Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In reply to mlyoung57. Incredibly, I don’t remember our conversation about your friend at all. I find this stunning–literal amnesia. I was there, but it’s almost as though I wasn’t. And believe it or not, I’ve never watche…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. Well, I definitely respond to “A Star Is Born” that way. What makes that film particularly wrenching and uplifting for me is the psychological (and other) parallels between the Bradley Cooper character and a prett…

Incidentally, Aristotle also talks about artistic catharsis in the Politics (book 8), and there is of course a minor scholarly industry of trying to figure out whether his account of catharsis there is the same as that in the Poetics. LikeLike

In reply to mlyoung57. That’s interesting. What’s an example of a tragic work that you respond to in that way? I’m particularly interested in your reaction to “A Star Is Born.” Ironically, you were right there with us when…

In reply to Roderick T. Long. I default so automatically to the popular psychoanalytic reading that I find it hard to conceive of alternatives to it. Point taken about Aristotle on the subconscious (or unconscious), but even if we didn’t have the…

I don’t have anything interesting to say at the level of theory. Personally: however it relates to Aristotle’s Poetics, I absolutely love tragedy of all sorts, for precisely the sort of reason that Sachs cites. Like nothing else, tragedy an…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. There’s also a big debate about whether purging/purification of pity and fear means that the spectator is purified of/from pity and fear, or that pity and fear themselves get purified, or what. The popular psychoanalyti…