This is Philosophy Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy Bites is available at W.

philosophy Bites.com.

George Bernard Shaw thought that comedy was like drama in which everyone was married in the last

act while tragedy was heavy drama in which everyone was killed.

It's been a puzzle for philosophers for several thousand years that people like to watch tragedies, which evoke feelings of sadness and suffering.

The same mystery attaches to horror movies which aim to shock and scare.

Professor Alex Neal has the happiest of roles as the University of Southampton's foremost expert on tragedy.

Alex Neal, welcome to Philosophy Bynes.

Hi Nigel.

The topic we're going to focus on today is the paradox of

tragedy. I wonder if you could begin by saying what this paradox is. The paradox of tragedy

is something that's been written about by philosophers for thousands of years.

It probably gets its classical expression in Aristotle's Poetics,

where Aristotle defines tragedy as an art form in terms of the affective, the emotional response that it's designed to generate.

And that is, as he says, the catharsis of pity and fear.

Catharsis is usually taken to mean something like a purging or a cleansing of emotion.

And Aristotle makes it clear that he thinks that catharsis as the end or the goal, the

T-loss of tragedy is something that's meant to be pleasurable. Indeed, he says the job of the tragic

poet is to aim at producing in the audience a particular kind of

pleasure and he describes that as the pleasure of pity and fear.

Okay so it doesn't sound anything paradoxical about producing pity or fear?

...