2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Toward a new ontology of art by means of comparing Aristotle's Poetics with Rhetoric
| Project/Area Number |
16520085
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Aesthetics/Art history
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| Research Institution | Seijo University |
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Principal Investigator |
TSUGAMI Eske Seijo University, Faculty of Arts and Literature, Professor (80197657)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2007
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| Keywords | Aristotle / Poetics / Rhetoric / art / hybris |
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| Research Abstract |
The aim of the present project was to settle the ontological status of a "probable or necessary" nexus of events which Aristotle discusses in his Poetics, by means of comparing it with his idea of "enthymema" or probable reasoning in Rhetoric, with a final objective of gaining an insight into the relationship of art to the world and into art's function in our actual life.
It has been philologically as well as logically confirmed through the four years of research that a close analogy can be drawn between rhetoric and tragedy (and by extension art in general), with the corollary that the nexus of events in tragedy, corresponding in position to enthymema in rhetoric, presents an image of the actual world.
At the final stage of the project the focus was on the concept of "hybris" which emerged as the pivot of the examination. When scholars took it to mean "insult" or "assault" in Chapter 2 of Rhetoric 2, they were obliged to translate it differently according to different contexts in the chapter. The decisive issue is whether it contains malice. Critical analysis of the text and context of 1378b23-35 has revealed that it means unmalicious "insolence". Then, it can be subsumed under "hamartia" or error, because an insolent person fails to duly foresee what consequence his words and deeds may cause to its victim. Such an interpretation of hybris has been verified in an examination of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.
All this implies that the discourse both in oration and tragedy represents in a probable manner, using fiction or enthymema, how the world works, on the assumption that the world is in principle intelligible. To conclude our discussion about art, a work of art is a paradigm of the actual world.
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