and matter: the god (Osiris) sows in matter (Isis) logoi (forms or ideas) from himself (De Iside. 372F). Porphyry’s allegorizing of Plato’s Cave of the Nymphs is another example. Plotinus is a strong influence on how the late Neoplatonists regarded myth. This paper argues that these philosophers’ use of allegory prepared the way for the Neoplatonists treatment of myth as inspired symbolism. Proclus and Syrianus, as reported by Hermias, did something more extreme by using mythology to construct inspired symbolic argument. Mythos becomes another type of logos, a vehicle for representing the invisible world of being, another kind of truth that can even serve a function in anagogic ascent. (shrink)

Explores the use of allegory in the writing of the renowned eleventh-century Muslim philosopher known in the West as Avicenna, paying special attention to the ways he influenced theological, mystical, and literary thought in subsequent Islamic--and Western--intellectual and religious history.

Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the impossibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, because the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spectator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, (...) in a trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological relations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending. (shrink)

This paper examines the Andalusian philosophical tale Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, written by the 12th-century philosopher Ibn Tufail, through the lens of Erik Erikson’s theory of the eight stages of human psychosocial development. In his book The Childhood and Society (1950), Erik Erikson offers eight key insights into how humans progress through different stages of development across their lifespan. The paper argues that Ibn Tufail’s allegory of the titular character, Hayy, is fundamentally a philosophical romance that examines various phases of (...) Hayy’s philosophical development while also reflecting his complex psychosocial evolution. The paper highlights that Hayy’s early nurturance by a doe and his life among animals and plants correspond to Erikson’s stages of trust, autonomy, and initiative. His later intellectual and ethical development aligns with the psychosocial stages of generativity and integrity—though there are notable differences from Erikson’s model at some crucial stages. The Eriksonian model is applied heuristically, not exhaustively, as the overarching aim is to shed light on the classical Islamic philosophical tale by applying a modern theoretical framework to demonstrate how it prefigures contemporary discussions of the human condition, identity, and spiritual integrity. It contributes to ongoing interdisciplinary discussions on Islamic philosophy and developmental psychology by showing how Hayy Ibn Yaqzān can be read as a narrative of psychosocial growth. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyze Plato’s epistemology of politics in the light of Book VII of the Republic, in which the Allegory of the Cave is introduced. The problem named in the title is presented within the framework of a veritative interpretation of Greek ontology (referencing Charles Kahn’s work) and against the backdrop of Plato’s polemic with sophistry (Protagoras and Gorgias), along with references to the sources of Plato’s inspiration – the Eleatics and Pythagoreans. In my (...) analysis I propose hypotheses concerning certain aspects of the Cave Allegory (e.g. the status of the fire) and present my interpretation of Plato’s politico-philosophical project. (shrink)

Allegory in Early Greek Philosophy examines the role that allegory plays in Greek thought, particularly in the transition from the mythic tradition of the archaic poets to the philosophical traditions of the Presocratics and Plato. It explores how a mode of speech that "says one thing, but means another" is integral to philosophy, which otherwise seeks to achieve clarity and precision in its discourse. By providing the early Greek thinkers with a way of defending and appropriating the poetic (...) wisdom of their predecessors, allegory enables philosophy to locate and recover its own origins in the mythic tradition. Allegory allows philosophy simultaneously to move beyond mythos and express the whole in terms of logos, a rational account in which reality is represented in a more abstract and universal way than myth allows. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss the ways in which a Christian spiritual tradition negotiates the challenges of negative theology and the impossibility to access divine truth through the use of images and allegories. This use of images, however, remains paradoxical since it negates the representational character of the – seemingly highly mimetic and concrete – images in order to produce a specific presence of the divine word below the horizon of meaning and semantics. “Figural realism” refers to this practice of (...) figuration, as it can be found, among others, in the writings of Henry Suso. (shrink)

This article explores the opportunities afforded by Ursula Le Guin’s allegory ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ for thinking about the role of youth work in modern cities and societies that are deemed to be successful but at the same time fail some young people. Using Melbourne and Australia as examples and following Le Guin the case is made that the prosperity of ‘liveable’ cities and ‘lucky’ countries coincides with the neglect and mistreatment of some young people. The (...) same cultural, economic and political practices and processes that produce the beauty and abundance also produce the inequalities and hardships, and these include policies inspired by neoliberalism, processes of individualisation, and utilitarianism. Unlike the ones who walk away from Omelas youth workers can stay and fight adversity and injustice, however alleviating problems young people experience is more complex than it is often thought to be. One reason this is the case is because youth work is entangled with the same range of ethical, emotional, intellectual, political, and economic circumstances that generate thriving places and disadvantaged young lives, and inadvertently youth workers can reproduce the challenging and limiting conditions faced by some young people. (shrink)

