Ryan Drake | Fairfield University (original) (raw)

Papers by Ryan Drake

Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2005

The Protagoras features the first known venture into detailed textual interpretation in the Weste... more 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 word at 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 having us lay our inherited texts aside, we can find in the Protagoras a reorientation to the linked activities of reading and dialogue, where we need not be forced to choose between merely using our own unaided voices and relying upon the (textual) voices of others in the project of philosophic education.

Philosophy Today, 2000

The relationship between the Frankfurt School project of social research and empirical method in ... more The relationship between the Frankfurt School project of social research and empirical method in mainstream sociology is widely acknowledged to be an ambivalent one. From its inception in the early 1930s, the Institut , fur Sozialforschung had maintained as its principal thesis that empirical sociological method required the guidance of a dialectical theory of society in order to overcome its status as a mere manifestation of bourgeois ideology. Interwover with this thesis was a series of ruthless critiques of the positivist approach to the human sciences that had become dominant in the Anglo-American world, an approach characterized by Horkheimer in the 1937 essay "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" as one that "belongs to a type of human being which is still relatively powerless. In spite of its active nature, this type tends to be passive in decisive matters."1 However, the program to forge a successful integration of factual data collection into a critical theory of society remained a problem throughout the lifespan of the Institute and its members, and hence, itself a passive endeavor. In fact, the earnestness with which Horkheimer, and especially Adorno, approached empirical method is portrayed by several Frankfurt School scholars and historians as half-hearted at best. It wasn't until 1938 that Adorno, in exile in the United States, actually took part in his first empirical study under the direction of Paul Lazarsfeld in the Princeton Radio Research Project. Beset by conflicts in perspective between the two men from the outset, with Lazarsfeld turning the criticisms of fetishism, neurosis, and sloppiness that Adorno leveled upon the subjects of his study back on Adorno himself,2 the experiment ended in failure two years later. And with the exception of the Gruppenexperiement of 1954 (the fervent criticisms of which marked the be- ginning of what would later be called the Positivist Dispute), Adorno gradually distanced himself from the research process, preferring the tasks of the theoretician to those of fieldwork. Thus his highly abstract and seemingly vague proposals for a melding of speculative theory and empirical method in sociology have led such commentators as Rolf Wiggershaus to conclude that Adorno "was not serious about the plans he had in mind for a critical empiricism."3 Others, like McCarney, have even gone further by stating that "Adorno was, of course, notoriously indifferent to the question of the objectification of his ideas in action."4 Given the prevalence of scepticism on this issue, we should hardly find it surprising that the better portion of the contemporary scholarly literature having to do with Adorno focuses mainly on his work on aesthetic theory or on the sort of cultural criticism employed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and in Prisms. Having been more or less pushed aside, or used merely as a foil for later theorists like Habermas or Foucault, the reconstructive sociology that Adorno had in mind now seems to be a subject fit more for an historian than for a serious theorist. However, despite the present intellectual climate, I would like to hold at a distance for the moment the questions of Adorno's level of commitment and the success of his project, in order to address directly his proposals for a more coherent science of society. In particular, I wish to examine the complex relation of empirical method to speculative theory as laid out most explicitly in his contributions to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology for the purpose of determining how, or whether, an integration of these two elements is made possible in such a way that it successfully avoids the difficulties faced by each in isolation from the other. My intent here will be twofold: 1 ) to outline Adorno's critique of dominant "traditional" sociological research methods, and 2) to provide a critical analysis of the measures that Adorno proposes as a necessary alternative to these methods in gaining a comprehensive understanding of society as it actually functions. …

Abstract: Plato's Protagoras composes an extended study of political education, understood b... more Abstract: Plato's Protagoras composes an extended study of political education, understood broadly as the project of cultivating judgment that aims at the good life for individuals and at the advantage of one's community as a whole. Within this investigation, Plato develops two primary ...

Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece, 2022

This paper explores the role of thorubos (racket, clamor) in Plato's psychology and politics.

Self-Understanding and Lifeworld, 2017

Epochê, 2021

This essay seeks to understand Gorgias’ reflections upon language and perception in the Encomium ... more 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 means of physically impressing and deforming the soul such that its reliance upon memory and habitual forms of dwelling in the world are subject to oblivion. Further, such conceptual and practical unmooring can be understood as forms of disease that rob an individual of her agency, either temporarily or permanently, and therefore reflect the problematic status of language in early democratic Greece.

