•  419
    Hippocrates at phaedrus 270c
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (3): 409-430. 2020.
    At Plato’s Phaedrus 270c, Socrates asks whether one can know souls without knowing ‘the whole.’ Phaedrus answers that ‘according to Hippocrates’ the same demand on knowing the whole applies to bodies. What parallel is intended between soul-knowledge and body-knowledge and which medical passages illustrate the analogy have been much debated. Three dominant interpretations read ‘the whole’ as respectively (1) environment, (2) kosmos, and (3) individual soul or body; and adduce supporting Hippocrat…Read more
  •  151
    Plato on Poetry: Imitation or Inspiration?
    Philosophy Compass 7 (10): 669-678. 2012.
    A passage in Plato’s Laws (719c) offers a fresh look at Plato’s theory of poetry and art. Only here does Plato call poetry both mimêsis “imitation, representation,” and the product of enthousiasmos “inspiration, possession.” The Republic and Sophist examine poetic imitation; the Ion and Phaedrus (with passages in Apology and Meno) develop a theory of artistic inspiration; but Plato does not confront the two descriptions together outside this paragraph. After all, mimêsis fuels an attack on poetr…Read more
  •  147
    Fashion Seen as Something Imitative and Foreign
    British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (1): 1-19. 2008.
    Philosophers have recently begun to write about fashion in dress. They acknowledge that philosophy traditionally ignored the subject altogether or else disparaged fashion. They do not observe that those past philosophers who slighted fashion characterized it as mass imitativeness; but in fact that one-sided characterization is what permitted commentators to overlook innovativeness in fashion. Indeed the figure of the foreigner that recurs in philosophical remarks about fashion only makes sense g…Read more
  •  72
    Plato's Ion: The Problem of the Author
    Philosophy 64 (249): 381-389. 1989.
    Today Plato's Ion, thought one of his weaker works, gets little attention. But in the past it has had its admirers–in 1821, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley translated it into English. Shelley, like other Romantic readers of Plato, was drawn to the Ion's account of divine inspiration in poetry. He recommended the dialogue to Thomas Love Peacock as a reply to the latter's Four Ages of Poetry: Shelley thought the Ion would refute Peacock's charge that poetry is useless in a practical world.
  •  63
    Fancy justice: Martha Nussbaum on the political value of the novel
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78 (3). 1997.
    Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice undertakes a defense of the novel by showing it to develop the sympathetic imagination. Three parts of her argument come in for criticism, with implications for other such political defenses. Nussbaum sometimes interprets the imagination practically, sometimes theoretically; the two forms have different effects on deliberation. Nussbaum credits the novelistic tradition with fostering the imagination; her example of Hard Times interferes with establishing this gen…Read more
  •  49
    Mimêsis in Aristophanes and Plato
    Philosophical Inquiry 21 (3-4): 61-78. 1999.
  •  47
  •  46
    Menexenus is one of the least studied among Plato's works, mostly because of the puzzling nature of the text, which has led many scholars either to reject the dialogue as spurious or to consider it as a mocking parody of Athenian funeral rhetoric. In this book, Pappas and Zelcer provide a persuasive alternative reading of the text, one that contributes in many ways to our understanding of Plato, and specifically to our understanding of his political thought. The book is organized into two parts.…Read more
  •  41
    The Impiety of the Republic's Imitator
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 17 (2): 219-232. 2013.
    The Republic rarely speaks of piety; yet religious concerns inform more of its treatment of poetry than readers acknowledge. A pair of tripartite rankings in Book 10 has puzzled interpreters: first the triad Form-couch-painting, then the ostensibly equivalent triad of a flute’s or bridle’s user-maker-imitator. The tripartitions work better together if one recognizes the divinity at work behind Athena’s gifts the flute and bridle. This mythic reading reveals the imitator to stand, yet again, in o…Read more
  •  36
    Morality Gags
    The Monist 88 (1): 52-71. 2005.
    It was in the year of Nietzsche’s death that Bergson published Laughter, but he had been thinking about the subject while Nietzsche was alive and active. In 1884 he delivered a lecture, “Le rire: de quoi rit-on? Pourquoi rit-on?”; the book Le Rire grew from that lecture and enlarged its inquiry into what one laughs at and why, even if the book still does not probe deeply enough into who that “one” is who’s laughing.
