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Propylaia In a recent book opening on to many of the issues this one will examine , Stephen Halliwell invokes the shade of Goethe, in particular his essay “Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke,” as the propylaia for his reexamination of the concept of mimesis.1 In setting up this propylaia Halliwell follows Goethe, who draws our mind from a simplistic view of mimetic art as “sheer illusionism—like the famous birds reputedly tricked into pecking at Zeuxis’ painted grapes” to the mimetic as having “the psychological power to draw its audience into its world, to offer something that is wholly convincing and absorbing in its own terms” (3). Since it is clear that the grapes did achieve this also, at least for the birds, we can see that Halliwell is arguing for an expansion of the concept of “the mimetic” (to mimētikon) from the narrow product of representationalism and realism made by the kind of imagination Plato famously represented as a mirror, to something more like the creation of a (hetero-) cosmos by a more powerful demiurge (also called imagination by Plato)—into which cosmos the audience is drawn.2 For Goethe, the expanded notion of mimesis was one that allowed insight into the “inner truth” of things (2, 4). Halliwell corrects the romantic tendency toward a solipsistic subjectivity this phrase might give rise to by precisely defining a point in the middle distance. He contends that mimesis “depict[s] and illuminate[s] a world that is (partly) accessible and knowable outside art, and by whose norms art can therefore, within limits,  1. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). References to this book are by page number in the text of this propylaia. 2. In “Two Views of the Imagination” I argue that Plato himself considers the imagination under two distinct metaphors: the mirror and the demiurge of images; for more on this distinction , see that article.  be tested and judged,” even while admitting that mimesis is “the creator of an independent heterocosm . . . [which] may still purport to contain some kind of ‘truth’ about, or grasp of, reality as a whole” (5). This more complex view of mimesis is, he shows, “present in the tradition of thought about mimesis from a very early stage” (5). This ancient sense of mimesis precedes our popular division between realist and representationalist theories of art on the one side and romantic expressionist and emotivist theories on the other. The ancient word mimesis plays on both sides of our modern division. One might, in fact, write a whole history of the philosophy of art within the bounds of “mimesis” so broadly and anciently understood. Little would escape it. As the originally broader term is pruned radically back to “mere” imitation, other terms of art must develop to stake out the phenomena once included in the richer ancient concept. The metaphors of the mirror/depicts and the lamp/illuminates, which have been seen as distinguishing the classical and the romantic, find their air here in this newly pruned area, as does that of the romantic creative genius (a demiurge somewhat forgetful of its “demi” status). This last, we should remember, as the dhmiourgo;" eijdwvlwn (597d–99a), as well as the first (the mirror), can be traced explicitly to Republic 10. Exhibiting the presence and operation of that more complicated view of mimesis in Plato and Aristotle, and tracing it through philosophies of art “from Plato, as one might aptly put it, to Derrida” (6) is what Halliwell ’s book does. With Halliwell’s project, at once both historical and philosophical, my own efforts in this book have a large measure of agreement and community of purpose. Like his, this project aims to be historical: it aims to build up, from the extant corpus of Aristotle, what his famously missing theory of comedy might have been. It also aims to be philosophical (as Aristotle would have been), for it presents an argument about what the nature and function of that made thing—comedy—is, which, if true, provides grounds for judgment of better and worse forms (as Aristotle does for tragedy in Poetics 14 and and Plato famously does in Republic for art generally). Clearly, the historical and philosophical aims of my project are intrinsically interrelated for a considerable length. For any attempt to make a historical claim about Aristotle’s view of comedy requires more than two steps back into the larger interpretation...

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