Aristotle on Tragedy 

My favourite english-speaking philosophy professor on RU-vid!

"The part on comedy is lost, tragically." And just like that you earned yourself a like and subscribe.

This is so good and it comes from a source book! Thanks for all this great work.

Congs and thanks from Greece! Waiting for a podcast on Herakleitos, our (everybody's) grandpapa!

So succinct and concentrated videos. Being a charismatic teacher such as yourself is one of my dreams 💘

I love this playlist. I was wondering I u could do a video on what Hegel thought about aesthetics.

Melody as a component of tragedy referred to the chorus (χορός), a group of 12 to 50 people representing the people or the community who entered the orchestra of the theatre and commented on the action of each scene, singing and dancing to the accompaniment of music. Characteristically, their verses were written in the Dorian dialect (the Dorians lived in more collective societies) and not in the Attic (Athenian) dialect in which the rest of the play was written for the protagonist, deuteragonist, tritagonist (individual actors).

I have to find this Anthology - looking in all the libraries and can't find it yet.

Aristotle refers to comedy in his poetics to differentiate it from tragedy. He says that in comedy the characters are presented below an average person as they are ridiculed in contrast with tragedy where they are presented above average. In comedy, verisimilitude, plausibility, social conventions and artistic conventions are subverted, overturned and thereby they produce the comic scene and laughter. I think you should do a video on laughter focusing on Bergson’s “Le Rire” laughter or even Freud’s excellent “Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious” , in which he tries to explain why we humans laugh, how laughter is released when we see or hear something comic. Aristotle’s chapter on comedy in his poetics is actually a theme in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”. It shows how the chapter is hidden away by the Benedictine monks in their library and finally destroyed when the library catches fire.

In my view-- "melody" could be transposed into the interplay between dialogue and blocking (character movement).

The craft of extracting pleasure from tragedy renews a spirit of endurance. Whereas the ideal becomes a scourge to progress of any measure. It only blushes me a little to play on my bias. Yet the weight of God's perfection only became bearable when he was crucified. The suffering servant was an exhalation of our collective haphazardness. It was the plan that won by losing (materially).

Amazing! Only Professor that talking about philosophy and it is not boring.

"Τragedy is an imitation of an act of great and perfect magnitude, performed without any of the species in the stories, acting and not by recitation, but by mercy and fear, for the catharsis of such passions". Αριστοτέλης-Aristotles 384-322 B.C.

Has anybody ever attempted to extrapolate the possible theory and approach to comedy based on the existing texts and proposed theories? That’d be fascinating as a theory

Italo Calvino: The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life and the inevitability of death. In a tragedy you die, in a comedy you get married.

Does he really mean by using the word imitating in the literal meaning of imitation?

I learned from this video and remember my lit crit courses ages ago. I wonder the extent to which Aristotle's proscriptions and prescriptions were based on dramas he had already encountered. Was he providing rules for future plays based on his experience with plays that had been produced without knowledge of his rules? Was he codifying from what was already in the public sphere and thus innocent of his thoughts, so to speak? Perhaps the playwrights were doing all the creative exploration and his Poetics were merely (excusez SVP!!) regularizing those explorations. I do not know how much weight to place on the Poetics versus actual works of theatre that preceded the Poetics. Please excuse this unschooled comment.

Aristotle was probably a semiotic magician.

From India ❤

Are you an actress in Hollywood?

"Do you know that according to Aristotle a person who dies crushed by a column does not die a tragic death? And yet here is that nontragic death hanging over you." - Sollers

A tragedy that his comedy was lost.

Young, pretty, how dare Professor Anderson be so luminescently intellectual!

Ok, ..know what you meant.+ Pineapple.

The book name ?

How is that you stay sane, Professor?

Well, then Romeo or Juliet is a very skilled person. 😮