Suturing the body corporate (divine and human)in the Brahmanic traditions

In this discussion, we ponder the discourse about the ‘body of the Divine’ in the Indian tradition. Beginning with the Vedas, we survey the major eras and thinkers of that tradition, considering various notions of the Supreme Divine Being it produced. For each, we ask: is the Divine embodied? If so, then in what way? What is the nature of the body of the Divine, and what is its relationship to human bodies? What is the value of the body of the Divine to the spiritual aspirant? We consider, where relevant, which views are pantheistic and which might be considered panentheistic. Panentheism is connected with discourse on the world as the body of God. It has origins in medieval Christian theology with anticipatory traces in Plato’s Timeaus. Under pantheism, were the world to end—were it to collapse or disappear irreversibly, perhaps, into a huge black hole—then God would disintegrate without a remainder as well; for in this view the Divine Spirit is the universe. The same is not true under panentheism which posits a more complex relationship between the Divine and the world. According to panentheism, God pervades the world—God is in the world—and at the same time, God sustains the world—the world is in God. This allows that God be greater than, transcendent of and independent of the world. In our conclusion we remark on how the views we have surveyed link to, resonate with, or dis-compare with the current—should one say revivified—interest in intellectual quarters with panentheism.

Renaturalising : Lacan's ethics and Nietzsche's critique of platonism

‬This thesis examines how Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis might contribute to our understanding of Nietzsche's critique of Platonism.

The devil in high heels : drugs, symbolism and Kate Moss

This paper contributes to critical voices on the issue of organisational responses to employee drug use. It does so by exploring symbolic readings of organisations’ relations with drugs and drug-taking. Our focus is recent coverage of, and organisational responses to, the UK tabloid media’s exposé of fashion supermodel Kate Moss’s alleged cocaine use. We consider that the celebrity endorsement in this particular case highlights the ambiguities created by the symbolic associations between the organisation and the ‘image’ projected by the celebrity. Overall, we use this case to explore symbolic relationships between drugs, sex, femininity and organisation. Through highlighting these connections, we question further the rationality of organisational responses to employee drug use and, utilising Derrida’s (1981) extension of Plato’s notion of the pharmakon, consider whether workforce drug testing might be fruitfully seen as a symbolic mechanism for scapegoating and sacrifice in order to protect the organisation’s (masculine) moral order.

The Sophists (Ancient Greek)

The sophists were itinerant professional teachers and intellectuals who frequented Athens and other Greek cities in the second half of the fifth century B.C.E. In return for a fee, the sophists offered young wealthy Greek men an education in aretē (virtue or excellence), thereby attaining wealth and fame while also arousing significant antipathy. Prior to the fifth century B.C.E., aretē was predominately associated with aristocratic warrior virtues such as courage and physical strength. In democratic Athens of the latter fifth century B.C.E., however, aretē was increasingly understood in terms of the ability to influence one’s fellow citizens in political gatherings through rhetorical persuasion; the sophistic education both grew out of and exploited this shift. The most famous representatives of the sophistic movement are Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Hippias, Prodicus and Thrasymachus.

The historical and philological difficulties confronting an interpretation of the sophists are significant. Only a handful of sophistic texts have survived and most of what we know of the sophists is drawn from second-hand testimony, fragments and the generally hostile depiction of them in Plato’s dialogues.

The philosophical problem of the nature of sophistry is arguably even more formidable. Due in large part to the influence of Plato and Aristotle, the term sophistry has come to signify the deliberate use of fallacious reasoning, intellectual charlatanism and moral unscrupulousness. It is, as the article explains, an oversimplification to think of the historical sophists in these terms because they made genuine and original contributions to Western thought. Plato and Aristotle nonetheless established their view of what constitutes legitimate philosophy in part by distinguishing their own activity – and that of Socrates – from the sophists. If one is so inclined, sophistry can thus be regarded, in a conceptual as well as historical sense, as the ‘other’ of philosophy.

