The Greeks and the Irrational, Revisited

We invite you to join us on this day of discussion of Dodds’ classic as we unpack the term ‘irrational’ and the power dynamics behind it.

E. R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational first appeared in 1951, and has since become a classic in our field. It is also one of the small handful of scholarly Classics books to have crossed the academic/mass-market readership border, comparable to J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

Like Frazer’s, Dodds’ argument capitalized on 20th century modernist attraction to the occult and the psychic, on the sexualization and fetishization of the shamanistic and oracular wisdom – in short, forms of thought that to a scientifically trained mind fell under the so-called irrational.

Historically, the label of irrationality often served as a rhetorical device to infantilize, pathologize, feminize, denigrate, or demonize others, especially subaltern others.

Even in current affairs, it takes only a very small sample of public discourses or political campaigns of demonization (and their media) to realize how over-stressed and strained the rational/irrational dichotomy really is.

In Classics, the cultural-critical dimension of conceptualizing the rational/irrational binary is most clearly visible in the history of scholarship on ancient Greek drama. There are numerous case scenarios : the irrational could be attributed to women (hysterical/ uncontrolled); or to enslaved men, whose personal integrity becomes undermined by rhetorics tactics of unwanted feminization; or again to non-Greeks, ridiculed through portrayals of outsize sexual appetites, or impulsive behaviour and ideas more generally.

In sum, discourses that contrast the perceived foreignness of irrational thought against the relatability of logical thinking are apt to expose xenophobic, classist, misogynist, ablist, or racist undercurrents of an argument. This conference is intended to unpack these undercurrents, taking the rational/irrational binary and Dodds’ classic work as our entry point. The aim is to sharpen critical focus on our field’s received scholarly and intellectual legacies.

Confirmed speakers :

Nick Lowe (RHUL)

Ella Haselwerdt (Cornell)

Francesca Spiegel (Humboldt, Berlin)

Martin Devecka (UC Santa Cruz)

Maria Gerolemou (Exeter)

Giulia Maria Chesi (Humboldt, Berlin)

Katherine Fleming (QMUL)