Christopher Janaway

Plato was the first great figure in Western philosophy to assess the value of the arts; he famously argued in the Republic that traditionally accepted forms of poetry, drama, and music are unsound, claiming they are conducive to warped ethical standards, detrimental to the psyche, and purveyors of illusions about important matters in human life. This view has been widely rejected; but Christopher Janaway here argues that Plato's hostile case is a more coherent and a more profound challenge to the arts than has sometimes been supposed. Denying that Plato advocates 'good art' in any modern sense, this book seeks both to understand Plato's critique in the context of his own philosophy and to locate him in today's philosophy of art, showing how issues in aesthetics arise from responses to his charges. Plato's questions about beauty, emotion, representation, ethical knowledge, artistic autonomy, and censorship are of contemporary relevance as formerly secure assumptions about the value of art and the aesthetic come under scrutiny. Images of Excellence is written not only for readers working in ancient philosophy, but for all who are interested in aesthetics, art theory, and literary theory.

Centres on Schopenhauer's conception of the self and how it relates to the world, primarily dealing with his book The World as Will and Representation. It locates Schopenhauer in relation to Kant, of whom he was both a follower and a critic. While accepting Kant's transcendental idealism and the associated notion of the 'I' as a pure subject of knowledge distinct from the world of objects, Schopenhauer undercuts this notion with a conception of the self as will. The self as will is primarily active, embodied, organic, and manifests pre-rational ends and drives. The book shows how Schopenhauer arrives at a position in which idealism and materialism are correlative positions, but where a metaphysical account of the thing in itself as will takes primacy. It explores Schopenhauer's arguments that willing is identical with acting, and that at the level of individual willing there is no freedom. The book assesses the relevance of Schopenhauer's conception of the self to recent philosophical debates, and explores its influence on Wittgenstein and on Nietzsche.