Guynn offers an innovative new approach to the ethical, cultural, and ideological analysis of medieval allegory. Working between poststructuralism and historical materialism, he considers both the playfulness of allegory (its openness to multiple interpretations and perspectives) and its disciplinary force (the use of rhetoric to naturalize hegemonies and suppress difference and dissent). Ultimately, he argues that both tendencies can be linked to the consolidation of power within ruling class institutions and the persecution of demonized others, notably women and (...) sexual minorities. The book examines a number of centrally canonical works, including the verse romance Eneas , Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae , The Romance of the Rose , and the Querelle de la Rose. (shrink)

This essay aims to shed new light on the stages of moral enlightenment in the Allegory of the Cave, of which there are three. I focus on the two stages within the cave, represented by eikasia and pistis, and provide a phenomenological description of these two mental states. The second part of the essay argues that there is a structural parallelism between the Allegory of the Cave and the ending of the Republic. The parallelism can be convincingly demonstrated (...) by a purely formal analysis, but additionally it complements and reinforces the original interpretation of the Cave, insofar as the ending of the Republic also mirrors, on the level of content, the previously adduced stages of moral enlightenment. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the geographies of electronic waste (e-waste). Several studies have examined how e-waste is increasingly exported to processing sites in China, India, Pakistan, Ghana and elsewhere across the global south, where it leads to devastating health effects. Through an interdisciplinary patchwork of human geography, public health, narrative theory, and philosophies of memory, this paper seeks to show how the export of e-waste to the global south—and the toxins it brings along with (...) it—is part of what makes “resilient” urban growth and citizenship possible elsewhere, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. The surplus value of technological production is only recuperable, in places like Silicon Valley, if its toxicity is spatially and temporally displaced onto— and hidden within— surplus bodies who are cast into necropolitical terrains of ill- health and danger. Tracing this story of e-waste, which spans from the epigenetic to the geopolitical, from the San Francisco Bay Area to China’s Greater Bay Area, requires a method of empirical allegory that can detect global iniquities on the most granular of scales, and vice versa. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I II III IV V VI.

The aim of the article is to clarify the basic perspective that Immagini cristiane e cultura antica adopted to read the relationship between early Christian iconographic production – the main subject of the book – and the development of the forms of later figurative art, as well as the path leading to modern aesthetics.For this purpose, the article compares the positions of Auerbach – that had an explicit influence on the book – with those of Benjamin, regarding the different ways (...) in which the two Berliner authors interpreted the meaning and the function of allegory. In Auerbach, allegory is understood as the past of the figura whose logic, according to Immagini cristiane e cultura antica, underlies not only the Christian literary production of the first centuries, but also the figurative one. In Benjamin, conversely, allegory is understood as the future of the figura, followed to the definitive crisis of Christian messianism. (shrink)

This paper explores how allegory served as a subtle yet powerful form of criticism in Romanian cinema during the 1980s, under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s authoritarian regime. The research focuses on selected films by directors such as Dan Pița, Alexandru Tatos, and Copel Moscu, who used metaphorical and indirect approaches to criticise the oppressive social and political climate. Through detailed content analysis, the study reveals how these filmmakers circumvented strict censorship by embedding criticism of societal conditions and governmental control in their (...) works. The paper also discusses the production and distribution challenges faced by these films, emphasising the filmmakers’ resistance to the regime’s constraints and their efforts to depict the harsh realities of life in socialist Romania. Ultimately, the paper contributes to the understanding of how Romanian artists used cinema as a medium of resistance and cultural expression in a repressive political environment. (shrink)

How closely do the theoretical notions of 'metaphor' and 'allegory' developed by ancient rhetoricians reflect the practice of classical writers? This question is tackled through eleven new essays by a team of distinguished academics. Ancient theories of metaphor are compared with twentieth century alternatives; theory is tested against practice; and allegory - a distinctive though neglected feature of ancient literature and philosophy - is explored against the background of the rhetoricians' claim that it is one form of metaphor.

The use or Puritan allegory is what lifts "The Last Hurrah," "By Love Possessed," "Invisible Man," and "Herzog" to the level of serious and lasting importance.

