https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1056 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1485 The Nux depicts the complaints of a walnut tree, pelted with stones and beaten with rods when she bears fruit. Discussion of the Nux, however, has largely centred on its authorship. Recognising its deep engagement with Ovid’s work, this article sets aside the question of authorship and takes a critical ecofeminist approach to explore the poem’s concerns with fertility, nature, the female, and violence. It argues that the walnut tree is feminised and humanised so that her complaints that fertility brings pain and her criticism of trees who sabotage their fertility to be beautiful have meaning for Roman women, and in particular for those women living under the Principate. It aims to demonstrate that the Nux figures the domination of nature and the oppression of women as outcomes of the same harmful ideology. jeu., 04 janv. 2024 11:20:41 +0100 mer., 17 janv. 2024 09:13:42 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1485 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1054 Aristotle is more straightforward than his interpreters. A number of scholars have championed an Aristotle guided by pure inductive observation to reach a theory of the inferiority of women and slaves. This view, however, is contrary both to Aristotle’s expressed method and his stated purpose. He begins from the phainomena and his explicit goal is to defend them and the advantages of master and husband. The current power structure is founded on nature and is and must be logically and genetically superior to the arguments he makes in its favor. In general, scholars have explicated either the argument about slaves or that about women. However, each is inescapably fettered to the other. The unquestioned inferiority of slaves is the analogical basis for the hierarchy of male over female (e.g. 1252a31). The unquestioned natural inferiority of women the basis of the proof of the existence of the natural slave (54b12-16). Aristotle reveals the uncertain heart of his argument in a series of unanswered rhetorical questions (59b23-37). There are three parts to his defense. The philosophical move is to reject Plato’s unity of virtue. Mere difference in quantity (Plato’s solution) provides contingent not absolute rule. The teleological move argues from different virtues to different essences for women and slaves. Aristotle creates separate entities to be ruled. The rhetorical move is to blend analogies based on the “natural” difference between male and female with the hierarchical difference between master and slave. Thus we reach the master trope of Western philosophy: man is spirit/culture, woman is matter/nature. A series of misreadings of Aristotle’s purposes and arguments reveal how successful he has been in anchoring ideology in a politicized nature. Philosophy is not a purely intellectual exercise; it is also a call to moral action. We must ask and answer Aristotle’s rhetorical questions. jeu., 16 juin 2022 09:12:17 +0200 ven., 13 oct. 2023 10:43:53 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1054