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The article centers on the exploration of reason, emphasizing the foundational role of the Socratic perspective in Western philosophical tradition. It argues for a reconstruction of reason as an urgent political and existential task, considering historical moments like Socratic and Ciceronian reasoning for insights that challenge the current narrow and detached understanding of reason.

The article explores the evolving reception of Jack Kerouac in China across three phases, from initial repudiation to eventual affirmation, using Kerouac's reception as a lens to understand broader changes in Chinese culture and politics. Topics covered include the ideological classification of Kerouac during different periods, the cultural and political context shaping his reception, and the transformation of Chinese academic attitudes toward the Beat Generation.

The Timaeus is a muthos that attempts to imagine a logos of the cosmos. Like the demiurge, readers are to be mimetic artists, poets (Tim. 28c3), who move constantly between the intelligible essences and their likenesses in the world of appearance, experience, and becoming, occupying a third register that is neither and both (28a6-b2). The cosmology of the Timaeus is both a likely story and an allegory of its own failure. It takes place within the nonspace of the khōra, a realm accessible only through bastard reasoning that we can perceive only as if in a dream. The Timaeus is an unfinalizable logos in which each moment of positing is also a moment of irony and interrogation, of simultaneous acceptance and active separation, of choric space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concepts of race are deeply implicated in concepts of national borders, and inherent in those concepts are fear, aggression, and violence. Such concepts are historical and in no way natural. This history has been traced by Foucault and others. Derrida's "infinite hospitality" offers an alternative way of conceptualizing identity. He argues for a radical openness to the other. Camus's "L'hôte" problematizes the concepts of hospitality, freedom, and identity in the French colonial context. These are not fated or decreed. Like Daru and his prisoner in Camus, we have a choice. That choice is never outside of a context. And that context may pervert our intentions. But we do not have to choose the prison of the given; we can envision a world of infinite, nomadic hospitality, and of openness to the other, even as we acknowledge that such openness may mean that we, as we understand ourselves, no longer exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the defense of reading and humanistic education. It further discusses personal, autobiographical debt and ethical accounting; debits and credits, as a balance between the pleasure and the reality principles; the assertion of absolute values such as god, masculinity as moral and physical domination and the refusal to acknowledge pain and terror; and also mention the Affordable Care Act.

The article offers the author's insights about the book "History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasures," by French philosopher Michel Foucault. Topics discussed include Foucault's response to the problem of desire as well as its relation to truth, opposition between the discourse of love and genealogy of sexuality, and Platonic theorization of relation between love and truth.

The article discusses the self-fashioning and irony in ancient and postmodern rhetorical theory, as of September 2015. It states historical views regarding the understanding of truth, citing examples of views of Saint Augustine on children's ability to learn names, It mentions the deconstruction of philosopher Hegel regarding the empiricist postulate of sense certainty.

This article offers a close reading of the passages leading up to the myth of the cave and contends that the Republic frames this famous passage less as the illustration of a transcendental truth than as a problematic and self-referential meditation on the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of distinguishing between being and seeming. It contends that the myth when read in context not only asks us to distinguish between shadows on the wall and things themselves, it also forces us to interrogate this distinction. How does the world beyond appearance appear? What is it like? How does the truth seem? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classics sees theory as a supplement and many comparative literature programs see premodern intellectual life the same way. This mutual suspicion accounts for much of the way theory is taught. In classics, it is often part of a quick proseminar. In comparative literature, theory is said to begin with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Plato and Aristotle are nodded to, but not seriously read. The model adopted at the University of South Carolina sees classics and comparative literature as engaged with each other and co-constitutive of a larger conversation that seeks to define the basic objects of study across the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on writers Marguerite Duras' and Plato's depictions of erotic attraction. He states that love in Duras' work is closely linked with death and mourning while Plato's is that of spiritual love, however he contends that their depictions have more in common than what is generally believed. He explores the tensions between immediacy and transcendence in some of the authors' works which include "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Symposium."

The article offers the author's perspective on the nature of the poetry of Sextus Propertius. He states that the concept which notes that Propertian elegance may be represented by an art of sharp juxtapositions or wry irony is rejected as a modernist canard. Also, he argues that every time a judgment is established on where a poem begins or ends, or whether one textual variant is to be chosen to another literary view of interpretation are inescapable.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the Freudian concept of unheimlich or the uncanny, the primacy of the topological in the later teaching of Jacques Lacan and the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis to read 17th and 18th-century French literary texts.

This article argues that Persius' claim to truth is inseparable from the stylistic complexity of his poetry. Irony becomes a method of truth-telling, not simply as a means of demystification but also as a way of pointing beyond the corruption of contemporary language. Part I of the article examines Persius' general discussion of poetic style throughout the corpus in light of Stoic conceptions of truth and the "sayable." Part II focuses on the opening of the Prologue and its relation to Satire 1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the concepts of ethics and irony and the role of irony in any ethical work. A parallel illustration of ethics and irony is presented through the works and writings of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Major claims note that irony is the disruptive emergence of reality into a symbolic continuity through a gesture, that irony is the result of critical thinking and ethics and the possibility of saying something real or ethical is based on the possibility of not saying what one means.

Deals with classical poetry by Propertius. Post-Lacanian feminists' definition of a woman; Creation of a subject position identified simultaneously with Augustan and anti-Augustan positions; Deployment of the trope of gender inversion in elegiac discourse; Explanatory framework for examining formal rhetoric of elegy.

This paper argues that French poststructuralist theory does not represent a movement antithetical to Classics and the Classical Tradition, but should be read as its extension. Major recurring themes of poststructuralist thought are articulated at the beginning of the 1960's in Lacan's commentaries on Sophocles' Antigone and Plato's Symposium. Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus as well as his citation of the Platonic tradition in his dispute with Foucault over the latter's Histoire de la folie further confirm the importance of the Hellenic tradition to poststructuralism's engagement with occidental philosophy. Finally, Foucault's late turn to Stoicism and the philosophers of the Roman imperial period can be seen as a response to and criticism of the positions established by Lacan and Derrida. The Classics are not only relevant to understanding poststructuralist theory and philosophy, but actually define the terms of its debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the beliefs of Perry Anderson, a founder of the `New Left Review' and one of the foremost historians and theoreticians to come out of the British Marxist Renaissance of the sixties and seventies. Major works; Argument against Francis Fukuyama's article `The End of History?'; Rejection of Leninist single-party politics; Capitalism.

Examines the relationship between the images of fire and the labyrinth as used in Books 5 and 6 of Vergil's `Aeneid'. Intersection of a series of fire images with a series of labyrinth images; Embodiment of the Minotaur and the action of Trojan women of unlawful desires; Use of analytical categories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; Labyrinth as symbolic of repression.

This paper explores how scholarship on Roman elegiac poetry has changed by tracing interpretations of the elusive figure of the puella in Roman poetry. Charting the history of the concept of the puella in elegy, the paper detects broader trends and epistemic shifts in the field of Classics and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]