http://www.egs.edu Simon Critchley, philosopher and author, talking about the relationship between tragedy and philosophy, grief, lamentation, truth, fiction, aesthetics, rhetoric and persuasion. In this lecture, Simon Critchley discusses Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Gorgias and the sophists in relationship to Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Hamlet, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nicole Loraux, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jacques Lacan focusing on ecstasy, ghosts, the city, tyranny, theater, deception, mimesis, spectatorship, gender trouble and the relationship between antiquity and modernity. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011. Simon Critchley.

Simon Critchley, Ph.D., is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The New School, as well as a professor at the European Graduate School (EGS). Simon Critchley was born on February 27, 1960 in Hertfordshire, England. He is a world renowned scholar of Continental Philosophy and phenomenology. Much of his work examines the crucial relationship between the ethical and political within philosophy.

Simon Critchley's published work deals largely with disappointment and it's relationship to philosophy; chiefly, religious or political disappointment. Simon Critchley's published works include: Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida (1999), Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought (1999), The Ethics of Deconstruction (2000), Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001), On Humour (2002), Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2008), and The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008).