Tragedy and philosophy /

Georgopoulos (Kent State) has collected essays, written especially for this volume, on an important cross-disciplinary topic. John P. Anton writes on Nietzsche's critique of Aristotle, Roland Galle on Hegel and Nietzsche. But most articles are much more general, seeking the essences of tragedy and philosophy and the relations, internal and external, between them. Richard F. Kuhns, writing from a psychoanalytical perspective, tells the reader that "experience, as described by philosophy, is simply inadequate, and the full complexity of experience is given only through the arts." Many of these essays (which do not discuss each other) seem to be ganging up on this heresy of Kuhns, insisting that his notion of philosophy as merely rational is piteously narrow. More than one author suggests that philosophy, which necessarily attempts completeness of vision and theory, possesses in its inevitable failure a (quasi) tragic flaw. With constant reference to King Lear, William Desmond discusses the essential concern of philosophy with "being at a loss," which is "ontologically constitutive for every particular being." All these essays are interesting, if occasionally portentous and ponderous. The one by Leon Rosenstein (the review copy was missing most of its pages) is quintessentially tragico-philosophical: here indeed "language opens to what transcends it, letting the unsaid permeate what is being said." Upper-level undergraduates and above. H. L. Shapiro; University of Missouri--St. Louis