According to the theoretical accounts which survive in the rhetorical handbooks of antiquity, allegory is extended metaphor, or an extended series of metaphors. This volume provides a critical discussion of ancient definitions of allegory and metaphor as merely ornamental 'tropes'. They examine metaphor and allegory from a variety of perspectives and compare theory with ancient literary practice.

For much of human history knowledge was communicated orally. Moral understandings were shared, developed and contextualized from generation to generation. Current moral theorists have argued that storied accounts may better serve to motivate ethical action and engage emotionally than standalone arguments. Over the years I found myself developing a story – which I spoke aloud to students in my introductory classes when we are starting work on non-human animal ethics, altering it and layering on elements year after year. Below is (...) a written version. (shrink)

In now classic article, James Clifford offers a novel perspective on ethnographic texts. Inspired by literary studies he uses contemporary ethnographic works to question ethnography’s claims of scientific objectivity and a clear distinction between allegorical and factual. If ethnography aims to keep its contemporary relevance, it should specifically focus on allegory as an intrinsic quality of ethnographic texts This kind of analysis may assume that any ethnographic text accounts for facts and events but at the same time it tackles (...) the moral, ideological or even cosmological issues. According to Clifford, ethnography has been dominated by a “pastoral” allegorical register which allowed an ethnographer to occupy a privileged position to interpret other, non-writing cultures. Clifford notices that this register is loosing support in the modern world since the difference between illiterate and literate cultures is not relevant anymore. Ethnographic pastoral is now replaced with self-reflexive and dialogical forms of ethnographic writing, analyzed by Clifford by the example of Marjorie Shostak’s book Nisa: The Life and Words of a!Kung Woman. (shrink)

The question of allegory’s relation to modern, commodity society remains controversial. Whereas some would question the attempt to relate aesthetic and social forms, other scholars have readily accepted the Benjamin-derived view of capitalist modernity as a fundamentally allegorical condition, a condition of “commodity nihilism” in which meanings oscillate as tirelessly as the magnitudes of economic value. Can allegorical forms of art and interpretation effectively criticize a commodity society that has apparently become allegorical? What, if anything, remains of the symbolic? (...) To begin answering such questions, this chapter examines the critical status of “allegory” in Benjamin. The first part situates allegory within Benjamin’s overarching concern with a philosophical rescue of “things” and “experience.” It details how Benjamin’s views on allegory’s social context change with his reception of the Marxian notion of the commodity form. The second part examines Benjamin’s view of the relation between allegory, experience and the commodity as he discerns it in Baudelaire’s nonconformist life and work. After outlining the import of capitalist allegory for questions of structure and agency, the final part offers an overall appraisal of the strengths and limitations of Baudelairean allegory as a form of ideological and or social critique. (shrink)

