Literatura académica sobre el tema "Aristotle’s Illusion"

The sixteenth century inherited three discourses on melancholy: the medical, philosophical, and religious ones. While the first presented it as a mental illness linked to a disorder of the humours, the second, with the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Problem XXX, saw it as a sign of creative genius, and the third reminded us that it was, according to Saint Jerome’s expression, the balneum diaboli; it allowed Satan to take possession of the patient’s mind, causing him to hallucinate. So how can we distinguish the melancholy of the genius from the pathology of the same name, especially when the latter is associated with the devil? The devil’s ability to create illusory worlds on the border between dream and reality coincides with Renaissance artists’works populated by ghosts, monsters, witches and demons. Could not these scenes, presented both as manifestations of the devil and projections of the hallucinated mind, be linked to the figure of the melancholic artist?

An unrecognised copy (1665) in Kant’s private library of Michael Piccart’s Isagoge (1605), an introduction to the system of Aristotelian philosophy together with Kant’s own remarks on this author (Refl 4160, AA 17, p. 439) can be established as an original source for the Kantian ‘ideosphere’. First, I point out contexts and consequences of Piccart’s Altdorfian Aristotelianism, in contrast to the Königsbergian Aristotelianism (emphasised by Tonelli’s research). To further check the quality of Piccart as a source of Kant’s, a conceptual case-study is elaborated with Kant’s critical distinction between analytics as a “logic of truth” (KrV, B 85) and dialectics as a “logic of illusion” (KrV, B 86). Hereby, dialectics is understood as part of an Aristotelian division of logic in analytics, dialectics and sophistics (Königsberg/Rabe versus Altdorf/Piccart). As will be shown by the paradigmatic case of the famous Königsbergian proponent of Aristotelianism, Paul Rabe, Kant cannot have received the suggestion for his own critical distinction from Rabe’s Cursus Philosophicus. Instead, Piccart refers to a passage of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which suggests the very distinction between an analytic philosopher who searches for scientific truth and dialecticians and sophists. For different reasons, they do not claim any scientific seriousness.

This article deals with the question of how the Jewish Aristotelians, followers of Maimonides, combined the exclusive status of the Song of Songs with the no­tion of the falsity of poetry. According to Aristotle’s Arabic commentators, poet­ics is part of the logical organon. The poetic syllogisms are based on deliberately false premises and rules of inference, and thus poetic discourse is the lowest in the hierarchy of the logical corpus. At the same time, the following Talmudic maxim is known: “If all Scripture is holy, then the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies”. Thus, Jewish theologians, having assimilated the Arab Aristotelian approach to poetics, were faced with a difficult task: how to explain the supreme status of the Song of Songs in the biblical canon if this book is written in the lan­guage of lies? In the works of medieval Jewish theologians we do not find a clearly formulated solution to this problem, which may be due to the fact that the Song of Songs was often associated with an undisclosed esoteric theme. This article will describe the range of views of medieval Jewish thinkers on the role of poetic speech in the Song of Songs and provide an overview of researchers’ attempts to formulate a solution to the above problem. An analysis of a number of texts by medieval Jewish commentators will offer a response not found in the research literature to the question of combining the high status of the Song of Songs with the deliberate falsity of poetic discourse. According to our reading of Moshe Ibn-Tibbon’s commentary on the Song of Songs, the false language of poetry helps to avoid the illusion of comprehension where positively formulated knowledge is impossible.

It is no exaggeration to say that Aristotle's Poetics is one of the most influential documents in the history of Western tradition. Not only, after its re-discovery in the early sixteenth century, did it dominate literary theory and practice for no less than three hundred years. Even after it had lost its privileged status – first to the alternative theories of literature brought forth by the Romantic movement and then to the literary theory and practice of twentieth-century modernism – the Poetics still retained its role of the normative text in opposition to which those new theories were being formulated. It will suffice to bring to mind the explicitly non-Aristotelian theory of drama developed by Bertold Brecht to see that, even when rejected, it was the Poetics that dictated the agenda of the theorists.This has changed in the last thirty years, with the emergence of post-modern literary theory. Although in the questioning of the notions of closure, of artistic illusion, of unity of plot the post-modern theory owes much more than it cares to admit to such modernists as Brecht or Adorno and through them to Aristotle, the damnatio memoriae it has imposed on the Poetics is so thorough that some theorists seem to be hardly aware of the very fact of its existence. This is probably why many theorists, in their privileging of emotional distancing over identification, meta-theatrality over illusion, formal and semantic openness over determinacy and closure, find their models in Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other non-Western literary traditions rather than in ancient Greece. That is to say, in so far as Aristotle is no longer considered relevant to literary theory, Greek literary tradition too is not considered relevant. The tacit presupposition on which this attitude is based is that Aristotle's Poetics adequately represents ancient Greek literary practice.