Fascinating -- the link between classic Greek Tragedy and its political context. It sets forth a strong counter argument to Plato and Aristotle's strong criticism of the Sophists, the dramatists, and the poets.

As someone who read 47 thousand books of literary criticism (slight exaggeration, but not in memory) while working on my graduate degree in England, I've largely avoided or yawned through the genre in recent decades, which means it would have been easy to have missed Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, which would have been a major loss. I don't remember the last time a critical book transformed my understanding of a form I thought I was familiar with, but this has sent me back to Aeschylus, Sophocles,...

This was an enjoyable, thought-provoking listen. I enjoy John Lee's narration, and he does not disappoint here. I've been thinking I should read the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and this convinced me that those works still have a lot of relevancy for our lives. There are also some great one-liners such as "think of the classical equivalent of twerking" and "Make Athens Great Again."

I have had very mixed feelings about this book. As a reader, I cannot say for sure that I enjoyed reading every pages. The chapters on Platonic and Aristotlean evaluations of tragedy can be a little long-winded and out of place, and I'd question why focusing on them instead of many other thinkers who have had more interesting things said about tragedy. I can appreciate that Critchley is taking aim at a "certain style of philosophy that can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle", maybe I am alrea...

This is a book about the meaning in drama for people, especially tragic but also comic. Critchley manages the difficult trick of making a wealth of complex philosophy clear and engaging to the reader. He moves from the metaphysics of Plato through the more measured naturalism of Aristotle to something akin to Wittgenstein. Tragedy has its own truths, revealed in the ordinary, through careful reading of the texts. Highly recommended for anyone interested in literature, drama and meaning in genera...

I really had no business reading this book. Its audience is more the maybe 1,00o classicists I imagine are left in the world, a smattering of philosophers and drama people who take drama probably too seriously. Yet, his premise to someone unfamiliar with philosophical arguments about tragedy is enlightening. He meticulously parses Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics to make his case that, instead of being threatening as Sophocles warns, Greek tragedy gives humans a realistic frame of refere...

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Greek Tragedy With Our Own BloodSimon Critchley's "Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us" (2019) explores ancient Greek tragedy and philosophy and discusses their continued significance. Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School of Social Research, has written extensively on philosophy and on philosophy's relationship to literature. He has the gift of writing both for those highly read in philosophy and for the more general reader, as shown in his role as moderator for the New York T...

Critchley mentions in this epilogue that despite not being a classicist, he has an interest in ancient Greek theatre. This book is primarily a work of a philosopher, however. It looks at theatre ("the spectacle of politics looking at itself") from the perspective of Plato and Aristotle, but with multiple other views thrown in. Plato chooses to reject theatre from his Republic, but Aristotle's Poetics goes into some detail on what theatre is, what effect it's supposed to have and its value. Critc...

I really respect Simon Critchley. I appreciate his work in the area of the philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas. I expected a lot and was excited by a glimpse of some central claim here about the possibility of a different approach to philosophy that reflects the moral ambiguity of tragedy. Sadly, I felt it never really delved deep enough into that possibility and the whole book remained a rambling introduction that covered a lot of area but did so only superficially.

In ancient times the book that introduced me to the grand subject of Sophocles et al. was George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy, as sonorous and epic as its subject, and which in turn set loose an avalanche of books eager to support or vigorously dissent from his argument. After that sturm und drang in the critical teapot, now long forgotten, comes Simon Critchley’s eccentric meditation, less grand and for me much more interesting in its variety of perspective, positions and reversals and pithy

In this work Simon Critchley explores Greek tragedies, arguing that the Attica tragedies import a philosophy, "tragedy's philosophy," which differs from the dominate philosophy of Rationalism handed down from us from Plato. All of this is fine, but it seems that at times Critchley is making claims that are self evident to the reader who has read the Greeks, and who has read Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the work is a wonderful guide into the wonderful world of Greek tragedy, which Critchley correctly...

A philosophical look at the nature of ancient Athenian tragedy and how we interact with it (and how it interacts with us?). A rather dense text, delightful at times, but at others a bit of a slog. A lot of the emphasis is rather on philosophy than tragedy. There are extensive bits about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among others, and their thoughts on tragedy (among other things). There are some odd assertions (like that Socrates admired craftsmen and craftsmanship, but had no practical skills...

Interesting. Good book.

Dit is vooral een boek voor Susan, denk ik. De schrijver is filosoof en vanuit zijn perspectief en dan vooral via Plato en Aristoteles, geeft hij een uitleg (zijn uitleg) van de Griekse tragedien. Ik vind het eerste deel van het boek wat wollig, een beetje te filosofisch. Maar als het gaat over de verschillende tragedies, dan wordt het erg interessant. Er zit veel meer in deze verhalen dan ik dacht. Dat wordt dus opnieuw lezen. Hij maakt overigens korte metten met Socrates. Kennelijk is dat niet...

Critchley's insight is essentially that tragedy and philosophy take fundamentally opposite world views, in that philosophy (going back to Socrates) principally attempts to unify, while tragedy embraces uncertainty and dualities without attempting to resolve them. He argues that for philosophy (and this is a somewhat overly broad generalization, but not necessarily unfairly) the fundamental disciplinary assumption is that there is some kind of basic root truth which can be gotten to, and the type...

I tend to like ambitious books and the sheer guts of Tragedy, The Greeks and Us were sure to make an impression. True, like most such ambitious endeavors, Chritchley’s takes on more than it can handle, but its open invitation for the cyclical infusion of the classics with the blood of the new generations is impassioned and earnest. The main claims of the book, tragedy as a mode of discourse superior to philosophy in the expression of humanity’s ‘ever-partial agency’ (272), are not all that diffe...

Some interesting points. But not up to his usual standard.

A great introduction to ideas about tragedy and us. Critchley is playful, erudite, and engaging. He made me turn to the few tensing tragedies. They’re short, heavy with “aliveness” of the theater. He helped introduce me to theorists, literary critics, and philosophers who have built metaphors and intellectual landscapes atop these plays. Worth reading. But you’ll begin to love the ancient Greeks, be warned.

Simon Critchley has a very interesting, ironic, sardonic, and fun writing voice. He has his own way of structuring sentences, with a wry interest in pointing out something he finds interesting, humorous, or ironic in things, and you get this just from the way his sentences run.This is a great look at the Greek tragedies - Euripdes, Aristophanes, Sophocles, etc. - and primarily through the lens/view of Plato and Aristotle. Simon Critchley is a very philosophy minded writer, so its no surprise tha...