Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
Again and again in Aeschylus’ tragedies we find one of the characters faced with a terrible choice between alternative courses of action. As well as giving rise to much debate among scholars of tragedy, these dilemmas have been analysed by philosophers such as Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum for the light they supposedly shed on issues of personal responsibility and moral luck. A striking feature of a number of these scenes is that the nature of the dilemma or the eventual decision is described in densely metaphorical language. The argument of this paper is that paying closer attention to these metaphors can make a significant difference to how we interpret the character’s decision-making process. This in turn raises important questions about how far the metaphorical language in these scenes can be paraphrased without imposing the very conceptual schemas and oppositions that the metaphors seem designed to challenge.