Christine Rojcewicz

This article addresses the unusually elaborate dramatic context in Plato’s Protagoras and effect of sophistry on democratic Athens. Because Socrates evokes Odysseus’ κατάβασις in the Odyssey to describe the sophists in Callias’ house (314c-316b), I propose that Socrates depicts the sophists as bodiless shades residing in Hades. Like the shades dwelling in Hades with no connection to embodied humans on Earth, the sophists in the Protagoras are non-Athenians with no consideration for the democratic body of the Athenian πόλις. I conclude that sophistry can be detrimental to Athenian democracy because it can produce education inequality founded on wealth inequality.

The essays in this volume all ask what it means for human beings to be embodied as desiring creatures—and perhaps still more piercingly, what it means for a philosopher to be embodied. In taking up this challenge via phenomenology, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of literature, the volume questions the orthodoxies not only of Western metaphysics but even of the phenomenological tradition itself. We miss much that has philosophical import when we exclude the somatic aspects of human life, and it is therefore the philosopher’s duty now to rediscover the meaning inherent in desire, emotion, and passion—without letting the biases of any tradition determine in advance the meaning that reveals itself in embodied desire. Continental philosophers have already done much to challenge binary oppositions, and this volume sets out a new challenge: we must now also question the dichotomy between being at home and being alienated. Alterity is not simply something out there, separate from myself; rather, it penetrates me through and through, even in my corporeal experience. My body is both my own and other; I am other than myself and therefore other than my body. Additionally, this book is a conversation, not a presentation of a new orthodoxy. Thus, the hope is that these essays will open the way for further dialogue that will continue to radically rethink our understanding of embodied desire. Gathered together here are twelve essays that address these issues from deeply interrelated albeit unique perspectives from within the field.

Through an exploration of the arts, Phenomenology and the Arts traces the relationship between phenomenology qua historical movement and qua descriptive method. Serving as an artistic undertaking, the phenomenological method itself echoes its content when describing artistic matters such as painting, drama, literature, and music. After establishing the thematics and structure of the volume, contributors analyze in rich and groundbreaking ways specifically Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, and works of art, including select jazz composers, the visual arts of Warhol and Klee, and others affect us. The book is of interest to interdisciplinary researchers engaged in the relationship between art and philosophy.