Beyond Reckoning: Philosophical Approaches to Cormac McCarthy, 2017

Plato's Statesman: Dialectic, Myth, Politics, 2018

Nietzsche's writings are often polemical and aggressive. They stand full of invective and terms o... more Nietzsche's writings are often polemical and aggressive. They stand full of invective and terms of negation, prefaced with anti-, mis-, un-, in-, and so on. His discourse is frequently that of a declaration of war (Tl Preface), and the subtitle to the Genealogy of Morals reads ...

Epoché, 2013

Kazimir Malevich's style of Suprematist painting represents the inauguration of nothing less tha... more 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 illuminated by a return to the very basis of this tradition, namely by a reconsideration of Aristotle's
account in De Anima III.2 of the initial possibility of objective perception as such.

Epoché, Jan 1, 2005

The Protagoras features the ﬁ rst known venture into detailed textual inter- pretation in the We... more The Protagoras features the ﬁ rst known venture into detailed textual inter-
pretation in the Western intellectual tradition. Yet if Socrates is to be taken at his word
at 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 having us lay our
inherited texts aside, we can ﬁ nd in the Protagoras a reorientation to the linked activi-
ties of reading and dialogue, where we need not be forced to choose between merely
using our own unaided voices and relying upon the (textual) voices of others in the
project of philosophic education.

International philosophical quarterly, Jan 1, 2010

A survey of commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics over the past century reflect a long-standing ass... more A survey of commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics over the past century reflect a long-standing assumption that pleasure, rather than understanding, is to be seen as the real aim of tragedy, despite questionable textual evidence to this end. This paper seeks to rehabilitate the 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 the organic unity of the plot - what Aristotle calls the "soul" of tragedy - I argue that the telos of tragedy in the Poetics is intended to accommodate both pleasure and incipient philosophical activity without necessarily privileging either.

Research in Phenomenology, Jan 1, 2011

Whereas the entrance of the monochrome into modern art has typically been understood in light of... more 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 psychological effects of figurative semblance, or what Socrates
calls the phantasm, in order to harmonize human perception with the world of sensuous mate-
rial objects. It is in this shared project, I contend, that Rodchenko’s strategy is to be understood
as a kind of materialist Platonism that, when viewed phenomenologically, reveals Plato’s objects
of absolute beauty to be, in the context of industrial capitalism and the crisis of perception that
Benjamin, among others, saw as its consequence, sites of loss and meaninglessness for modern
consciousness, yet sites which nonetheless contain emancipatory potential for a social order that
has been systematically alienated from itself and its environment.

Polis: The Journal of the Society for Greek Political …, Jan 1, 2007

Research in Phenomenology, Jan 1, 2006

Teaching Documents by Ryan Drake

The term 'aesthetics' comes from the Greek word 'aisthesis', meaning 'sense-perception', and it h... more The term 'aesthetics' comes from the Greek word 'aisthesis', meaning 'sense-perception', and it has a long history in philosophical discourse from Plato and Aristotle onward. Yet it was not until the middle of the 1700's that aesthetics became its own proper field of study, where disputes about 'taste' were carried out alongside debates about the proper cultivation of humans in a world that was increasingly subject to change, technological innovation, and political instability. This is to say that the philosophical science of aesthetics is a distinctively modern phenomenon, where questions about the nature of art and perception cannot be easily separated from the historical circumstances that gave rise to such questions. Through art-historical, art-theoretical, and philosophical approaches, we will endeavor to get a feel for this modern orientation in general terms, and at the same time we will focus on specific historical moments, figures, and documents in order to understand two particular aesthetic crises: 1) the crisis of perception that is rooted in the transformation of everyday life in the industrial revolution-a crisis that bears itself out both in terms of physical sensation as well as ideology; and 2) the crisis in Western visual art, specifically painting, that led ultimately to formal abstraction and hence to a problematic relationship with representation as such. In this latter crisis we find that at certain points in its development the very definition of art, and along with it, its right to exist, is set at stake. This course is broken into three phases of roughly five weeks each: the first seeks to gain concepts and perspectives on art from a philosophical point of view, primarily through the writings of Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Charles Baudelaire, as well as analyses of modern existence and the conditions of perception and action that affect humans, including works by Georg Simmel, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx. The second undertakes an interdisciplinary study of artistic movements and perspectives in the West from the late 18 th to the mid-20 th