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.
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?