Perhaps because of the interpretative difficulties mentioned above, the sophists have been many things to many people. For Hegel (1995/1840) the sophists were subjectivists whose sceptical reaction to the objective dogmatism of the presocratics was synthesised in the work of Plato and Aristotle. For the utilitarian English classicist George Grote (1904), the sophists were progressive thinkers who placed in question the prevailing morality of their time. More recent work by French theorists such as Jacques Derrida (1981) and Jean Francois-Lyotard (1985) suggests affinities between the sophists and postmodernism.

This article provides a broad overview of the sophists, and indicates some of the central philosophical issues raised by their work. Section 1 discusses the meaning of the term sophist. Section 2 surveys the individual contributions of the most famous sophists. Section 3 examines three themes that have often been taken as characteristic of sophistic thought: the distinction between nature and convention, relativism about knowledge and truth and the power of speech. Finally, section 4 analyses attempts by Plato and others to establish a clear demarcation between philosophy and sophistry.

Semiotic, rhetoric and democracy

This paper unites Deely’s call for a better understanding of semiotics with Jaeger’s insight into the sophists and the cultural history of the Ancient Greeks. The two bodies of knowledge are brought together to try to better understand the importance of rhetorical processes to political forms such as democracy. Jaeger explains how cultural expression, particularly poetry, changed through the archaic and classical eras to deliver, or at least to be commensurate with contemporary politics and ideologies. He explains how Plato (429-347 BCE) struggled against certain poetry and prose manifestations in his ambition to create a ‘perfect man’ – a humanity which would think in a way which would enable the ideal Republic to flourish. Deely’s approach based on Poinsot and Peirce presents a theoretical framework by means of which we can think of the struggle to influence individual and communal conceptualisation as a struggle within semiotics. This is a struggle over the ways reality is signified by signs. Signs are physical and mental indications which, in the semiotic tradition, are taken to produce human subjectivity – human ‘being’. Deely’s extensive body of work is about how these signs are the building blocks of realist constructions of understanding. This paper is concerned with the deliberate use of oral and written signs in rhetorical activity which has been deliberately crafted to change subjectivity. We discuss: (1) what thought and culture is in terms of semiotics and (2) Jaeger’s depiction of Ancient Greece as an illustration of the conjunction between culture and subjectivity. These two fields are brought together in order to make the argument that rhetoric can be theorised as the deliberate harnessing of semiotic affects. The implication is that the same semiotic, subjectivity-changing potency holds for 21st century rhetoric. However fourth century BCE Athens is the best setting for a preliminary discussion of rhetoric as deliberate semiotic practice because this was when rhetoric was most clearly understood for what it is. By contrast a discussion concentrating on modern rhetoric: public relations; advertising; lobbying; and public affairs would open wider controversies requiring considerably more complex explanation.

The poetic presentation of philosophy:Leo Strauss on Plato’s “symposium”

This essay undertakes a close analysis of Leo Strauss’s remarkable but undertreated Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Symposium,” reading it as opening a privileged purview of his own (and his students’) wider understandings of philosophy, poetry, and politics. The essay begins by drawing out Strauss’s three framing justifications for his manner of reading the Symposium as a document in the “ancient quarrel” of philosophy and poetry concerning which of the two should rightly shape the culture and ethical ideals of the Greeks (part 1). Then, following the course of Plato’s Symposium, the essay ascends through Strauss’s readings of the first five speeches in Plato’s dialogue (part 2) toward the highlight of Strauss’s reading, namely, his three remarkable sessions on Socrates’s speech. Part 3 analyses Strauss’s reading of this speech up to its climax, which Strauss argues involves the philosophical “demotion of poetry”: a criticism of poets as motivated by the Eros of fame and of tragic poetry as at its best creating captivating images of gods and heroes which reflect their creators’ self-love and patriotic love of “one’s own,”as against any transpolitical truth. Part 4 then looks at Strauss’s unusual reading of the culmination of Socrates’s great speech (Diotima on the “higher mysteries”) alongside Alkibiades’s speech in the Symposium as representing Plato’s “poetic presentation of philosophy.” The essay becomes more critical as it proceeds. Strauss’s reading of the Symposium, like his reading of the Republic, is remarkable for its own “demotion of metaphysics” in Plato, and in my concluding remarks, I will question this status, or disappearance, of metaphysics in Strauss’s Platonism and whether this disappearance compromises Strauss' ability to differentiate philosophy as he sees it from poetry.

