Tragedy and Philosophy by Walter Kaufmann
Published 1968 · 145,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Tragedy and Philosophy to read?
Tragedy and Philosophy scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Philosophical and classical vocabulary; Greek terms given in transliteration; technical but well-defined.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Moves between close reading of dramatic texts and abstract claims about tragedy's epistemological status.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Dense with analysis of specific plays, philosophical interpretation, and historical reception across two thousand years.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Chapters state their analytical task at the outset; Kaufmann is direct and polemical.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Analytical throughout; symbolic dimensions of tragedy are treated as objects of study, not deployed.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Kaufmann's polemical attacks on Aristotle and Hegel carry a dry wit that leavens the scholarship.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Each chapter's argument is fully resolved; the book's main theses are stated in the introduction.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Multiple interlocking parts: readings of individual playwrights, then philosophers who misread them, then corrections.
How Tragedy and Philosophy is regarded
Tragedy and Philosophy holds a literary regard score of 65 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.