Table of Contents:
  • ch. 1. Luck and ethics
  • pt. 1. Tragedy: fragility and ambition
  • ch. 2. Aeschylus and practical conflict
  • ch. 3. Sophocles' Antigone: conflict, vision, and simplification
  • pt. 2. Plato: goodness without fragility?
  • ch. 4. The Protagoras: a science of practical reasoning
  • Interlude 1: Plato's anti-tragic theater
  • ch. 5. The Republic: true value and the standpoint of perfection
  • ch. 6. The speech of Alcibiades: a reading of the Symposium
  • ch. 7. 'This story isn't true': madness, reason, and recantation in the Phaedrus
  • pt. 3. Aristotle: the fragility of the good human life
  • ch. 8. Saving Aristotle's appearances
  • ch. 9. Rational animals and the explanation of action
  • ch. 10. Non-scientific deliberation
  • ch. 11. The vulnerability of the good human life: activity and disaster
  • ch. 12. The vulnerability of the good human life: relational goods
  • Appendix to part 3: human and divine
  • Interlude 2: luck and the tragic emotions
  • Epilogue: tragedy
  • ch. 13. The betrayal of convention: a reading of Euripides' Hecuba.