We usually think of philosophy as the production of theories and arguments. Yet there are other sides to philosophy, the recognition of which is necessary to understand its wider personal and cultural significance. Some of these sides are seldom acknowledged as philosophical at all, perhaps because literature has appropriated what professional philosophy unfortunately has lost. One philosophical activity often overlooked is the construction of philosophical allegories: to describe one's life in explicit philosophical terms or philosophically suggestive ways. Reading life allegorically (...) is to recognize philosophy in what seems merely details of the whole picture and to develop a sense for how philosophical constellations are mirrored in one's life, no matter how ordinary that life may seem. As a theoretical position skepticism is sometimes stated by saying that we are in a prison from which we cannot escape. What if one had actually been in some kind of prison, say, a home or a university, and then described that episode so that the skeptical picture is revealed in the description? That would be what I call an autobiographical philosophical allegory: a part of one's life is sublimated into a picture of the human condition. To attain as much, the episode need not be imbued with philosophical significance at the time—it may have felt utterly ordinary or utterly private. Yet the telling of it can make it extraordinary and promote it into a philosophical piece. In the following, I shall elucidate the concept of philosophical allegory through a reading of some episodes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 267-296 [Access article in PDF] Allegory and Democratic Public Culture in the Postmodern Era Robert Hariman The man lies on the hotel bed, clad only in his underwear, as he watches the TV screen just beyond his feet. His right hand holds the remote control, which he uses to scan through the cable channels. To his left sits Abraham Lincoln, clothed in long-sleeved (...) white shirt and black pants and reading a book. Lincoln's long, angular frame is just a bit stooped, and his brow is slightly furrowed, as if long accustomed to thinking on the edge of melancholy. Lincoln is mulling over a statement by Walter Benjamin: "Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things" (Benjamin 1977, 178). 1Seated to the man's right is a woman wearing the terry cloth bathrobe provided by the hotel. She leans slightly forward, legs crossed, as she reads the New York Times Magazine cover story about President Clinton. "Listen to this," she says with a bemused smile. "In the clutter around his desk in the Oval Office stands not a single bust of a favorite predecessor, but five: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Truman and two of F.D.R., plus a statuette of Will Rogers for good measure. If governing is choosing, this collection is a metaphor for this President's trouble with choices, and he himself allows, 'That's the story of my Presidency, that desk'" (Purdum 1996, 36).The man says nothing as he continues to watch the succession of images on the screen: a lizard flicks its tongue in the desert heat; a child in a stroller laughs as she holds a strawberry ice cream cone; a congressman in blue suit, white shirt, and red tie jabs his finger into the air as he talks earnestly; cars plastered with automotive product logos curl around a race track; Fred and Ginger swirl around the dance floor; soldiers wade ashore at Omaha Beach; the Space Shuttle lifts off; Groucho lifts his eyebrows; Regis smiles; mushrooms and peppers simmer in a pan.The succession of images could go on indefinitely. The tableau remains static. The composition is an allegory: a figural presentation that organizes multiple interpretations regarding collective experience. It also contains and comments on other forms of itself: Clinton's desk is an example [End Page 267] of the figural anecdote that has been a staple of American public address. The manifold of televisual images exemplifies the allegorical encoding that operates within postmodern art forms, including fragmentary appropriation, paratactic association, encyclopedic range, and non-linear temporality. The statement by Benjamin illuminates the nature of allegory in a specific genre and historical period, and as it is a general mode of representation, and perhaps as it is a model for all textual interpretation.The composition also evokes a set of dialectical tensions that are characteristic of both allegory in general and fundamental anxieties in the contemporary period. Past and present sit side by side, but incongruously, as if by artifice alone. So it is also with the print and visual media, which are held together by mutual competencies but otherwise in figural isolation that perhaps represents different destinies. Likewise, one might wonder about the peculiar relationship between public affairs and private life: the succession of images on the screen adhere to no hierarchy of values, no principle of loyalty or sacrifice, no basis for discerning obligations or maintaining rights, yet they are replete with the paraphernalia of these concerns, and the arrangement of figures in the room likewise is at once suggestive yet inconclusive. If this tableau contains familiar features of the mass-mediated experience that now saturates American politics, one might wonder: Is the democratic tradition in ruins?Allegories give us dynamic juxtapositions in a static frame. This principle of composition seems particularly suited to periods of cultural change. To the extent that the genre of allegory has a history, it is one of eternal recurrence at periods of loss and fragmentation produced by the expansion of a new, somewhat... (shrink)

