philosophy and theatre an introduction

A pluralistic solution? What we have set out here are some basic strategies for responding to the problem of how I might pity Va ...

never beaten. Blundered orders, in particular, can cause severe harm to those who obey them (‘Charge for the guns!’). In both ca ...

Hume, although it’s clear from his essay that by his time it was already an established topic for philosophical discussion. He b ...

Theatres in the later Greek world did, in fact, serve as venues for political debate and decision-making.^20 Wefind echoes of th ...

have indulged in over the years–gladiator battles, public executions, jousting, hunting, bullfights, boxing and so on–it seems t ...

rise to its feet. In the context of the play, the departure of the soldiers from their small town is, to say the very least, not ...

enjoying tragedy doesn’t involve bringing about horrible events, we can set about doing what we always do, namely enjoying watch ...

performance–a time-consuming and expensive procedure–isn’t guar- anteed to pick up on what a large audience would respond to. No ...

others that aren’t presently threats to ourselves. But in that case, we would expect to enjoy tragedies that show events unlikel ...

Brecht’s political theatre Up to this point, we’ve looked at some general ways in which theatre can interact with politics. This ...

I might not have said, unprompted, that‘I really enjoyed it’. There’s nothing particularly surprising about this: the best philo ...

A second element of the Aristotelian drama is that it takes itself to present universal truths–truths that hold for all people a ...

conveys more truth with less distress.^33 This seems all wrong: we often praise tragedies for being moving in a‘tragic’way. Comp ...

universal truths). What about empathy? The connection between empa- thy and thefirst feature (reduction to emotional conflicts) ...

clear that catharsis could function in that role. Setting catharsis aside, I shall consider three proposals which appeal to trut ...

that message home. Nonetheless, the connection suggested here is pretty weak. Even Oedipus, one might suppose, could have done t ...

keep them in) would surely pale compared with the discomfort of being surrounded by angry, venomous snakes; and if letting them ...

thought they might be useful.^41 I’ll begin with the ‘epic drama’.To begin with, recall that the terms‘epic’and‘dramatic’describ ...

to be made to feel a certain way in relation to a situation, but not be required in any way to act upon it. More importantly, th ...

are ultimately trying to get a certain point across–to explain what hap- pened, how and why. Sometimes it may help them to act o ...