Issues in Ancient Intellectual History: On the Attic Enlightenment

Issues in Ancient Intellectual History: On the Attic Enlightenment

In my current book project, I reassess the fifth-century-BCE playwright Aristophanes’ engagement with contemporary intellectual culture, making a new case for the intellectual-historical significance of the comic poet’s extant oeuvre. Drawing on a concept made famous by the intellectual historian Isiah Berlin, I suggest that Aristophanes’ attitude toward philosopher, sophists, poets, scientists, and the rest should be understood as part of what I call an Attic “counter-enlightenment,” a critical response to a new type of intellectualism that was emerging in contemporary Athens. In this talk, I will discuss some of the methodological issues involved in applying this framework, which was first developed in reference to the modern enlightenment, to the intellectual culture of classical Athens.

D. David Williams received his Ph.D. from the Department of Classics and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2022; he also spent a year as a Regular Member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2018-2019) and one as a visiting student at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2021-2022). In 2022-2023, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

His research focuses on the literature and intellectual history of archaic and classical Greece, with a particular concentration on Athenian drama, Socrates and the sophists, and Plato. He is at work on three long-term research projects. The first, an expansion of his dissertation research, focuses on Aristophanes’ engagement with contemporary intellectual culture (see above). The second is a collaborative volume on the sophist Hippias of Elis. The third is a comprehensive study of the use of gnomic statements on the tragic stage.