Hosted by the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, the University of Chicago. Lectures are offered at 12:15pm on the first Friday of every month except July, in the Claudia Cassidy Theater of the Chicago Cultural Center. Free admission. Click here for complete details.

Dawn Herrera, Feasts and Beasts: Metaphors of the Multitude in Aristotle and Plato

February 7, 12:15pm

In Book III of the Politics, Aristotle diverges from his systematic approach to offer his reader a series of unwieldy but suggestive metaphors of "the many" as a political collective. Looking beyond their poetic insufficiencies, in this talk I read Aristotle's metaphors of the multitude against those found in Plato's Republic, and consider the conceptual resources they have to offer our thinking about political authority. I argue that the form of Aristotle's argument, its development in metaphor, is not insignificant: might our ability to "carry over" the meaning of democracy as a political possibility help us constitute it as such?