Truth Conditions

Abstract

Abstract The final chapter examines the logical writings of Jacopo Zabarella and his theory of drama as a form of social praxis. It explores Zabarella’s conception of dramatic spectatorship as an exercise in civic engagement, where audiences use strategies of logical inference and deduction to reveal the key moral insights of a play and apply them to their own experience. The chapter then charts the transmission of Zabarella’s works in early modern England, before exploring a series of case studies from Shakespeare’s plays. The focus is on As You Like It, a play that affirms Zabarella’s conviction that shared principles of reasoning can build and sustain communities, but also resists the idea of coopting drama as an instrument of political philosophy. Literature’s ways of knowing cannot always be accommodated to the frameworks of practical reasoning Zabarella describes, but instead extend our thinking into the more fragile and complex spaces of potentiality.