Book discussion on Gwenda-lin Grewal’s, Thinking About Death in Plato’s Euthydemus. A Close Reading and New Translation (OUP 2022)
Speakers:
Gwenda-lin Grewal (NSSR)
Cinzia Arruzza (NSSR)
Nicholas Pappas (CUNY)
Thinking of Death places Plato’s Euthydemus among the dialogues that surround the trial and death of Socrates. A premonition of philosophy’s fate arrives in the form of Socrates’ encounter with the two-headed sophist pair, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, who appear as if they are the ghost of the Socrates of Aristophanes’ Thinkery. The pair vacillate between choral ode and rhapsody, as Plato vacillates between referring to them in the dual and plural number in Greek. Gwenda-lin Grewal’s close reading explores how the structure of the dialogue and the pair’s back-and-forth arguments bear a striking resemblance to thinking itself: in its immersive remove from reality, thinking simulates death even as it cannot conceive of its possibility. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take this to an extreme, and so emerge as the philosophical dream and sophistic nightmare of being disembodied from substance. The Euthydemus is haunted by philosophy’s tenuous relationship to political life. This is played out in the narration through Crito’s implied criticism of Socrates-the phantom image of the Athenian laws-and in the drama itself, which appears to take place in Hades. Thinking of death thus brings with it a lurid parody of the death of thinking: the farce of perfect philosophy that bears the gravity of the city’s sophistry. Grewal also provides a new translation of the Euthydemus that pays careful attention to grammatical ambiguities, nuances, and wit in ways that substantially expand the reader’s access to the dialogue’s mysteries.
Facts about the increasing collective human influence on biological systems, from local ecosystems to planetary-level Earth systems, support the proposal that we now live in the Anthropocene. What do such facts imply, if anything, about norms and values guiding land management and conservation practices going forward? Do facts about anthropogenic drivers that can result in undesirable and irreversible changes to ecological and Earth systems license further intentional interventions and underwrite calls for “planetary management”? What would appropriate respect for wildness look like on a human-dominated planet? If human influence on environmental systems pushes them over thresholds into radically new states, are received Western or Indigenous ideologies sufficient to guide an appropriate response? How should we think about responding to such radical environmental change? How, if at all, should environmental ethics adapt to the Anthropocene?
Registration is free but required. Registration will open online in early October. All questions about the event should be sent to philo.modernconference@nyu.edu.
Friday, November 15
9:30–9:55 Check–in and Coffee
9:55 Welcome
10:00–12:00 Baruch Spinoza
Speaker: Kristin Primus (University of California, Berkeley)
“Spinoza and Our Eternal Mind”
Commentator: John Grey (Michigan State University)
12:00–2:00 Lunch Break
2:00–4:00 Margaret Cavendish
Speaker: Marcy Lascano (University of Kansas)
“‘There is nothing I Dread More than Death’: Cavendish on Death and the Afterlife”
Commentator: Deborah Boyle (College of Charleston)
4:00–4:30 Coffee Break
4:30–6:00 Immanuel Kant
Speaker: Andrew Chignell (Princeton University)
“Kant’s Theoretical Argument for a Future Life”
Commentator: Jochen Bojanowski (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
6:30–7:30 Reception
Saturday, November 16
9:30–10:00 Check–in and Coffee
10:00–12:00 Søren Kierkegaard
Speaker: Clare Carlisle (King’s College London)
“Close to Death: Kierkegaard on Im/mortality and Philosophy”
Commentator: John J. Davenport (Fordham University)
12:00–2:00 Lunch Break
2:00–4:00 Martin Heidegger
Speaker: Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford University)
“Heidegger and the Possibility of Death”
Commentator: Sean Kelly (Harvard University)
4:00–4:30 Coffee Break
4:30–6:30 Contemporary
Speaker: Michael Cholbi (University of Edinburgh)
“Immortal Lives and the Varieties of Agency”
Commentator: Ben Bradley (Syracuse University)
6:30–7:30 Reception
Don Garrett, Anja Jauernig, John Richardson,
Sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Philosophy.