Author Description

This book revolutionizes the 1000-year old tradition that stems from the first commentaries on the Poetics by the Arabic scholars. Aristotle's treatise has always been thought to be about poetic-literary theory, with tragedy being its paradigm. Scott demonstrates, however, that Aristotle (c. 384-322 BCE) employs poiesis not in the way universally assumed until now, as "language in verse" or "poetry," which the sophist Gorgias only coined in 415 BCE. Rather, Aristotle follows Diotima, who in the Symposium of Plato (c. 424-347) explains poiesis as mousike kai metra (typically "'music' and verses"). One reason Aristotle employs the Diotiman and not the Gorgian sense of poiesis is that not one poem exists in the so-called "Poetics"; another reason is that the definition of tragedy includes "music." Scott subsequently demonstrates that Aristotle considers tragedy not to be a species of literature but one of dramatic musical theater that also requires dance and spectacle. Chapter 2 includes a revised version of Scott's "The Poetics of Performance: The Necessity of Performance, Spectacle, Music, and Dance in Aristotelian Tragedy" (Cambridge University Press, 1999). The book also supplements his arguments of "Purging the Poetics" (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 2003), reprinted here as Chapter 5, and provides the additional, and seemingly insuperable, reasons why Aristotle could not have written the clause with the words catharsis, pity, and fear in the definition of tragedy, as a number of internationally known ancient Greek specialists have already been accepting. As part of his reasons, Scott shows that, despite their very admirable paleography, Leonardo Tarán and Dmitri Gutas too often mangle the philosophical interpretations and even some of the philology regarding the "musical" terms, especially when they try to sweep the problems of catharsis under the rug. They claim in their rece