How can stories contribute to ethical education, when they reach people who have already been shaped by many stories, including ethically problematic ones? This question is pursued here by considering Plato’s allegory of the cave, focusing on a reading of it offered by Jonathan Lear. Lear claims that the cave allegory aims to undermine its audience’s inheritance of stories. I question the possibility and desirability of that project, especially in relation to ethical education. Some works of contemporary fiction (...) by Jenny Erpenbeck and J. M. Coetzee are discussed as stories that use more complex strategies for ethically constructive engagement with story-saturated audiences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Allegory and the Spaces of LoveOscar Martín (bio)Writing about Spanish sentimental fiction from 1450 to 1550 is not an easy task, as we are discussing a genre with a difficult theoretical configuration. The investigation of sentimental fiction, however, has been sorting out the classifications that applied to a hodgepodge of works previously labeled as “sentimental novel” (“novela sentimental”). This label, once attached uncritically to a bunch of heterogeneous (...) texts that shared such intangibles as “loving focus” or “prevalence of psychological description over narratives,” has been applied more consistently nowaday, thanks in part to the scholarly efforts started in the 1980s like those of Martínez Jiménez and Muñoz Marquina (1982), and Martínez Latre (1989).1 Using some of these research efforts, Alan Deyermond has codified the genre accurately:Brevity; focus on psychological interest over external action; a tragic vision of love; autobiography (first-person narration or a narrator as a character) and the insertion of letters or poems (or, often, both) into the narration.[77]2Within this scholarly categorization, Regula Rohland de Langbehn has been pivotal in offering—first in 1986, and more recently in 1999—a threefold scheme in the development of the genre she labels as “sentimental novel”: a first group chronologically of the genre would be represented by Siervo libre de amor and Sátira de felice e infelice vida, both works marked by the influence of cancionero poetry—specially in the allegorical structuring and in the characterization of love, and by other subjects being limited to an abstract and general analysis of emotions. Both works also present a debate over the moral value of love. A second group would gravitate around Triste deleytacion and the works of Diego de San Pedro and Juan de Flores, works that show a wider range of topics and the impact of a broader generic textuality like cancionero poetry and such chivalric novels as Tirant. Finally, she distinguishes a third group whose main characteristic is the imprint of Celestina’s influence on both the narrative surface and its thematic approach. In the same vein, Vicenta Blay Manzanera has taken up this threefold scheme, dividing the genre into “the creation of the paradigm” (“la creación del paradigma”) the climactic stage, and the downfall and disarticulation of the narrative sentimental system” (“la fase climática” and “el tercero la fase de declive o desintegración del paradigma”) [“La conciencia genérica” 221]. [End Page 132]Just as Rohland de Langbehn’s works had at least settled down the arguments about the existence of a sentimental novelistic genre, however, medieval Hispanic scholarship has been shaken by an entrenched debate over not only the identification of this genre (novel or fiction) but whether the genre even existed at all. It was Antonio Cortijo Ocaña who, while editing a critical cluster in La Corónica on sentimental fiction, opened the door to some scholars such as Weissberger who voiced their skepticism over the generic nature of sentimental prose, a skepticism already present in an innovative volume published by Gwara and Gerli in 1997. This skeptical position was also supported by Cortijo Ocaña himself, who in 2001 published a monumental work in which, although using the generic term as a departure point, he ended up suggesting the difficulty of defining it, therefore jettisoning it. This position in turn was contested by Rohland de Langbehn, who in 2002 defended the validity of both the existence of a genre and its name novela sentimental, a position that has sparked a new round of replies in a La Corónica forum in 2003.In this debate, I would join today’s minority position on the existence of a sentimental genre, because, as I explained in my 2001 review of Rohland de Langbehn’s book and as I find convincingly argued in her 2002 contribution, there are internal traits within sentimental fictional texts that do not appear together in other sentimental generic texts [139]. In addition, once we take into account the obvious intertextuality of those sentimental texts, as Blay Manzanera has shown [“La conciencia genérica”], and the overutilization of central motifs in the configuration of love’s debate, we... (shrink)

When faith traditions confront postmodern uncertainties regarding historical liturgical practices, political and cultural ideologies, the self and sacred space, the assurance of truth claims, allegorical readings and interpretations of sites where divine presence is found are equally questioned. Can allegorical interpretations offer a valuable strategy in postmodern understandings for identifying how Divine presence is embodied? One possibility is to discover how two Anglican women embody their faith community’s via media and in turn these women may be read as an “open (...) icon.” To provide contrasting views, Orthodox Icons are particularly noted for their allegorical certainties that identify and point with sharp clarification to Tradition and the Church’s sacramental understandings. An allegorical frame “closes” the Orthodox icon. In a postmodern view, allegory “opens” said frame to a vast horizontal landscape that discovers spaces, places, and persons in which the Holy Spirit works mysteriously and unexpectedly. Both Evelyn Underhill and Barbara Brown Taylor writing almost a century apart and each encountering their respective historical reactions to “modernism,” trace the margins of their faith along the Anglican understanding of the via media. In doing so, both suggest the notion of “open” icon—the body itself. (shrink)

A retelling of Plato's famous cave allegory. Inspired by Dōgen, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.

Western literary, philosophical, and religious traditions from Plato and Paul to Augustine and Avicenna have utilized, exploited, or been subjected to allegorical interpretation. Naturally developing a composite picture of interpretive allegory from such a large landscape faces numerous difficulties. As the editor puts it, “to imagine a ‘definitive’ account of the theory and practice of allegorical interpretation in the West would require something of an allegorical vision in its own right.” With that caveat in mind, however, the international team (...) of contributors—from a variety of disciplines—offers a “historical and conceptual framework” for understanding interpretive allegory in the West, from antiquity through the early and late medieval and renaissance periods, and from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries._ This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here_ for details. (shrink)

In a wide-ranging study, Josh Cohen argues that the American fixation with image - literally celebrating the surface, the visual, the spectacular spaces of the cinema and the city - has produced a crisis of literary perception, with crucial cultural and political consequences.

