• Sound and the soul in Plato
    In Jill Gordon (ed.), Hearing, sound, and the auditory in ancient Greece, Indiana University Press. 2022.
  • Sound and the soul in Plato
    In Jill Gordon (ed.), Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece, Indiana University Press. 2022.
  •  16
    The Compulsion of Bodies: Infection and Possession in Gorgias' Helen
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (2): 249-268. 2021.
    This essay seeks to understand Gorgias’ reflections upon language and perception in the Encomium of Helen through the threefold vocabularies of medicine, enchantment, and oratory that were often taken together in the fifth century. I demonstrate that the two modes of sorcery to which Gorgias refers have to do with language and its effect on opinion, on the one hand, and perception and its effect upon one’s affective bearing, on the other. Both effects, I claim, are grasped through their forceful…Read more
  •  580
    Devices of Shock: Adorno's Aesthetics of Film and Fritz Lang's Fury
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2009 (149): 151-168. 2009.
    Two critical yet comic elements, beyond the more obvious narrative of persecution, reveal themselves in Adorno's recorded nightmare. The first is comic because it so aptly displays his relentless critical impulse despite himself, the way in which theory invades the private sphere of his dreams: even in sleep, Adorno finds himself at once reading phenomena and on guard against a false transcendence from which they could, in the last instance, be deciphered.1 The second is more patently absurd, ye…Read more
  •  579
    A closer look at the character of Odysseus in the opening passages of the Philoctetes reveals a more nuanced psychology of guilt and justification than commentators have thus far appreciated in the cunning hero's role. This paper examines the relations of sympathy between Odysseus, Neoptolemus, and Philoctetes as a way of entering into the complicated political drama of the work. Conceiving politics in the Philoctetes as a hybrid construction of the demands of nature and the demands of the gods,…Read more
  •  768
    The Death of Painting (After Plato)
    Research in Phenomenology 41 (1): 23-44. 2011.
    Whereas the entrance of the monochrome into modern art has typically been understood in light of movements in contemporary art and aesthetic theory following in its wake, this essay seeks to understand the motivations for, and the effect of, the monochrome in the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1921 in reference to Plato's analysis of pure pleasure and absolute beauty in the Philebus . I argue that Rodchenko and Plato were motivated by a shared project to contend with the aesthetic and psychologi…Read more
  •  165
    This study asks after the fate of sophistry in the Eleatic Stranger's investigation of the best of the six regimes governed by law, and outlines as far as possible the role of the rhetor under the supervision of the true statesman, as well as the function and effects of myth on the citizens of the best regime. In short, I argue that Socrates' competitors do, in a qualified manner, still have a place in such a polis precisely where the work of gathering intelligence finds its civic limit.
  •  26
    Plato’s Fable (review)
    Ancient Philosophy 28 (2): 418-423. 2008.
  •  1194
    Wonder, Nature, and the Ends of Tragedy
    International Philosophical Quarterly 50 (1): 77-91. 2010.
    A survey of commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics over the past century reflects a long-standing assumption that pleasure, rather than understanding, is to be seen as the real aim of tragedy, despite weak textual evidence to this end. This paper seeks to rehabilitatethe role of understanding in tragedy’s effect, as Aristotle sees it, to an equal status with that of its affective counterpart. Through an analysis of the essential inducement of wonder on the part of the viewer and its connection with…Read more
  •  610
    Aristotelian Aisthesis and the Violence of Suprematism
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (1): 49-66. 2013.
    Kazimir Malevich’s style of Suprematist painting represents the inauguration of nothing less than a new form of culture premised upon a demolition of the Western tradition’s reifying habits of objective thought. In ridding his canvases of all objects and mimetic conventions, Malevich sought to reconfigure human perception in such a way as to open consciousness to alternative modes of organization and signification. In this paper, I argue that Malevich’s revolutionary aesthetic strategy can be il…Read more
  •  5
    Plato’s Fable (review)
    Ancient Philosophy 28 (2): 418-423. 2008.
  •  196
    Extraneous Voices
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 10 (1): 1-20. 2005.
    The Protagoras features the first known venture into detailed textual interpretation in the Western intellectual tradition. Yet if Socrates is to be taken at his wordat the close of his hermeneutic contest with Protagoras, this venture is to be regarded as a playful demonstration of the worthlessness of texts for aiding in the pursuit of knowledge. This essay is an attempt to view Socrates’ puzzling remarks on this point within their dramatic and historical contexts. I argue that, far from havin…Read more