Rebecca Bushnell (School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania)

Brian Cummings (Anniversary Professor, University of York)

This talk focuses upon a single dramatic scene in order to address a general problem: what is the relationship between theoretical abstraction and emotional display? William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s collaborative play Timon of Athens seemingly insists upon the isometric correlation between affective service and the capacity to pay. Against this backdrop, there stands the ethical counterexample of Flavius, the “one good man” who, with tears in his eyes, remains loyal to his destitute master. Flavius’ affect prompts Timon to deploy a peculiar and symptomatic form: the logical syllogism. In what sense do Timon’s syllogisms constitute a response to Flavius’ tears? In pursuit of answers to this question, I shall (briefly) contextualize the ambient tension between rhetoric and logic within early modern England, and consider the intersection of this dramatic scene with Hegel’s account of the dynamic interdependence of lord and bondsman, and with Hegel’s account of the relationship between logic and sexual difference. If weeping is shown to be a gendered act that sunders the capacity of logic to denote a singular human “all,” how might that complicate this play’s staging of philosophical generality?

Drew Daniel (Assistant Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University)