  •  33
    Plato’s Invisible Cities (review)
    Ancient Philosophy 13 (2): 427-430. 1993.
  •  32
    Autochthony in Plato's Menexenus
    Philosophical Inquiry 34 (1-2): 66-80. 2011.
  •  32
    Authorship and authority
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (4): 325-332. 1989.
  •  31
    The poetics' argument against Plato
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 30 (1): 83-100. 1992.
  •  28
    Plato's Myths
    Philosophical Inquiry 34 (1-2): 101-106. 2011.
  •  28
    Philhellenism and Greek Philosophy
    Philosophical Forum 32 (2): 165-173. 2001.
  •  28
    In this second edition of the highly successfulRoutledge Philosophy GuideBook to Plato and theRepublic, Nickolas Pappas extends his exploration of the text to ...
  •  26
    Telling Good Love from Bad in Plato’s Phaedrus
    Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 32 (1): 41-58. 2017.
    When the Phaedrus produces an account of eros that goes beyond earlier oversimplifying terms, it rests its analysis on a distinction between human and divine. The dialogue’s attempts to articulate this distinction repeatedly fail. In part they rest on the difference between right and left, but in ways that problematize that difference as well. In the end this difficulty in definition casts a shadow over the prospect of the effective reciprocation of love, because the loved one will not be able t…Read more
  •  25
    Two Myths of Philosophy’s Beginnings
    Philosophical Inquiry 40 (3-4): 6-22. 2016.
  •  20
    Plato on Justice and Power: Reading Book I of Plato's Republic
    with Kimon Lycos
    Philosophical Review 100 (3): 515. 1991.
  •  16
    Nietzsche's Apollo
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 45 (1): 43-53. 2014.
    Two great evaluative questions about The Birth of Tragedy ask how accurate the book is about Greece’s “tragic age,” and how nostalgic it is for that age. Wilamowitz raised the question of accuracy as soon as the book was published, and the issue has never gone away. As for nostalgia, even without accepting extreme versions of the charge, you can still worry that BT portrays Socrates as such a calamity—a monstrosity, and therefore a freakish birth, something that did not have to happen—as to invi…Read more
  •  15
    Platon'un Estetiği
    Öncül Analitik Felsefe. 2023.
    Eğer estetik, sanat ve güzelliğe dair felsefi bir soruşturmaysa (veya güzelliğin –örneğin “estetik değer” gibi– güncel bir karşılığıysa), Platon’un diyaloglarının çarpıcı özelliği, her iki konuya da eşit zaman ayırması ama yine de onlara karşıtlarmış gibi muamele etmesidir. Güzellik en iyiye yakınken, çoğunlukla şiirle temsil edilen sanat, Platon’un bahsettiği herhangi bir fenomenden daha büyük bir tehlikeye yakındır. Peki, her iki pozisyonu da içeren “Platon’un estetiği” diye bir şey olabilir m…Read more
  •  12
    Plato, often cited as a founding father of Western philosophy, set out ideas in the Republic regarding the nature of justice, order, and the character of the just individual, that endure into the modern day. The Routledge Guidebook to Plato’s Republic introduces the major themes in Plato’s great book and acts as a companion for reading the work, examining: The context of Plato’s work and the background to his writing Each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, meanings and impact Th…Read more
  •  12
    Socrates' Charitable Treatment of Poetry
    Philosophy and Literature 13 (2): 248-261. 1989.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nicholas Pappas SOCRATES' CHARITABLE TREATMENT OF POETRY Of course this title seems wrong. If anything is certain about Socrates' treatment ofpoetry in Plato's dialogues, it is that he never gives a poem a chance to explain itself. He dismisses poems altogether on the basis of their suspect moral content {Republic II and III), or their representational form {Republic X), or their dramatic structure {Laws 719); he calls poets ignorant…Read more
  •  11
    Plato's _Republic _is perhaps the most significant and important work of philosophy and is Plato's most famous work. No other work has made such an impact on the history of western thought. In this second edition of the highly successful Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Plato and the _Republic_, Nickolas Pappas extends his exploration of the text to include substantial revisions and new material. In addition to the existing text, the chapters on Plato's ethics and politics have been revised and…Read more
  •  10
    Commentary on Frede
    Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 12 (1): 277-284. 1996.