Paul A. Kottman – författare

Paul A. Kottman offers a new and compelling understanding of tragedy as seen in four of Shakespeare's mature plays- As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest. The author pushes beyond traditional ways of thinking about tragedy, framing his readings with simple questions that have been missing from scholarship of the past generation: Are we still moved by Shakespeare, and why? Kottman throws into question the inheritability of human relationships by showing how the bonds upon which we depend for meaning and worth can be dissolved. According to Kottman, the lives of Shakespeare's protagonists are conditioned by social bonds-kinship ties, civic relations, economic dependencies, political allegiances-that unravel irreparably. This breakdown means they can neither inherit nor bequeath a livable or desirable form of sociality.Orlando and Rosalind inherit nothing "but growth itself" before becoming refugees in the Forest of Arden; Hamlet is disinherited not only by Claudius's election but by the sheer vacuity of the activities that remain open to him; Lear's disinheritance of Cordelia bequeaths a series of events that finally leave the social sphere itself forsaken of heirs and forbearers alike. Firmly rooted in the philosophical tradition of reading Shakespeare, this bold work is the first sustained interpretation of Shakespearean tragedy since Stanley Cavell's work on skepticism and A. C. Bradley's century-old Shakespearean Tragedy.

Juxtaposing readings of three plays of William Shakespeare and two major treatises in political philosophy—Plato's Republic and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan—Kottman contests the figural ground from which political philosophy emerges and suggests how a Shakespearean sense of the 'scene' might open up new avenues for thinking about politics. A Politics of the Scene builds especially on the reflections of Hannah Arendt and offers a speculative approach to politics that abandons taxonomical and scientific ambitions in order to finally reckon with the world as a stage.

A number of the most influential thinkers of the past two hundred and fifty years, Herder, Goethe, Hegel, Benjamin, Marx, Schmitt, Lukács, Derrida, Cavell, Agnes Heller, and others, have grappled with Shakespeare. This is the first volume to bring together their engagements with his drama, which are part of an underexplored philosophical tradition. Philosophers on Shakespeare comes at a time when the critical paradigm of Shakespeare studies in the academy is shifting from a historicist and cultural materialist model toward a renewed interest in theoretical readings of the plays. Shakespeare's work is currently being taught and performed more than ever, and there is a proliferation of new critical editions of the plays themselves to which this volume will serve as a timely and much-needed companion. It is useful for the light it sheds on individual plays as well as for its survey of literary criticism, aesthetic theory, theories of tragedy and dramatic criticism since the mid-eighteenth century.

A number of the most influential thinkers of the past two hundred and fifty years, Herder, Goethe, Hegel, Benjamin, Marx, Schmitt, Lukács, Derrida, Cavell, Agnes Heller, and others, have grappled with Shakespeare. This is the first volume to bring together their engagements with his drama, which are part of an underexplored philosophical tradition. Philosophers on Shakespeare comes at a time when the critical paradigm of Shakespeare studies in the academy is shifting from a historicist and cultural materialist model toward a renewed interest in theoretical readings of the plays. Shakespeare's work is currently being taught and performed more than ever, and there is a proliferation of new critical editions of the plays themselves to which this volume will serve as a timely and much-needed companion. It is useful for the light it sheds on individual plays as well as for its survey of literary criticism, aesthetic theory, theories of tragedy and dramatic criticism since the mid-eighteenth century.

Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, Paul A. Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives. Through keen interpretations of the best known philosophical and literary depictions of its topic—including Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Ovid, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—his book treats love as a fundamental way that we humans make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.

Philosophers working on aesthetics have paid considerable attention to art and artists of the early modern period. Yet early modern artistic practices scarcely figure in recent work on the emergence of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy over the course the eighteenth century. This book addresses that gap, elaborating the extent to which artworks and practices of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were accompanied by an immense range of discussions about the arts and their relation to one another.Rather than take art as a stand-in for or reflection of some other historical event or social phenomenon, this book treats art as a phenomenon in itself. The contributors suggest ways in which artworks and practices of the early modern period make aesthetic experience central to philosophical reflection, while also showing art's need for philosophy.

Philosophers working on aesthetics have paid considerable attention to art and artists of the early modern period. Yet early modern artistic practices scarcely figure in recent work on the emergence of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy over the course the eighteenth century. This book addresses that gap, elaborating the extent to which artworks and practices of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were accompanied by an immense range of discussions about the arts and their relation to one another.Rather than take art as a stand-in for or reflection of some other historical event or social phenomenon, this book treats art as a phenomenon in itself. The contributors suggest ways in which artworks and practices of the early modern period make aesthetic experience central to philosophical reflection, while also showing art's need for philosophy.