philosophy and theatre an introduction

world (more or less following Aristotle) to seek them there. To understand what the truths are and how they are expressed, we mu ...

(like theatre) might indirectly be useful and advantageous, if all the people who attend it would otherwise be doing much more u ...

other people in other places. In combining the illusions and intoxications of the different art forms, tragedy also combines and ...

the grounds that it’s natural. Second, one should ask why it matters whether something is natural or not. Presumably, by most st ...

that his contemporaries expected. We needn’t enter into philological debates about the origins of tragedy, but can quickly appre ...

also a school of morals, implicitly defendsPhèdreon Christian grounds. In this play, he says, thinking about an act is punished ...

account of theatre may have within a complex philosophical account of human culture. Further Reading Philosophical discussions o ...

supposes, watchLearwithout taking home any message about how children ought to behave towards their parents. But even if, say, S ...

16 1.3.75. 17 Oedipus Tyrannus,lines 1529–30, in Sophocles (2003) p. 107. 18 Walton (1990: 79) goes further in holding that an a ...

played by actors. The difficulty comes in applying these thoughts to ourselves–but theatre enables us to forget this obligation ...

44 This is one of the claims of Hamilton (1982). 45 T. Mann,Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull(Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag ...

appropriately to the world, then it would make us more moral; and it might do so without pretending to communicate any easily ve ...

73 Nietzsche is not so much referring to the specific arguments of Plato and Socrates, which we looked at in the previous chapte ...

deserving of my attention. Second, even supposing that plays give some special emotional insight, there’s a gap between gaining ...

4 History in the Making: Theatre and the Past Herodotus of Helicarnassus here presents his research so that human events do not ...

we would not have shown that all plays have such an effect, or that the plays we think are the best (as works of art) have such ...

Athenian buildings would have provided a strong reminder–if one was needed–of the cost of the war. Many modern readers have foun ...

continuing success.^41 The playwright Michael Frayn cites, with approval, Friedrich Hebbel’s dictum:‘in a good play, everyone is ...

Now that we have our guiding question, the chapter proceeds as follows: first, I give some defining features of a history play. ...

moral handbook;‘rewarding’the characters at the end isn’t always successful in banishing the enjoyable impression of vice.^46 Ma ...