ZOOM:

• Please email a.benedicty@uva.nl for the Zoom link.
• You may also come to room OMHP C0.17 to join the class, where we will Zoom-in the speaker on the larger screen.

This talk will focus on Aristotle’s rejection of the Platonic absolute theory of goodness in favor of naturalism, the view that the good is relative to the nature of a thing. To come to grips with this idea, we will have to consider what Aristotle means by a nature, why this rules out the possibility of absolute goodness, and how these ideas relate to the realm of artifacts, including literary artifacts, where there are no natures, strictly speaking.

Dhananjay Jagannathan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College–CUNY. His scholarly work spans Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. His first book Aristotle’s Practical Epistemology, published by Oxford University Press in 2024, analyzed the ethical and political dimensions of Aristotle’s theory of practical wisdom. He is currently working on a book on cultural identity, cultural transgression, and cultural appropriation entitled Culture as Conversation, which will be published by Penguin Press in 2026.

This conversation is hosted by Literary and Cultural Analysis department at the UvA, in the context of the undergraduate course Contesting Critical Histories, taught by Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Niall Martin.