Phi Fic

Concluding our discussion of Aristophanes's play with Lucy Lawless and Emily Perkins. We focus on trying to connect its lessons to the here and now: Is Lysistrata's victory properly described as the ascension of some kind of "feminine spirit" over warlike values, and how does that actually relate to women's struggles now to attain positions of power?

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We are rejoined by actresses Lucy Lawless and Emily Perkins to discuss Aristophanes's bawdy play. Listen to us perform it first.

Supplementary readings included Jeffery Henderson's introduction to his 1988 translation of the play; "Sexual Humor and Harmony in Lysistrata" by Jay M. Semel (1981); and "The 'Female Intruder' Reconsidered: Women in Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae" by Helene P. Foley (1982).

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The PEL Players return to perform a "cold read" of Aristophanes's play about using a sex strike to end war, first performed in 411 BCE. Jeffrey Henderson's translation makes this very accessible, and it's still really damn funny. Your hosts are joined by five real actors from TV, film, and Broadway. We will be following this up in ep. 188 with a full discussion of the play and the issues it raises.

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Three substantial chunks of a follow-up conversation to our free speech episode. Mark and Wes discuss Jordan Peterson on speech, organizations' promoting certain speech (as opposed to restricting), insults vs. arguments, offense vs. harm, "incoherence" arguments like Fish's, fundamental principles in ethics, and more.

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Continuing our free form discussion, trying to make sense of Stanley Fish's “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too” (1994) and other potential rationales for prohibiting hate speech. How might the same sentence or idea be used in different speech acts, some of which might be legitimately censured but others not?

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A free-form discussion drawing on Stanley Fish's “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too” (1994), Joel Feinberg’s “Limits to the Free Expression of Opinion” (1975), and other sources.

What are the legitimate limits on free speech? Feinberg delves into the harm and offense principles. Fish argues that every claim to free speech has ideological assumptions actually favoring some types of speech baked into it. A lively back and forth ensues!

The true story of Friday will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday.

We discuss J.M. Coetzee's novel Foe, which presents an origin story of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Coetzee writes about Susan Barton, a woman castaway at sea who discovers an island inhabited by two men, Robinson Crusoe and Friday. Once rescued, Crusoe dies and Barton goes on a journey with Friday to tell her story. She seeks the renowned author Daniel Defoe but struggles with telling her story through the author.

We therefore have five parts in all: the loss of the daughter; the quest for the daughter in Brazil; abandonment of the quest, and the adventure of the island; assumption of the quest by the daughter; and the union of the daughter with her mother. It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end. As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode—which is properly the second part of the middle—and by the reversal in which the daughter takes up the quest abandoned by the mother.

All the joy I had felt in finding my way to Foe fled me.

Reality becomes blurry for Barton and the narrative builds to a metaphysical break in the structure, which explores authorship. What do stories matter? What gets left out? Who gets to speak? We also mention a work of nonfiction from a favorite thought-provoking author, "The Kekulé Problem" by Cormac McCarthy.

But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday.

Hear more Phi Fic.

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Thanks to Christopher Nolen for the music.

Continuing on How to Do Things with Words (lectures from 1955), covering lectures 5-9.

Austin tries and fails to come up with a way to grammatically distinguish performatives from other utterances, and so turns to his more complicated system of aspects of a single act: locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary. In doing so, he perlocutionarily blows our minds.

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On How to Do Things with Words (lectures from 1955). What's the relationship between language and the world? Austin says it's not all about descriptive true-or-false statements, but also includes "performatives" like "I promise…" and "I do" (spoken in a wedding) that are actions unto themselves. They can't be true or false, but they can be "unhappy" if social conventions aren't fulfilled (e.g., you try to marry a pig). Austin thinks performatives will change your whole view of language and of linguistically expressed philosophical problems!

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