Aither is a double-blind peer review, Open Access online academic journal. It is indexed at ERIH+ and Scopus. It is published by the Faculty of Arts of the Palacký University in Olomouc in cooperation with the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It comes out twice a year. Every second issue is international and contains foreign-language articles (mainly in English, but also in German and French). The journal is registered under the number ISSN 1803-7860.

Aither 17/2017:32-47 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2017.002

Aristotle's Opinions on Tragic Poetry as a Controversial Legacy

Jaroslav Daneš
Fakulta filozofická, Univerzita Hradec Králové

Aristotle's opinions are controversial in at least a triple sense. First, we have in mind his editing of and commenting on Poetics. Second, we may see his work as part of a polemic with his contemporaries with whom he did not agree with over the evaluation of tragic poetry. Third, his work is controversial because of the method Aristotle employed and the results he obtained with this method. In this paper the focus will be on the third point, especially on Aristotle's alleged or real interpretation of tragedy as a text and on the possible reasons for his seeming or deliberate underappreciation of tragedy as performance or spectacle (ὄψις). In the final part a sketch will be provided of the breakup with Aristotle's legacy by means of the example of Oliver Taplin and David Wiles, as well as new methodological approaches to ancient Greek tragedy, which go far beyond Aristotle.

Published: March 30, 2017  Show citation

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Daneš, J. (2017). Aristotle's Opinions on Tragic Poetry as a Controversial Legacy. Aither, 9(17), 32-47. doi: 10.5507/aither.2017.002
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