The Philosophy of Tragedy: Conclusion by Michael Davis

Lectures by Michael Davis, Professor of Philosophy, delivered in the fall semester of 2018 at Sarah Lawrence College. Davis works primarily in Greek philosophy, in moral and political philosophy, and in what might be called the “poetics” of philosophy. He is the translator, with Seth Benardete, of Aristotle’s On Poetics and has written on a variety of philosophers from Plato to Heidegger and of literary figures from Homer and the Greek tragedians to Saul Bellow and Tom Stoppard. More information about Davis is available at . More philosophical content can be found at . Videos edited by Sebastian Soper and Alexandre Legrand. Greek tragedy has been performed, read, imitated and interpreted for twenty-five hundred years. From the very beginning it was thought to be philosophically significant—somehow pointing to the truth of human life as a whole (the phrase the “tragedy of life“ first appears in Plato). As a literary form it