Mr. Davis Faculty biography Lecture Second semester Greek tragedy has been performed, read, imitated, and interpreted for twenty-five hundred years. As a literary form it is thought especially revealing philosophically by Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, to name only a few. Among others, Seneca, Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, Goethe, Shelley, O'Neill, and Sartre wrote versions of Greek tragedies. And, of course, there is Freud.
Greek tragedy examines the fundamental things in a fundamental way.
Justice, family, guilt, law, autonomy, sexuality, political life, the divine-these are its issues. For conference we will read perhaps the greatest philosophical treatment of tragedy, Aristotle's Poetics. Open to any interested student. Although the cultural settings in which this question occurs are varied, the question itself does not change. To pose it anew for purposes of a philosophic investigation implies a conviction that the answer is not obvious.