Searching for Oedipus

Searching for Oedipus
Author: Kenneth Glazer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2018-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0761870466

Aristotle considered it to be the model on which all other tragedies should be based. Freud viewed it as the key to unlocking the subconscious. Countless others have agreed with D.H. Lawrence’s assessment that it is “the finest drama of all time.” It is Oedipus Rex, one of the most celebrated—and disputed—works in all of Western literature. For centuries, classicists, psychologists, philosophers and many others have tried to solve the “Riddle of Oedipus,” the age-old puzzle of what Sophocles’s masterpiece means and why it is so singularly mesmerizing. In Searching for Oedipus, Kenneth Glazer offers a fresh and personal way of looking at Oedipus Rex by recounting what Oedipus Rex has meant to him at different points in his life and how, gradually over many years, he came to answer this ancient riddle for himself. Along the way, Searching for Oedipus shows just how deeply Oedipus Rex is embedded in our cultural DNA and how strongly its influence continues to be felt. Both a valuable resource for scholars and a riveting, accessible analysis for the general reader, Searching for Oedipus brings to life a work of art that, even after 2,500 years, still retains the power to shock and inspire.

Logic as a Liberal Art

Logic as a Liberal Art
Author: R. E. Houser
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0813232341

In the twenty-first century there are two ways to study logic. The more recent approach is symbolic logic. The history of teaching logic since World War II, however, casts doubt on the idea that symbolic logic is best for a first logic course. Logic as a Liberal Art is designed as part of a minority approach, teaching logic in the "verbal" way, in the student's "natural" language, the approach invented by Aristotle. On utilitarian grounds alone, this "verbal" approach is superior for a first course in logic, for the whole range of students. For millennia, this "verbal" approach to logic was taught in conjunction with grammar and rhetoric, christened the trivium. The decline in teaching grammar and rhetoric in American secondary schools has led Dr. Rollen Edward Houser to develop this book. The first part treats grammar, rhetoric, and the essential nature of logic. Those teachers who look down upon rhetoric are free, of course, to skip those lessons. The treatment of logic itself follows Aristotle's division of the three acts of the mind (Prior Analytics 1.1). Formal logic is then taken up in Aristotle's order, with Parts on the logic of Terms, Propositions, and Arguments. The emphasis in Logic as a Liberal Art is on learning logic through doing problems. Consequently, there are more problems in each lesson than would be found, for example, in many textbooks. In addition, a special effort has been made to have easy, medium, and difficult problems in each Problem Set. In this way the problem sets are designed to offer a challenge to all students, from those most in need of a logic course to the very best students.

The Reception of Aristotle's Metaphysics in Avicenna's Kitāb al-Šifā'

The Reception of Aristotle's Metaphysics in Avicenna's Kitāb al-Šifā'
Author: Amos Bertolacci
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 693
Release: 2006-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9047408713

The systematic comparison of Avicenna’s Ilāhiyyāt of the Šifā' with Aristotle’s Metaphysics, accomplished for the first time in the present volume, provides a detailed account of Avicenna’s reworking of the epistemological profile and contents of the Metaphysics and a comprehensive investigation of this latter’s transmission in pre-Avicennian Greek and Arabic philosophy.

A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex

A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex
Author: Gabrielle Suchon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2010-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226779238

During the oppressive reign of Louis XIV, Gabrielle Suchon (1632–1703) was the most forceful female voice in France, advocating women’s freedom and self-determination, access to knowledge, and assertion of authority. This volume collects Suchon’s writing from two works—Treatise on Ethics and Politics (1693) and On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen; or, Life without Commitments (1700)—and demonstrates her to be an original philosophical and moral thinker and writer. Suchon argues that both women and men have inherently similar intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual capacities, which entitle them equally to essentially human prerogatives, and she displays her breadth of knowledge as she harnesses evidence from biblical, classical, patristic, and contemporary secular sources to bolster her claim. Forgotten over the centuries, these writings have been gaining increasing attention from feminist historians, students of philosophy, and scholars of seventeenth-century French literature and culture. This translation, from Domna C. Stanton and Rebecca M. Wilkin, marks the first time these works will appear in English.

The Secrets of Generation

The Secrets of Generation
Author: Raymond Stephanson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 579
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442646969

The secrets of Generation' is an interdisciplinary examination of the many aspects of reproduction in the eighteenth century. Exploring the theme of generation from the perspective of histories of medicine, literature, biology, technology, and culture, this collection offers a range of cutting-edge approaches. Its twenty-four contributors, scholars from across Europe and North America, bring an international perspective to discuss reproduction in British, French, American, German, and Italian contexts. The book is a collection on eighteenth-century generation and its many milieus

Poetics

Poetics
Author: Aristotle
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2011-12-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1585104612

A complete translation of Aristotle's classic that is both faithful and readable, along with an introduction that provides the modern reader with a means of understanding this seminal work and its impact on our culture. In this volume, Joe Sachs (translator of Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and the Nicomachean Ethics )also supplements his excellent translation with well-chosen notes and glossary of important terms. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Aristotle’s immediate audience.

A Surgical Temptation

A Surgical Temptation
Author: Robert Darby
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2013-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 022610978X

In the eighteenth century, the Western world viewed circumcision as an embarrassing disfigurement peculiar to Jews. A century later, British doctors urged parents to circumcise their sons as a routine precaution against every imaginable sexual dysfunction, from syphilis and phimosis to masturbation and bed-wetting. Thirty years later the procedure again came under hostile scrutiny, culminating in its disappearance during the 1960s. Why Britain adopted a practice it had traditionally abhorred and then abandoned it after only two generations is the subject of A Surgical Temptation. Robert Darby reveals that circumcision has always been related to the question of how to control male sexuality. This study explores the process by which the male genitals, and the foreskin especially, were pathologized, while offering glimpses into the lives of such figures as James Boswell, John Maynard Keynes, and W. H. Auden. Examining the development of knowledge about genital anatomy, concepts of health, sexual morality, the rise of the medical profession, and the nature of disease, Darby shows how these factors transformed attitudes toward the male body and its management and played a vital role in the emergence of modern medicine.