Often celebrated for transforming “male” and “female” into spiritual pedagogy, Origen’s allegorical exegesis is also notorious for sexing the inner life: “male” becomes the sign of spirit and rational mastery, while “female” becomes the sign of soul, flesh, sensibility, and affect. Modern readers frequently treat this as harmless “internalization,” a move that neutralizes gender by relocating it from bodies to faculties. This article challenges that assumption by reading Homilies on Genesis 1.15 (and adjacent loci) through Luce Irigaray’s critique of sexual (...) indifference and the specular economy of Western discourse. I argue that Origen’s spiritualization does not dissolve the hierarchy of sexual difference but can universalize it, installing a metaphysical grammar in which the feminine functions as the sensible/material remainder that the masculine must govern and, in the limit, transcend. Yet the Origenic economy does not close neatly. By attending to women as pedagogically exemplary speakers of Scripture and to Origen’s occasional authorization of women’s instruction (under constraint), I show where the scheme fractures: the sensible and the feminine cannot be merely disposable because they are indispensable conditions of spiritual formation. The article thus offers not a moral verdict on Origen but a precise diagnosis of how gender operates as a philosophical-theological operator in patristic exegesis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ is not a nostalgic account of a Romantic seducer-figure, and it does not represent the ‘ethical’ rejection of such Romanticism. Instead, it portrays the violence involved just as much in conventional bourgeois marriage as in works of erotic fantasy, and it reveals the necessary failure of both these projects. Although the suffering they may cause is real enough, they never manage to achieve the mastery they seek to impose. At the same time, this radical cultural critique (...) functions as a philosophical allegory of imagination. For, if the main character is a seducer, he is also an artist, and if the material he seeks to shape is a woman, it is also the image produced by imagination as such. Kierkegaard's tale illustrates, and interrogates, the necessary role played by the image in mediating between the ‘real’ and the ‘meaningful.’. (shrink)

Consisting of five descriptive proses and two poems, this composition reflects in literary form the political thought of the author. Concise and lively, it is a unique style of writing with rich implications.

The present paper undertakes a hermeneutic analysis of the hitherto little investigated preface of Theodore Metochites᾽ Paraphrase of the natural scientific works of Aristotle. Based on a problematic quotation at the very beginning of the proem, the article shows that paraphrase does not only mean, for Metochites, the language-specific clarification of the obscure Aristotelian texts but mainly the elucidation and simplification of the relationship of physics to the rest of the philosophical curriculum, as well as of the interconnection between Aristotle‘s (...) separate treatises of natural sciences. The preface proves to be an indirect, i.e. encoded testimony for the exegetical competition of Theodore Metochites with his coeval George Pachymeres and the most prominent ancient paraphraser of Aristotle, namely Themistius (4th century CE). (shrink)

Compared with history, which is a compendium of statements of what happened in human past, rumors are a fleeting phenomenon that escapes scholarship from historiography. However, rumors, as the manifestation of local beliefs and the power relationships at the time, can expand the horizons of history by providing decentralized perspectives towards various events. The semiotic relationship between rumor and collective memory delves into respective cultures of social groups on both synchronic and diachronic planes. On the one hand, collective memory provides (...) an integrated framework of rumor studies, which can be stratified by different layers, reaching different depths of the collective concern. On the other hand, it can contextualize rumors in the rich archive of cultural texts preceding rumor texts. In this regard, collective memory functions both as the corpus for rumor discourses to generate and as the context for such discourses to mesmerize the public by pre-selecting the audience as model readers, especially under a particular social concern. Moreover, these discourses can be sedimented for future recurrence of rumors of the same schema under certain social circumstances, which demonstrates the dynamics of culture as new rumor texts are generated out of the cultural context. Rumors, therefore, are framed in cultural history, which leads to further discussions on explosion as a cultural phenomenon. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the relations between Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment and adds Giorgio Agamben’s essay “What is an Apparatus?” to this constellation. It explores, specifically, the relations between Foucault’s definition of enlightenment and the central notion of Agamben’s philosophy: potentiality. The relation between potentiality and enlightenment is then mobilized in the article in the context of a discussion of technology in Kant, Foucault, and Agamben. What might be the relevance of the relation between Foucault’s enlightenment (...) and Agamben’s potentiality for our understanding of technological developments today? The article engages with this question through a discussion of Foucault’s writings on the care of the self, Agamben’s theory of art, and Bernard Stiegler’s work on technology. It closes with a discussion of an artwork that stages the dramatic relation between all of these texts. (shrink)