Poetics in its Aristotelian Context

Pierre Destrée is an Associate FNRS Research Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Louvain. He has published a French translation with commentary of the Poetics, and he is the author of numerous articles on the Presocratics, Plato and Aristotle. He is the coeditor of several books, most recently: with Penelope Murray, The Blackwell Companion to Ancient Aesthetics (2015); with Zina Giannopoulou, Plato: Symposium: A Critical Guide (2017); with Radcliffe Edmonds, Plato and the Power of Images (2017); and with Franco Trivigno, Laughter, Humor and Comedy in Ancient Philosophy (2019).Malcolm Heath is Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Leeds. His publications include Interpreting Classical Texts (2002), Menander: A Rhetor in Context (2004), and Ancient Philosophical Poetics (2012). He has also translated Aristotle’s Poetics (1996). He is currently working on the place of poetry in Aristotle’s philosophical anthropology, and on Longinus On Sublimity. Dana L. Munteanu is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Ohio State University. She is the author of Tragic Pathos: Pity and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy (2012), the editor of Emotion, Genre and Gender in Classical Antiquity (2011) and co-editor with Zara Torlone and Dorota Dutsch of A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe (2017). Her scholarly publications have concentrated on Greek drama, philosophy and the reception of classics in opera and literature.

"One of the merits of [this volume] is that the authors are comfortable working, in a mutually reinforcing way, in the related fields of classics, literary theory, philosophy, and history. The volume will prove to be of lasting value to Aristotelian scholars as well as to specialists in Platonic studies who may be pleased to find that subtler approaches are taken with regard to Plato’s critique of the arts and his influence on Aristotle’s thought." - R. Bensen Cain, Oklahoma State University, USA, in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2021

• Introduction Part 1. Aristotle’s Aesthetics: Poetry and Other Arts – Tradition and Innovation 1. Poetry and Biology: The Anatomy of Tragedy 2. To Kalon and the Experience of Art 3. Aesthetic Emotions 4. Was Phthonos a Comedic Emotion for Aristotle? On the Pleasure and Moral Psychology of Laughter 5. Painting as an Aesthetic Paradigm Part 2. Poetics, Politics and Ethics: Links and Independence 6. Family Bounds, Political Community, and Tragic Pathos 7. Is there a Poetics in the Politics? 8. Varieties of Characters: The Better, the Worse, and the Like 9. The Ethical Context of Poetics 5: Comic Error and Lack of Self-Control Part 3. Language and Content: Poetic Puzzles in Philosophical Context 10. Taxonomic Flexibility: Metaphor, Genos, and Eidos 11. Poetry and Historia Afterword 12. Reading the Poetics in Context