The Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas is pleased to announce an upcoming talk by Luke Lea (PhD candidate) entitled: “What Would Grow From a Buried Bed?: Nature and Culture in Antiphon’s On Truth .” We look forward to seeing you there.
Date: Wednesday, February 12
Time: 12.30-13.30
Location: H 232
Abstract:
Reflection on culture and civilization sometimes pits nature against products of human activity and invention such as art, technology, law, and political order. Inquiry into the antithesis of nomos (law, custom, convention) and phusis (nature) in ancient Greece forms an early and influential chapter in this history. The earliest extended discussion of the antithesis that survives belongs to the now fragmentary On Truth, a wide-ranging philosophical treatise written by the sophist Antiphon, a contemporary of Socrates in Classical Athens.
If one were to bury a bed in the ground and the rotting wood of the bed were to send up a shoot, what is it that would grow? Antiphon posed this question in On Truth to illustrate the relationship of nomos to phusis. This talk develops a novel interpretation of the thought experiment. I begin by arguing that the standard interpretation of it preserves misunderstandings that date back to Aristotle. Whereas Aristotle took Antiphon to be making a point about wood conceived as a homogenous material substrate, the original thought experiment was meant instead to appeal to intuitions about the spontaneous generation and growth of biological organisms. I then propose that Antiphon crafted the thought experiment to demonstrate two points about nomos and phusis: that phusis reveals the truth about things while nomos obscures it; and that the impositions of nomos tend to have a hostile effect on phusis. Finally, I consider how the buried-bed thought experiment bears on the interpretation of immoralist passages from other fragments of On Truth.
Bio:
Luke Lea is a Ph.D. candidate in the Classical Studies program of Columbia University, specializing in ancient Greek philosophy, with a particular focus on the ethics and psychology of Plato and the Early Greek Philosophers. His dissertation studies the ethical thought of the sophist Antiphon, its relation to Book II of Plato’s Republic, and the implications of the relationship between justice and nature in ancient Greek philosophical thought.