Aristotle and Tragic Temporality treats a theme that has drawn scholarly attention for millennia: Aristotle on time and our experience of it. It does so, however, in a wholly unprecedented way, grounding its interpretation in his Poetics and Ethics, rather than the natural philosophy of the Physics. <\/p>\n
Sean D. Kirkland first takes up Aristotle’s discussion of our tragic temporal situatedness\u2014our having to act, think, and live always between a determining past we can never fully master and a projected future we can never fully anticipate. It is this condition that comes powerfully to light for Aristotle on stage in the performance of a tragic drama. The familiar Aristotelian \u2018virtue ethics\u2019 then becomes something radically new in the transforming light of the Poetics\u2019 temporality – an outline of how humans can inhabit that irremediably tragic condition, never overcoming or suspending it, and arrive nonetheless at something like happiness and excellence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"