Aug 21, · 1. Introduction Background. Until recently, loyalty did not attract much attention in Western philosophical writing. Most of the detailed engagement with loyalty came from creative writers (Aeschylus, Galsworthy, Conrad), business and marketing scholars (Goman; Jacoby & Chestnut), psychologists (Zdaniuk & Levine), psychiatrists (Böszörményi-Nagy), sociologists (Connor), religion A selection of philosophy texts by philosophers of the early modern period, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought. Texts include the writings of Hume, Descartes, Bacon, Berkeley, Newton, Locke, Mill, Edwards, Kant, Leibniz, Malebranche, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Reid Jun 02, · 1. Problems in Delineating the Field. The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips , )
Philosophy of Education (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Ancient Greek thought held that poetry, drama, and other forms of fine art were imitations of reality, a reality that could be actual or potential. Some questions naturally spring from this broad theory of art, plato essay, for example: what exactly is being imitated by the poet or artist? How is it being imitated, is the imitation a straight copy, a distortion or an improvement in some way? Both Plato and Aristotle, the foremost philosophers of their time, arrived at widely different answers to the questions above.
Their differing views on mimesis, as outlined principally in The Republic and The Poeticswere thus partly a consequence of their differences in their ontological and epistemological views of the world. There are other factors, too, which complicate the matter. In Book II of The RepublicPlato begins a discussion of poetry which is concerned with gods and heroes. Many stories, Plato is saying, are not imitations of any reality but are outright falsities, on the grounds that since gods and heroes are by definition better than men, plato essay, they cannot perform such atrocious acts as plato essay for example in Homer and Aeschylus the examples in Republic Such portrayals provide justification for men to commit such acts themselves, and therefore these misrepresentations of gods and heroes are harmful to a general populace.
Such poetry, then, plato essay, is lies and may be an imitation, plato essay, but it is not an imitation of any truth and therefore must be condemned. Imitation proper appears in the Republic in Book III, where Plato begins to consider the more complicated case of poetry concerning men. Here Plato shows a preference for straight narrative, in that by simply narrating events the poet may avoid entirely the explicit imitation of those characters he is speaking of, plato essay, and the actors, too, can avoid placing themselves in a situation where they would imitate the evil acts of evil characters as they would perhaps not normally do.
When, however, imitation is used as a form of diction, Plato comes to the conclusion that plato essay such imitation which mimics men who are not of upright and intelligent nature is undesirable in the ideal city.
Plato therefore seems to cover the case of his own dialogues, where he speaks through the mouths of Socrates, Adeimantus and Glaucon, plato essay.
Furthermore, where that imitated character has undesirable traits, the imitation is to be avoided. And later, in Book X, Plato claims that most poetry of necessity contains evil men in order to produce interest and pleasureand this too forms a basis for a wide-ranging condemnation of poetry.
Plato then begins a detailed discussion explaining imitation from first principles — its mechanism and its relation to truth, plato essay. The argument is based largely on the theory of Forms and certain relations between the art of poetry and painting.
All imitation, Plato argues, has little connection with truth; poets work in a similar way to a painter, plato essay, who imitates the appearance of a bed which in turn is made by a craftsman from an idea in nature and therefore the work of God. Furthermore, the imitator, being so far removed from the truth, can have little knowledge of what he imitates so can thus have little conception of the inherent goodness or badness of his work, plato essay.
His conceptualisation of both the political state and the individual soul separates reason and will operations of the mind from pleasure and the passions occupations of the senses. In the doctrine of the Line the similar attributes of knowledge vs. illusion are approximated into a linear scale. Since poetry appeals to the more illusory sense perception, it is placed lower in the scale; it cannot therefore have any access to the Forms, the highest reality possible.
As with painting, so with poetry, plato essay, says Plato; he does not treat poetry on its own terms. Certainly these arts use very different methods and it is difficult to conceive their functions as identical as Plato essay makes out.
Plato takes the object of imitation to be the same in both; that is, they plato essay appearances of things which are essentially static, not active. Knowledge however is located within plato essay various crafts shipbuilding, generalship etc. There is little in Book X of The Republic that would reconcile Plato with the poets. Poetry is imitative and corrupting and its purpose is simply to give pleasure to an audience. Plato says little of a possible didactic end in poetry; some imitations, he admits in Book III, are not harmful, such as those which portray plato essay good men performing morally good actions.
As to a didactic end in poetry, this too Plato addresses. Plato uses this in a sustained attack on Homer RepublicX, p Plato essay Plato covers the case where there is a moral structure within poetry itself; that is, evil actions that are clearly portrayed as evil actions plato essay to be condemned.
All too often, though, poetry shows unjust men prospering while good men suffer. In Books II and III this claim can hardly be justified, however; Plato does not condemn all plato essay, but that imitation which is harmful to the moral character of the receiver, namely the representations or misrepresentations of gods, heroes and men which show them to be evil or acting without proper decorum. In The Poetics Aristotle examines poetry on its own terms; he pays much more attention to such aspects as genres and specific metres than did Plato.
He in one sense narrows down the object of imitation. Plato used a theory concerning the painter, plato essay, who often imitates static objects such as a bedplato essay, and whose creations are necessarily static, and extended this theory to poetry.
