Columbia – Seminar in Classical Civilization: Charles Brittain

Charles Brittain (Cornell University) will speak this Thursday, March 23 starting at 7:30pm in Faculty House. His paper is titled “Protagorean Hermeneutics.”

Prof. Brittain has kindly shared an abstract of his upcoming talk with us: “In this paper I argue that Protagoras’ method of poetic interpretation was technical, dialectical (pro and contra), and constructive. A re-examination of the evidence for his work on the Iliad shows that he used certain technical tools of criticism to build constructive interpretations – which is what we should expect from Protagoras’ ideas about the educational role of poetry in Plato’s Protagoras. Relying on these conclusions from the direct evidence, I argue that we can form a fuller picture of the technical tools available to Protagoras by comparing the parody of his method in Protagoras 339-41 and Aristophanes’ reworking of sophistic hermeneutics in the battle of the prologues in Frogs 1126-96. These results point to a positive interpretation of Protagorean hermeneutics, even if its precise form remains beyond our grasp.”