2010 - ISNS Madrid 2010 Panel: Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, organised by Dylan Burns and Luciana Gabriela Soares Santoprete. (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Vicious Art or Vicious Audience? Understanding the Effects of Art on the Youthful and Vicious Audience in Aristotle’s Poetics” According to Aristotle, tragedy can be morally instructive if managed correctly. We believe that this qualification—correct management of the instructive capacity of art—requires further investigation. In particular, Aristotle’s apparent acceptance of the arts must be critically reviewed through the lens of his moral psychology. This paper examines an Aristotelian analysis of the effects of tragic art on the moral psychology of persons of different character types. We contend that two distinct groups of people who lack keen moral perception—the youth and vicious people—render the efficacy of moral education through tragedy a delicate matter. Those who benefit most directly from watching tragedy are what we shall call morally knowing subjects. A morally knowing subject is one who already recognizes the good in general (e.g., it is usually wrong to steal from and murder other people, and it is usually good to be charitable and truthful). Morally knowing subjects include the virtuous, continent, and incontinent characters (and, as we shall discuss, possibly older youths on the brink of developing one of these character types). Such a person has some knowledge of the good and, for that reason, can correctly identify and compare instances of injustice in the plot of a tragedy. The virtuous person is most keen to judge, as she already knows and loves the good. For her especially, tragedy is cathartic. Tragedy allows her to rehearse her moral knowledge while putting it into the context of orthogonal fear and pity. The continent and incontinent persons, like the virtuous, can easily identify sympathetic characters. Watching tragedy helps them to rehearse aligning their emotional responses with their moral knowledge. For them, tragedy can be most instructive. However, this educative value seems contingent upon the subject’s moral knowledge. For example, a morally knowing subject knows, prior to viewing a performance of Medea, that while adultery is wrong, filicide is worse. Such a subject might feel pity for Medea initially when her husband, Jason, betrays her. However, upon the realization that Medea will murder their children in retaliation, the morally knowing subject experiences fear for the children’s welfare, and no longer sympathizes with Medea. Inept moral perception might preclude one from having this morally correct emotional response. Youths and vicious people each have, in a way, inept moral perception. Youths are uninformed and the vicious misidentify the good. At first blush, it might appear that tragedy would not help such people develop (or improve) their moral character. However, we argue that the spectacle relevant to youths and the vicious is much broader than the stage. Provided the vicious and very young playgoers are surrounded by mostly morally knowing subjects, they too can learn from tragedy. For instance, if a youth or a vicious person were to continue to identify with Medea even after her plans for filicide are apparent, but it is obvious that the majority of people in the audience feel differently, then the youth or vicious person might come to question their own moral judgment.
Infinite Horizons: Nicholas of Cusa and Seventeenth-Century Cambridge Platonism
American Cusanus Society Newsletter, 2018
Building on the pioneering work of Michael Allen, Stephen Gersh, and Sarah Hutton, this paper argues that one of the most robust chapters in the legacy of Nicholas Cusanus involves how his thought was received and developed by the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists. Specifically, Nicholas’ novel theorization of infinity and symbolism proved to be extremely important among seventeenth-century English thinkers attempting to avoid the Scylla of Cartesianism and the Charybdis of Spinozism. I concentrate on two important philosophers, Ralph Cudworth (1617- 1688) and Henry More (1614-1687), and show how their intellectual elucidations of Cusanus facilitated a new conception of infinity, the momentous effects of which were seen most prominently in the poetry of their contemporary Thomas Traherne (1636- 1674). I illustrate how Cusanus’ development of the apophatic conception of infinity provided unique resources for the re-symbolization of materiality among philosophers and poets alike.
Sometime before 1410, Nicholas Love (d. 1423/4), the first prior of the Carthusian Charterhouse of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, began composing a full-scale English prose translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi. The fruits of his labors, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, became one of the best known and most widely copied vernacular translations of the Meditationes. This paper seeks to comprehend Love’s conception of the soul and the process of self-examination and -transformation that he scripted for readers of and meditators on his Mirror, highlighting the virtues in Christ’s life that he deemed constitutive of “good living” and, therefore, worthy of imitation. Of particular interest are the excisions and additions Love made to his Latin source-text and what these editorial interventions potentially reveal about his intended readership and their presumed capacities for meditation.
Esoteric Pilgrimage: Ismaili Muslim Hermeneutics of Hajj
The Fatimid Caliphate (909-1171) was the only Shi‘i Muslim Caliphate in Islamic history in which a hereditary Ismaili Imam descended from the ahl al-bayt of the Prophet Muhammad ruled as both spiritual and temporal sovereign. Before and during the tenure of the Fatimid rule, an Isma‘ili da‘wa operated throughout both Fatimid and non-Fatimid lands where numerous Isma‘ili da‘is summoned Muslims to recognize the spiritual authority of the Ismaili Imams. This paper examines the spiritual hermeneutics or ta’wil of the hajj as elucidated in the writings of the Fatimid Isma‘ili da‘is Ja‘far b. Mansur al-Yaman, al-Mu’ayyad al-Din fi’l-Din al-Shirazi and Nasir-i Khusraw and argues that the Isma‘ili ta’wil of the hajj invests the Ismaili Imam with a spiritual status superior to the physical Ka‘ba. This hermeneutic also establishes a distinctively Isma‘ili practice of making pilgrimage to the Fatimid Imam-Caliph in Cairo. This argument is demonstrated through three pieces of evidence: firstly, the ta’wil or esoteric interpretation of the hajj presented by various Fatimid da‘is, including al-Naysaburi, al-Mu’ayyad, and Nasir-i Khusraw, situates the Ka‘ba as the exoteric House of God and the physical qiblah while presenting the Fatimid Imam as the esoteric House of God and the spiritual qiblah. Secondly, the Fatimid poets Ibn al-Hani al-Andalusi and al-Mu’ayyad fi’l-Din al-Shirazi explicitly assert the superiority of the Imam to the physical Ka‘bah and highlight the importance of making hajj to the former over the latter. Thirdly, this spiritual hermeneutic is enacted and embodied in the actual pilgrimage in that numerous Isma‘ili da‘is including al-Mu’ayyad and Nasir-i Khusraw made to see the Fatimid Imam-Caliph in Cairo. As an example of an enduring hermeneutic, the practice of undertaking a journey for an audience (mulaqat) with the Ismaili Imam continued to have a paramount status in Isma‘ili Muslim piety long after the Fatimid period and persists in present times.