Last Island’s Weblog

How do we directly perceive time? This is a philosophical question with a biological answer. The first critical debates about the nature of observation took place in ancient Greece between the followers of Plato and Aristotle. Platonic doctrine held that perception is passive. The world exists as a collection of imperfect copies of ideal forms. [...]

Aristotle writes that the function of tragedy is to arouse the emotions of pity and fear, and to affect the Catharsis of these emotions. Aristotle has used the term Catharsis only once, but no phrase has been handled so frequently by critics, and poets. Aristotle has not explained what exactly he meant by the word, [...]