Aristophanes and the philosophy of sensory perception
The fifth century saw the rise of a new philosophical interest in theorizing sensory perception. This thesis explores how Aristophanic comedy positions itself in relation to that project. It argues that comedy directly engages with the fifth-century theorization of perception and the challenges early philosophers make to the epistemic authority of the senses, and does so most explicitly for expressly political reasons. Section I explores Aristophanes as implicit respondent to the philosophers. It reads comic imagery from <i>Knights </i>against the implicit background of the physiological theorization of senses as mutually exclusive modalities. Here, I examine a series of images featuring jumps between the senses, moments typically marked for their striking discontinuity. I suggest that for their original audience, however, this Aristophanic language works to precisely opposite effect: it exploits the conceptual structures of everyday Attic in order to make explicit an underlying unity between the senses. In the process, I illustrate the obfuscating consequences of interpretative strategies that would explain Aristophanic imagery using precisely the sorts of <i>a priori </i>judgements of segregation between
Clements, Ashley
Aristophanes and the philosophy of sensory perception. The fifth century saw the rise of a new philosophical interest in theorizing sensory perception. This thesis explores how Aristophanic comedy positions itself in relation to that project. It argues that comedy directly engages with the fifth-century theorization of perception and the challenges early philosophers make to the epistemic authority of the senses, and does so most explicitly for expressly political reasons. Section I explores Aristophanes as implicit respondent to the philosophers. It reads comic imagery from <i>Knights </i>against the implicit background of the physiological theorization of senses as mutually exclusive modalities. Here, I examine a series of images featuring jumps between the senses, moments typically marked for their striking discontinuity. I suggest that for their original audience, however, this Aristophanic language works to precisely opposite effect: it exploits the conceptual structures of everyday Attic in order to make explicit an underlying unity between the senses. In the process, I illustrate the obfuscating consequences of interpretative strategies that would explain Aristophanic imagery using precisely the sorts of <i>a priori </i>judgements of segregation between
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