Tragedy and Philosophy Book

	Preface (1979)
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
	Prologue
I	Plato: The Rival as Critic
1	Before Plato	1
2	Plato's references to the Big Three	8
3	Republic 376-403	10
4	Republic VI-VII and X	17
5	Plato as a tragic poet	22
6	The Laws	25
II	Aristotle: The Judge Who Knows
7	Introduction to the Poetics	30
8	Aristotle's definition of tragedy	33
9	mimesis	36
10	spoudaios (noble)	41
11	"pity and fear"?	43
12	catharsis	49
13	The six elements - spectacle and thought	52
14	plot and its primacy	55
15	hamartia and hybrid	59
16	happy end	69
III	Toward a New Poetics
17	Beyond Plato and Aristotle	75
18	Imitation - and a new definition of tragedy	78
19	The work's relation to its author	87
20	The philosophical dimension	92
IV	The Riddle of Oedipus
21	Three classical interpretations	102
22	The historical context	108
23	Man's radical insecurity	115
24	Human blindness	117
25	The curse of honesty	120
26	The inevitability of tragedy	126
27	Justice as problematic and the five themes	129
28	Oedipus versus Plato	133
V	Homer and the Birth of Tragedy
29	How Homer shaped Greek tragedy	136
30	The gods in the Iliad	143
31	Neither belief nor dualism	148
32	The matter of weight	152
33	Man's lot	154
VI	Aeschylus and the Death of Tragedy
34	Nietzsche and the death of tragedy	163
35	What we know of Aeschylus	166
36	Orestes in Homer	169
37	Aeschylus' "optimism"	174
38	How he is more tragic than Homer	180
39	Character in the Iliad and Oresteia	183
40	How tragedy did and did not die	190
VII	Sophocles: Poet of Heroic Despair
41	Nietzsche and Sophocles' "cheerfulness"	195
42	Hegel's "theory of tragedy"	200
43	Ajax	212
44	Antigone	215
45	The Women of Trachis and Electra	225
46	Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus	232
47	Sophocles' "humanism"	236
VIII	Euripides, Nietzsche, and Sartre
48	In defense of Euripides	242
49	Euripides' Electra	247
50	Was Euripides an "irrationalist"?	253
51	Nietzsche's influence on The Flies	258
52	Are Dirty Hands and The Flies tragedies?	263
IX	Shakespeare and the Philosophers
53	Testing the philosophers	270
54	Aristotle and Shakespeare	272
55	Hegel on Shakespeare	279
56	Hume's essay "Of Tragedy"	287
57	Schopenhauer on tragedy	290
58	Nietzsche versus Schopenhauer	296
59	Max Scheler and "the tragic"	300
X	Tragedy Today
60	Tragic events and "the merely pathetic"	309
61	Can tragedies be written today?	317
62	The Deputy as a modern Christian tragedy	322
63	Tragedy versus history: The Deputy and Soldiers	331
64	Brecht's Galileo	337
65	The Confessions of Nat Turner	347
66	The modernity of Greek tragedy; prospects	354
	Epilogue	359
	Chronology	364
	A Note on Translations	366
	Bibliography	369
	Index	380