But Aristole argues from what would seem to be an obvious premise yet one that seems to be ignored by Plato: that poetry imitates men in action; a dynamic basis, not a static one, plato essay. Where Plato argued against plato essay from its relation to truth embodied in the theory of Formsthough, Aristotle makes some similar arguments in relation to nature, plato essay. Aristotle classifies genres in relation to their means of imitation, plato essay, instead of the usual distinctions made according to prose, plato essay, verse or metre.
Thus the object of imitation in tragedy are men who are better than us, and in comedy men who are worse. Clearly Aristotle is conceiving imitation as a different process from Plato. The medium of imitation is taken to be three-fold: rhythm, language and harmony are used by practitioners of the arts, either separately or combined.
While Aristotle nowhere makes a clear exposition of his theories on the mechanism of imitation from first principles as does Plato in Republic Xthere is enough plato essay in The Physics to construct a coherent account. However, I shall attempt to show that there is a direct and illuminating correlation between concepts in The Physics with those of The Poeticswhether many of the parallelisms were consciously intended plato essay not. Firstly there is the conceptual notion of form and matter as integral parts of objects of nature.
Aristotle places much more importance on form than matter, in opposition to the majority of pre-Socratic philiosophers the Ionians, for example, who sought the basic substance from which all objects in the universe were fashioned.
Furthermore, the changes of nature are teleological: matter exists for the sake of the form, plato essay it is the form which is the telosor end, plato essay. Each step in this continuous chain is necessary for the sake of the end, and no step occurs simply by chance, but by a cause or combination of causes. As well the plot must be a unity, such plato essay if any event were removed the plot would be irreparably damaged; it must be complete and entire, and of reasonable size, plato essay.
the plot. the end, we can draw up a somewhat simplified table:. Which is not to plato essay that Aristotle did not turn the full force of his analytical mind upon the subject, merely that his observations on poetry are consonant with his over-all theory of Becoming, plato essay.
As well, that art and nature imply each other. Useful arts complete nature by supplying her deficiencies in the sense that they move further along the teleological chain to realise an end; applying this principle to fine arts leads to difficulty.
Fine arts such as poetry rather imitate nature in the sense that they do not complete her, as do the useful arts, but imitate the teleological process whereby nature moves toward plato essay specific end. Both fine and useful art, plato essay, then, are alike in that they resemble nature in their teleological motivations and both are subject to mistakes and limitations such as are found in nature.
The objects of imitation are the actions of men, plato essay, and the poets can imitate men as they are or better or worse than they are. It follows from this that the poet has it within his power to imitate real or imagined events; as S. Plato claims that poets have but scant knowledge of that which they imitate since they merely reflect as a mirror doesand indeed knowledge is an antidote against the lies of the poet.
whole, but comprised of various parts. And these parts must, plato essay, of necessity, form a coherent totality since poetry is understood through sense perception. Just because events must display verisimilitude does not mean that they should directly reflect life as it is commonly conceived. Poetry, then, is an imitation of the actions of men, dealt with in a universal way, bringing about pity and fear and the catharsis of same.
Poetry and drama, being forms of art and thus imitations of nature in the above senseplato essay, imitate this process of change. Nature : Becoming: motion, a change of form from potentiality to actuality Poetry : Plot: an action, a change of fortune e. by peripety, recognition, etc. natureplato essay can be thought of as the study of or an expression of the changes undergone by man e g. from misery to happiness, ignorance to knowledge etc, plato essay.
Imitation need not be a straight copy of reality or of transcendent forms ; its goals are the aims of the artist who may envision things not as they are but as they could be or should be. Neither is mimesis simply a distorted symbolic representation of reality; its domain is the possible and the probable. In Ion Plato argues that the poet, or the imitator, plato essay, can have no knowledge of what he imitates, an argument that is based largely on the division of knowledge into professions.
The charioteer, the physician, and the general are given as examples of people who have an intimate knowledge of their craft because plato essay are aware of the uses to which it will be put. The faults with art occur within art itself, says Aristotle — the only fault is to represent things inartistically; in other words, a fault with the imitation itself. In fact, the best art imitates nature in all of the ways that Aristotle outlines in the Physicsand as I have attempted to show in the exposition above.
WORKS CONSULTED Annas, plato essay, Julia. Oxford; Oxford University Press, plato essay, The Poetics. Translated by Allan H. Gilbert in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit: Wayne State UP, Butcher, S.
New York: Dover Publications, Dryden, plato essay, John. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays vol 2. London, Everyman, Grube, G. The Greek and Roman Critics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Guthrie, W. A Plato essay of Greek Philosophy vol VI. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, The Ion. The Republic. Books II,III,and X.
Ross, W, plato essay. D, ed.
The Ladder of Love: Plato's Symposium
, time: 8:12Loyalty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Aug 21, · 1. Introduction Background. Until recently, loyalty did not attract much attention in Western philosophical writing. Most of the detailed engagement with loyalty came from creative writers (Aeschylus, Galsworthy, Conrad), business and marketing scholars (Goman; Jacoby & Chestnut), psychologists (Zdaniuk & Levine), psychiatrists (Böszörményi-Nagy), sociologists (Connor), religion Jan 09, · Essay: Art as Imitation in Plato and Aristotle Posted on January 9, by literaryfruit Ancient Greek thought held that poetry, drama, and other forms of fine art were imitations of reality, a reality that could be actual or potential A selection of philosophy texts by philosophers of the early modern period, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought. Texts include the writings of Hume, Descartes, Bacon, Berkeley, Newton, Locke, Mill, Edwards, Kant, Leibniz, Malebranche, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Reid
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