Miriam Leonard

Under the microscope of recent scholarship the universality of Greek tragedy has started to fade, as particularities of Athenian culture have come into focus. Miriam Leonard contests the idea of the death of tragedy and argues powerfully for the continued vitality and viability of Greek tragic theater in the central debates of contemporary culture.

Tragic Modernities

Thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, and Parmenides have shaped the way we see the world, and it is their original conception of philosophy which has placed topics such as logic, metaphysics, ethics, and ontology at the heart of philosophical debates for centuries. Miriam Leonard not only explores the central theories of their works, but also gives some sense of the messy process of abstraction, where written texts get transformed into timeless ideals. She looks at how simple phrases such as ?in what way?” or ?there is” are turned into the language of philosophy. Taking passages from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Lucretius, and Cicero as well as Plato and Aristotle, this guide provides an insight into the influence of its texts on the later history of ideas.

How to Read Ancient Philosophy

Vanda Zajko

A collection of essays on the reception of classical myth within feminist writing across a wide range of subject areas, including poetry, philosophy, science, politics, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. The contributors show that myth has been central to the formulation and development of feminist thought and politics.

Classical Myth and Feminist Thought

Laughing with Medusa

"What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Asked by the early Christian Tertullian, the question was vigorously debated in the nineteenth century. While classics dominated the intellectual life of Europe, Christianity still prevailed and conflicts raged between the religious and the secular. Taking on the question of how the glories of the classical world could be reconciled with the Bible, Socrates and the Jews explains how Judaism played a vital role in defining modern philhellenism. Exploring the tension between Hebraism and Hellenism, Miriam Leonard gracefully probes the philosophical tradition behind the development of classical philology and considers how the conflict became a preoccupation for the leading thinkers of modernity, including Matthew Arnold, Moses Mendelssohn, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. For each, she shows how the contrast between classical and biblical traditions is central to writings about rationalism, political subjectivity, and progress. Illustrating how the encounter between Athens and Jerusalem became a lightning rod for intellectual concerns, this book is a sophisticated addition to the history of ideas.

Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud

Socrates and the Jews

"The essays in this volume chart Derrida's dialogue with the ancient world in the context of the central concerns of his work."--Introduction, p. 12.

Derrida and Antiquity

Laughing with Medusa explores a series of interlinking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical discourses? Why has psychoanalysis placed myth at the centre of its explorations of the modern subject? Why are the Muses feminine? Do the categories of myth and politics intersect or are they mutually exclusive? Does feminism's recourse to myth offer a script of resistance or commit it to an ineffective utopianism? Covering a wide range of subject areas including poetry, philosophy, science, history, and psychoanalysis as well as classics, this book engages with these questions from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. It includes a specially commisssioned work of fiction, `Iphigeneia's Wedding', by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

Joshua Billings

From around 1800, particularly in Germany, Greek tragedy has been privileged in popular and scholarly discourse for its relation to apparently timeless metaphysical, existential, ethical, aesthetic, and psychological questions. As a major concern of modern philosophy, it has fascinated thinkers including Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity considers this tradition of philosophy in relation to the ancientGreek works themselves, and mediates between the concerns of classicists and those of intellectual historians and philosophers.

Miriam Leonard

Books

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