Paul Woodruff

The Necessity of Theater

The Necessity of Theater PART ONE: THE ART OF BEING WATCHED 1. Defining the Art 2. What Theater Makes 3. Action Worth Watching: Plot 4. Staging Choices 5. People Worth Watching: Characters 6. Sacred Space 7. Mimesis PART TWO: THE ART OF WATCHING 8. Emotion 9. Empathy 10. Laughter 11. Understanding Theater 12. The Mask of Wisdom

Mindful Virtue, Mindful Reverence

How does one talk about moral thought and moral action as a religious naturalist? We explore this question by considering two human capacities: the capacity for mindfulness, and the capacity for virtue. We suggest that mindfulness is deeply enhanced by an understanding of the scientific worldview and that the four cardinal virtues-courage, fairmindedness, humaneness, and reverence-are rendered coherent by mindful reflection. We focus on the concept of mindful reverence and propose that the mindful reverence elicited by the evolutionary narrative is at the heart of religious naturalism. Religious education, we suggest, entails the cultivation of mindful virtue, in ourselves and in our children.

Socrates and ontology: The evidence of the Hippias major

Aristotle notes with approval that Socrates did not separate the forms.2 By this he means, at least, that Socrates did not subscribe to the existence of forms separate from their particular instances, and implies that Socrates either did not admit forms into his ontology at all, or ceded them only the shadowy status of Aristotelian forms. Aristotles testimony in this regard fits neatly with the evidence of Platos earlier dialogues, which of all Platos work seem most accurately to represent the historical Socrates.3 The Socrates we have from the early dialogues does not develop a theory of forms, though he talks frequently about forms, and evidently uses an unstated theory of forms in his dialectic.4 Unlike the Socrates of the middle dialogues, our Socrates does not argue explicitly for the separation of the forms,5 and does not obviously presuppose their separate existence in the process of his dialectic.6 The consensus of recent scholars writing in English on the matter is that the early dialogues treat forms as immanent in particular things.7 R. E. Allen has challenged this orthodoxy:

Why Did Protagoras Use Poetry in Education

Like Plato, Protagoras held that young children learn virtue from fine examples in poetry. Unlike Plato, Protagoras taught adults by correcting the diction of poets. In this paper I ask what his standard of correctness might be, and what benefit he intended his students to take from exercises in correction. If his standard of correctness is truth, then he may intend his students to learn by questioning the content of poems; that would be suggestive of Plato’s program in Republic III. But his standard is more likely to be the accurate use of language; in that case he would intend his students to learn to express their thoughts clearly enough that their audience would understand what they were saying. That standard would be independent of the truth of what they are saying; and that would be a precursor to modern techniques by which we try to teach speaking and writing. Truth is not so easy to escape, however, and we shall see that Protagoras’ exercise must assume that the poet is trying to tell the truth.

Early Greek Legal Thought

To write about early Greek legal thought requires, first, some consideration of what this expression might have meant at the time. “Legal philosophy” in the modern sense did not exist before Plato, but “legal thought,” in the sense of thinking about law, undoubtedly did. We find various reflections on law explicitly or implicitly in the writings of many who are now classified separately as poets, philosophers, sophists, or historians, but whom the Greeks would have grouped together under the term sophoi—“wise men.” In thinking about law, however, the Greeks differed considerably from us in their basic construction of the subject.

Performing Memory: In the Mind and on the Public Stage

The dead walk in the minds of those who have survived traumatic losses. They confront us with questions: that is why we cannot forget them, and, at the same time, that is why we cannot bear to remember them. We cannot, at least, until we have taken action about the questions. Some of us cling to the memories that wound us, and in doing that we have to put up with relentless pain, even though memory may have healing power.1 Others try to obliterate the wounding memories—and fail, of course. Lose memory, and you lose yourself: You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives…Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.2

Virtue Ethics, Mass Killing, and Hatred

Thinking about genocide is a challenge by itself; so much anger, horror, dread, and disgust flood the mind. People rather like us, who are not criminals in other ways, kill innocents because of the group to which they belong. Not to be horrified, not to be angry would be a failure of character, and yet horror and anger may drown out the thinking that the subject calls for. To be calm about it is to betray the many who have been killed; so how can I be clear enough about this terrible subject, and not betray its victims? How not betray the victims, while looking to explain what happened to their destroyers? The horror has two edges, one for those who are killed and one for those who, in a devastating moral catastrophe, become killers.

The Sophistic Movement.

Preface 1. Introduction 2. Towards a history of interpretations of the sophistic movement 3. The sophists as a social phenomenon 4. The meaning of the term sophist 5. The individual sophists 6. Dialectic, antilogic and eristic 7. The theory of language 8. The doctrine of logos in literature and rhetoric 9. Sophistic relativism 10. The nomos-physis controversy 11. Can virtue be taught? 12. The theory of society 13. Religion and the gods 14. Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Rousseau, Molière, and the Ethics of Laughter

Rousseau attacks comedy on the grounds that it is bad for our morals. He tries to show that to make a comedy moral is to take the fun out of it. No one would deny that some jokes are bad, and bad for us. But I think Rousseau is mistaken in his belief that the fun of comedy depends on the bad sort of joke. In this essay I examine the ethics of laughter and the techniques of comedy, and find them rooted in a common metaphysics of human nature. It turns out, if I am right, that the most effective comic techniques are the most innocent.