In its historical particularity tragedy had its first great moment in ancient Athens, when didaskaloi, educators, would compete for civic recognition staging increasingly elaborate exchanges of dramatic speeches.  And once the great Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and, if Plato tells right, Agathon had their day, tragedy became a site for serious thinking in the West through generations and centuries and millennia.  Tragedy was at the heart of the English Renaissance, and the German Romantics and later Continental philosophers seized upon tragedy’s philosophical gravity to bolster notions of existence Romantic and historicist and even postmodern.  Today Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Miriam Leonard of the University College of London to talk about her new book, Tragic Modernities, and to explore some of the great contests that break out when philosophers take on the tragic.

Download Episodes of Christian Humanist Profiles