Sarah Feldman

Heraclitus’ human-animal juxtapositions, which oppose the needs and preferences of humans against those of nonhuman animals, are typically read in one of two ways. The ‘unity reading’ affirms that each preference or need yields a degree of insight into a given object; brought together in the unity of opposites, these convey some truth about that object. The ‘values reading,’ on the other hand, presents both preferences or needs as manifesting an absence of insight. This article argues for a version of the values reading structured and mediated by the unity reading. By examining the interplay between the two readings, it shows how the challenge to human-relative needs and preferences generates an even more fundamental challenge to basic categories or distinctions. These distinctions are pervaded by human-relative needs and preferences in ways that seem to prevent us from grasping the true natures of things.

This article offers a new take on Aristotle’s account of rectificatory justice. Through an analysis of the rhetorical and the inferential moves of Nicomachean Ethics V.4–5, it shows how this account functions as both an illustration of and a response to puzzles that arise from the institutional and social circumstances that condition legal justice—specifically, the degree to which legislators and judges who aim at justice for a community must adapt their deliberations to existing public opinion. More specifically, it argues that Aristotle’s account of rectificatory justice emphasizes both the crucial role that an appearance of precise judgements plays in any practicable approach to legal justice, and the fact that this appearance of precision may require some sacrifice of actual precision.

This paper offers a new reading of Heraclitus fragment B90 (Diels-Kranz). It argues that we can enrich our understanding of the fragment by reading it, not as a primitive analogy, but as a skillful simile grounded both in the poetic tradition and in the cultural context that would have conditioned its significance for Heraclitus and his audience. Read in this way, B90’s evocation of a cosmos whose common measure parallels the common measure of the polis’ marketplace is not simply a source of cosmological doctrine. It is also an epistemic challenge that threatens to undermine the very possibility of cosmology.

Much recent scholarship on Plato’ Crito has revolved around the controversy about the relationship and possible compatibility between the arguments Socrates gives in his own person (SocratesS) and those he gives in the person of the Laws (SocratesL). By contrast, the relation between the arguments given by SocratesL and those given by Crito continues to be seen as uncontroversial: by the end of the dialogue, commentators agree, Crito has no choice but to concede to the force of SocratesL’s arguments. Against this traditional reading, this paper will argue not only that SocratesL’s arguments fail to secure Crito’s agreement, but also that two characters’ attempts to communicate end at an impasse that seems to leave little room for meaningful shared discourse –and may even undermine Crito’s belief in the possibility of meaningful speech. My interpretation is informed by Socrates’ account (at 49c9-e3) of the need for and nature of a “common ground” as a prerequisite for genuine dialogue. This passage, I argue, challenges the traditional analysis of Crito as the representative of a particular value system or a particular “type”, demanding, instead, a consideration of the effect of Socrates’ arguments upon Crito in light of a more robust view of the latter’s perspective. Such a reconsideration has consequences not only for our appreciation of the dramatic structure of the dialogue, but also for how we understand one of the dialogue’s central, if underexplored, themes: the belief in a shared logos and the psychagogic necessity and perils of testing that belief.

This article considers an apparent tension between, on the one hand, a widespread belief among literature teachers that the appreciation of a poem involves an experience of form-content inseparability and, on the other hand, these same teachers’ use of paraphrase to encourage appreciation. Using Terrence Deacon’s model of art experience, I argue that the tensions of this ‘paraphrase paradox’ mirror tensions inherent in poetic experience. Section II draws upon work by Rafe McGregor, Peter Lamarque, and Peter Kivy to frame an approach to the form-content distinction, and to offer a brief overview of the paraphrase paradox. Sections III-IV summarize Deacon’s model of aesthetic experience, and argue that this model implies that poetic experience both triggers an impulse towards paraphrase, and frustrates this impulse. Section V looks at implications for the poetry teacher’s attempts to navigate the paraphrase paradox. Section VI tests these implications through an analysis of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Faith Healing’.

The Half-Life of Oracles speaks from a way-station between mortals and immortals, a place where the strangeness of daily life meets the intimacy of distant ages. These are poems in which the living and the dead play endless games of musical chairs, emperors and philosophers wage war against rivers, and dusty incantations for achieving immortality are reborn as pick-up lines. By turns tender and thundering, capable of calling the gods down from Olympus if necessary, The Half-Life of Oracles charts with lucidity and intensity the cross-pollination of memory and myth.