Tragedy
The two main strands in the history of philosophical reflection on tragedy, as a genre of art, can both be seen as having their origins in Plato's critique of tragic poetry in the Republic and other dialogues. It is there that we find their first sustained philosophical treatment; and with respect to this small part of it, at least, Alfred North Whitehead's characterization of the history of philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato is not too fanciful.
Tragedy and Emotion
One strand of thought focuses on the character and value of our experience of tragedy, and can be seen in Plato's charge that tragedy (and indeed mimetic poetry in general) "gratifies and indulges the instinctive desires … with its hunger for tears and for an uninhibited indulgence in grief"; that "it waters [passions] when they ought to be allowed to wither, and makes them control us when we ought, in the interests of our own greater welfare and happiness, to control them" (1987, 606a). Plato's thought that the emotional dimension of our experience of tragedy is particularly significant has been taken up in a variety of directions by other philosophers.
In the Poetics, Aristotle argued that tragedy's capacity to arouse the emotions of pity and fear in its audience, so far from rendering it intellectually and morally damaging, is in fact a source of its value: Tragedy aims at emotional effect not for its own sake, or for the sake of gratifying or indulging its audience, he argued, but rather in such a way as to bring about a catharsis of the tragic emotions.