Precarious decencies: negotiating creative (im)mortalities, in life, together

This paper takes up the question of what might hinder the collaborative impulse among artists and specifically poets, and offers—as one possible answer—the complication posed by the urge of an artist for immortality, or for their (individual) name to live on. The paper begins by returning to a moment in Plato, namely that of the Symposium and its observations concerning the connection between poiesis (making) and a questing after immortality. Contrasting with what seems like Plato's broadly positive framing, the paper takes up a second reading of immortality (or the 'will-to-live') found in an early text of the Yogic canon, that of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. In this second text, written somewhat later than Plato's, the will-to-live is framed otherwise, as one of five afflictions that can be 'made thin' by practice. The paper's wager is that, viewed in this way, as an affliction, the will-to-live (or urge for immortality) deserves consideration as a hindrance to the impulse towards collaboration. Noting, however, that in the poiesis of writing poetry, where there is both the making of things and the action of making things, this creative constellation always contains the tempering solution to its own inherent lures. Writing, although providing fuel for immortal appetites (due to what it makes), also works to temper the worst of this same impulse via the contribution of practice—as dedication, craft and community-as-practice. The practice of writing, therefore, is already at play, and can be emphasised explicitly for any poet or maker who also wants to be able to want to collaborate. The practice of writing, then, and its turn away from investments in identity, works to thin out the more destructive face of an urge for a dubious eternity that can eclipse our ability to work together creatively with others in this life.

There is not just a war: recalling the therapeutic metaphor in western metaphilosophy

This paper offers a critical response to the claims of Sivin and Lloyd (2002) and Mattice (2014) to the effect that Greek and Roman philosophy was characterised by a predominance of combat metaphors. Drawing on Plato and Plutarch, as well as contemporary studies led by Nussbaum (1993), I argue that a host of different metaphors was demonstrably used in the Greek tradition to describe philosophy and its subjects, led by the therapeutic or medicinal metaphor of philosophy as ‘therapy of desire’ or of desiderative opinion. I propose that it was the sophists like Protagoras, at least as they are depicted by Plato, who sought to conceive of philosophising as a strategic, warlike activity. In conclusion, I reflect on the invisibility of the medicinal metaphor, outside of certain dedicated studies in the history of ideas, in contemporary thinking about Western philosophy and its past.

Democratic corporealities of love : the architectural cinema and eroticized publics of Pauline Kael

The American film critic Pauline Kael’s career interestingly parallels the Cold War period but nobody has explored this yet. Filling that gap, this essay constructs Kael’s writings and critic’s persona as a contribution to a discourse of international democracy. Kael was part of a generation of American critics who took seriously the importance of art to politics. However, she goes further than her contemporaries by energizing this relationship through her emphasis on corporeality—both on screen and off screen—and on the eroticized body. A discernible philosophical lineage runs from Plato’s version of love as described by Socrates in The Symposium to Kael’s writings and bodily habits. In this lineage, love is figured as relational and desiring. A second line of relationship between Plato and Kael is in the way they each connected erotic discourses to the very similar architectures of the andrôn (men’s quarters), for Plato, and the modern American cinema or screening room, for Kael. Plato and Kael draw out the inherent spatial energy of these places (which is most evident at the borders of andrôn and cinema) through the interactions they construct of images and talk with the erotic, love-based relationality of bodies. They thereby maximize the bodily powers of these architectures as places where a public of differences and (inevitably) “loose” democracy might form. Kael’s advocacy doesn’t suggest a formal political program so much as a more feminine democracy of erotic discourses allied to an energizing architecture suitable to the accumulation of plural, participatory corporealities.