philosophy and theatre an introduction

at the turn of the previous century often focused on what would maintain or disrupt illusion. Thus, on the naturalist side, Ibse ...

art for Plato is twice removed from the reality it attempts to portray.^18 Whatever Plato meant by repeatedly distancing himself ...

included) would now take Plato’s metaphysical claims about the forms seriously; but we are more concerned with his claims about ...

during tragedies, or, equivalently, look scared during horrorfilms) is far from uncontroversial and it has been the subject of m ...

France in the next (as in Henry V). It’s hardly an everyday, life-like experience to see a single place (the stage) change from ...

god of wine–Dionysus). In its mature form, this festival hosted plays in an open-air theatre that could seat about 14,000 people ...

nobody does so once the curtain goes down.^60 Indeed, Rousseau at one point complains that whatever beneficial moral effect is p ...

displaying the world to its audience can survive (and has survived). It’s just that the simplistic notion of a theatre that trie ...

as we have seen, do seem to require deception or false belief on the part of the audience; others do not. However, it might be p ...

parallel text on comedy, which, if it was ever written, has not survived) in a way thatThe Republicis not. Aristotle does have b ...

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

Aristotle is clearly interested in describing a skill that Plato doesn’t acknowledge: playwrights have to select which parts of ...

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

on the audience or viewer) there may be overriding reasons to get some details wrong. A painter, for example, might deliberately ...

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

So far, all we’ve said is that, in addition to imitation-mimesis, theatre involves some kind of imagining or play-acting. These ...

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

Imagination and make-believe So far, we have discussed imagination, play-acting, make-believe and pretence, without really disti ...

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 ...

well guess accurately when and where it’s going to emerge from the cloud. This makes it different from thefirst, artistic kind o ...