klasyki: Tragic hero

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

A tragic hero (or sometimes tragic heroine if they are female) is the protagonist of a tragedy. In his Poetics, Aristotle records the descriptions of the tragic hero to the playwright and strictly defines the place that the tragic hero must play and the kind of man he must be. Aristotle based his observations on previous dramas. Many of the most famous instances of tragic heroes appear in Greek literature, most notably the works of Sophocles and Euripides.

Evidence: 44 • authority: 80

Aristotle on the Best Kind of Tragic Plot: Re-reading Poetics 13–14

Evidence: 44 • authority: 88

Staging Tragic Temporality in the Poetics. This chapter offers a very close reading of Aristotle’s discussion of Greek tragic drama. It takes very seriously his claim that, as a mimetic work of art, tragic drama accomplishes its essential aim through an imitation of its subject matter, human praxis or ‘goal-directed activity,’ which allows its audience to manthanein or ‘learn’ what praxis is. And what is revealed to us in tragedy, according to Aristotle, is the otherwise concealed fact that human life is always positioned between a determining past we can never fully master and a projected future we can never fully anticipate or control.

Evidence: 38 • authority: 72

Aristotle's Poetics (Ancient Greek: Περὶ ποιητικῆς Peri poietikês; Latin: De Poetica; c. 335 BCE) is the earliest surviving work of Greek dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to solely focus on literary theory. In this text, Aristotle offers an account of ποιητική, which refers to poetry or, more literally, "the poetic art," deriving from the term for "poet, author, maker," ποιητής. Aristotle divides the art of poetry into verse, drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and epic poetry. The genres all share the function of mimesis, but differ in: Musical rhythm, harmony, meter, and melody; The goodness of the characters; and The mode of storytelling.…

Evidence: 38 • authority: 80

Oedipus Rex as the Ideal Tragic Hero of Aristotle

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Aristotle first used the term ethics to name a field of study developed by his predecessors Socrates and Plato which is devoted to the attempt to provide a rational response to the question of how humans should best live. Aristotle regarded ethics and politics as two related but separate fields of study, since ethics examines the good of the individual, while politics examines the good of the city-state, which he considered to be the best type of community. Aristotle's writings have been read more or less continuously since ancient times, and his ethical treatises in particular continue to influence philosophers working today. Aristotle emphasized the practical importance of developing exce…

Evidence: — • authority: 88

Living with Tragic Temporality in the Ethics. This chapter offers a reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, contrasting the way in which Aristotle “grounds” his claims about virtue to the way in which Kant does so in his moral philosophy. The suggestion here is that, when viewed in light of the tragic temporality uncovered in the last chapter as belonging essentially to the human condition for Aristotle, the Ethics now seems specifically constructed to provide us with a way to flourish as human beings within that tragic condition. Here, understanding aretê or ‘excellence, virtue’ as a mean between two vicious extremes and the notion of phronesis or ‘practical intelligence’ as grounded ir…

Evidence: — • authority: 88

Aristotle and Tragic Temporality. Aristotle and Tragic Temporality approaches questions relating to time and our experience of it in the works of Aristotle, focusing on his Poetics and Ethics, rather than the natural philosophy of the Physics that has been the more or less exclusive focus of interpreters approaching Aristotle on this issue. The book begins with an extensive treatment of the role of non-being in the life of living things for Aristotle, an ecstatic mode of being we find complicated in human’s tragic temporality. It then moves to the two standard accounts of time from the modern period, as either objective or subjective, which have traditionally been imposed on Aristotle and p…