The Seba library treats Hamartia in 8 passages, across 3 authors (including Hollis, James, Martha C. Nussbaum, Douglas L. Cairns).
the classical imagination identified a condition they called hamartia, which has been translated as ‘the tragic flaw,’ but which I prefer to define as ‘wounded vision.’
Hollis redefines hamartia away from moral defect toward perceptual distortion rooted in personal, familial, and cultural history operating in the unconscious.
, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001thesis
through hamartia, a wounded vision. The internalized phenomenology of childhood constitutes the lens through which one wanders in the labyrinth of choice.
Hollis argues that hamartia is the condition of making consequential choices without awareness that one’s perceptual lens is itself distorted by childhood experience.
, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001thesis
They can also be used to increase our understanding of tragic hamartia, or missing-the-mark. For despite the thousands of pages that have been written on this notion, we still need an account that is fully responsive to t
Nussbaum contends that existing scholarship on hamartia remains ethically insufficient and that Aristotle’s broader framework of luck, goodness, and vulnerability must inform any adequate interpretation.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
Neoptolemus says (1224) that he intends to undo his previous hamartia, and at 1228 defines this as consisting in his ‘disgraceful (aischras) deceptions’
Cairns traces the moral register of hamartia in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, showing how the term shifts from non-moral failure to a specifically shame-laden, morally culpable error requiring rectification.
, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting
hamartia, 25, 32, 120
The index entry for Swamplands of the Soul confirms that hamartia is a recurring structural concept in Hollis’s treatment of guilt, Greek tragedy, and complex formation.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996supporting
vision, tragic, 15, 17 wounded (hamartia), 14, 16, 71
The index of Creating a Life equates wounded vision directly with hamartia, confirming it as a technical term in Hollis’s depth-psychological lexicon for the tragic dimension of human choice.
, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001supporting
BREMER, J. M. (1969), Hamartia (Amsterdam).
A bibliographic citation of Bremer’s dedicated monograph on hamartia establishes the term’s standing as a discrete subject of classical scholarly inquiry within the corpus.
, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993aside
‘Some reflections on ate and hamartia’, HSCP 72 (1967), 89-123.
A bibliographic reference to Dawe’s comparative study of ate and hamartia signals the scholarly tradition linking these two cognate concepts in the context of Greek tragic error.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside