A fresh explication of the Thomist justification of self-defense casts off the hobbles of the principle of double effects to find a more secure footing in the historicaldevelopment of subjective natural rights by medieval jurists, and a straight-forward application to the latent threat of death in childbirth posed by non-consensual pregnancy. By articulating the implicit Thomistic right to defensive abortion in terms of conditional rights bestowed in Creation as correlative to particular natural law duties, justly proportionate limits to defensive abortion (...) are identified, and balanced against the forfeited or reserved natural rights variously imputed to conceptus and embryo in non-consensual pregnancies. Subsequently, the varieties of involuntary consent are examined from a Thomist perspective with a view to their relevance in justifying recourse to a rehabilitated practice of defensive abortion when free and full consent to impregnation and childbirth is absent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Evolution of the Society for the Advancement of American PhilosophyJames Campbelldespite my increasingly decrepit appearance, I can lay no claim to being one of the founders of SAAP. When I joined the Society in the mid-1970s, it was already a well-functioning organization—if a much smaller one than today. After a few years of attending meetings, I began to submit papers, and I first appeared on the program at (...) our sixth annual meeting at John Carroll University in 1979. (See Fig. 1, the complete program, below.) While I was not one of the founders of SAAP, I did know them all. Presiding at the early meetings were, in the order of their presidencies, such elders as John Lachs, John J. McDermott, Darnell Rucker, James Gouinlock, Beth J. Singer, Peter H. Hare, Sandra B. Rosenthal, Thelma Z. Lavine, Joseph Betz, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and Andrew J. Reck. Serving in the background at the same time were such patron saints as Justus Buchler, Douglas Greenlee, Abraham Edel, Max Harold Fisch, Elizabeth Flower, Edward H. Madden, David L. Miller, Frank M. Oppenheim, Evelyn Shirk, John E. Smith, and H. S. Thayer. It was a good time to be coming to American Philosophy, under the guidance of a Society that respected the fundamentals of pluralism and "fallibilism."1IThe brief discussion of the evolution of SAAP that I offer here initially emphasizes what the Society has meant to me over nearly five decades.2 As I was entering graduate school in 1974, I was drawn by the American philosophical tradition. It was, as William James writes, my "dumb conviction" that the best answers were to be found in this philosophical direction and not in the others, and that my job was to pursue these answers.3 What I found in this tradition was a refuge from both the analytic style of philosophy then dominant in America, with what I saw as its obsession with truth4 and its [End Page 1] confusion of cleverness with wisdom, and the alternatives of the various continental traditions that, although they pursued wisdom, seemed to me to rely too strongly on the mysterious or the untranslatable. My own sense of the American philosophical tradition at the time was an amalgam of Puritanism, Deism, Transcendentalism, Pragmatism in its various forms, and a large dose of Columbia Naturalism. Through further study and especially through my interactions at SAAP meetings, I became more grounded in these approaches and more open to other strands within the tradition.5 For me, cooperative interaction with others was essential to further understanding. Just as for Josiah Royce, the secret was "the community."6Among the lessons that I drew from the American philosophical tradition were the following. I knew that it was necessary to resist the human tendency to believe that what works for me will work for everyone else. As George Santayana reminds us, all philosophy is "personal."7 Thus, certain thinkers and certain thoughts will benefit from their initial plausibility to us, and other thoughts and thinkers will be initially suspect. To counter this personal prejudice, we need to partake in careful, long-term study. On a related point, Ralph Waldo Emerson urges us to seek insight from others, to accept what he calls "provocation" while not accepting their answers.8 At the same time, we live among these other individuals, marry them, teach their children, and benefit from their contributions to our social existence. In other words, American Philosophy teaches us that people are social creatures—a point which both Emerson and James were wary of, but not blind to—and that our thinking should focus on the world of shared experience. As Benjamin Franklin writes, our efforts in "Philosophy" make sense only when our pursuit of wisdom is related to human well-being.9 This point is so important that we need to wonder how our efforts were ever allowed to narrow and separate from a broad sense of human welfare to focus upon supposedly more important minutiae. With John Dewey, I saw the job of philosophers to be helping individuals to understand and deal with their philosophical "problems" of living.10 And, perhaps more... (shrink)

This paper discusses aspects of the thought of the American patriot and thinker, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790). At the present time, Franklin is too often regarded primarily as a scientific amateur whose tinkerings produced nothing of lasting importance, or as a self-centered prig of interest only to others like himself. In reality, Franklin was a thoughtful and concerned individual attempting to advance the common weal, both through his personal struggle toward moral perfection and through the institutionalization of the scientific spirit of (...) fallibilism, publicity, and the unquestioned appeal to experience as the sole means of deciding policies. I hope to suggest the ongoing value of Franklin's work in the course of my paper. (shrink)

This welcome volume offers a rich presentation of the ideas of Jane Addams, with emphases upon her contributions to the Pragmatic movement. It is divided into two parts. Chapters 1–4 “provide a historical and theoretical foundation for Addams’s social philosophy,” and chapters 5–9 “discuss how Addams applied her social theories to a variety of social issues” including pacifism, race and diversity, socialism, education broadly conceived, and religion. There is also an introduction, an afterword, and an extensive bibliography. It is the (...) author’s hope that his study will spur further work on the role of Addams, and other women, in the history of Pragmatism and American philosophy; and I anticipate.. (shrink)

America the Philosophical is a slyly funny book, and one that hints at how the last few decades of being a philosopher might have been more interesting. Through its many sub-themes, we are introduced to a philosophical interpretation of America that widens our sense of both philosophy and the meaning of the American experience. All in all, Romano offers us a magnificent, idiosyncratic, disjointed feast, only parts of which I can consider in my own personal response that follows. From one (...) point of view, philosophers are people who find experience intellectually puzzling and try, by thinking on their own and in cooperation with like-minded others, to untangle these puzzles. In this sense, it is surely... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Our Living SocietyJames CampbellIWhen I was working on my history of the early years of the American Philosophical Association (A Thoughtful Profession), I spent a great deal of time immersed in the unhappy genre of the presidential address. Three divisions, each with its own annual president, make for a lot of presidential addresses. One of the things that I learned from this effort was that these addresses can be (...) sorted quite easily into two types. The first reflects some philosophical interest of the individual president; the second considers the ongoing life of the association. My presidential address will be of the latter sort.I thought that I would speak with you today about the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) as a living society. To do so means, of course, that I will be speaking about us. "We" are the members of SAAP—or better, we are SAAP. I will address my remarks primarily to the younger members of the audience: to those who cannot recall a time before SAAP existed. As our Society moves forward, and as the members of the founding generation inevitably pass on, there has been a natural change of focus. Our Society was established nearly forty years ago, at a time when the founders felt great alienation from the American Philosophical Association. The issues that brought them together in the early-1970s, however, are not the issues that we are facing at present. Our issues—your issues as the future of the Society—have fundamentally changed. It is no longer possible, if it ever really was, to define ourselves simply as "not them." We need to articulate, better than we have, not so much who we are as who we desire to become. While our pluralistic ways may no longer stick out in the broader philosophical profession, as Walt Whitman would in a Wall Street brokerage house, we [End Page 128] continue to feel isolation from much of what goes on in the profession. In many ways, SAAP's initial phase has been a tremendous success; but where does SAAP, where do we, go from here?III thought that I might also speak a bit about myself, not because my story is so special, but because it is a small piece of our collective past. Others of you may remember these times differently and may have taken away different lessons. If you will allow me, I will begin my story after I left the Army in 1969 and enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia, where I had grown up. I was at that time a bit older, and more serious, than most of my fellow students. I enrolled as a philosophy major because, after a number of years entrapped within the military system of blind obedience to unquestioned authority, I wanted to find better justifications for my own, and for society's, practices. Philosophy appealed to me as the place where I might find the answers to my life questions.Unfortunately, philosophy in those days—at Temple and at most other American universities—was not the sort of field in which students found many answers to the questions that puzzled me. We learned a great deal about duck-rabbits and the uncertain location of someone named Brown; we wondered whether a person might know how to sex chickens, and how he or she might know; we explored the apparent menace of female impersonators' conventions for the inherited notion of truth. Overall, philosophy seemed to be a branch of epistemology, rather than vice versa. After several years of this sort of philosophical study, I managed to become very clever. I had a counter-example for any statement more daring than "hello," and I thought that I knew a great deal because I had learned how to avoid all consideration of context or history.Still, through my cleverness, I realized that something was not right. I was not developing answers for my puzzlements about life or the improvement of society. Since I was not doing what I wanted to do in philosophy, the fact that I was doing it quite well mattered little. As I look back now through the eyes... (shrink)

The common belief is that disability is bad for the person who is disabled, that it has a negative effect on well-being. Some disability rights activists and philosophers, however, assert that disability has little or no impact on how well a person’s life goes, that it is neutral with respect to flourishing. In recent articles Stephen Campbell and Joseph Stramondo, while rejecting both views, claim that we cannot make any broad generalizations about the effect of disability on well-being. Whether (...) they are right about physical and sensory disabilities, I do not know, but I argue that they are wrong about intellectual disabilities. A broad generalization about intellectual disabilities is justified: it always has a negative impact on quality of life, even though there is no single negative impact. The disadvantages of ID are plain but complicated. (shrink)

Abstract Evolutionary epistemologists from Popper to Campbell have appropriated the Darwinian principle to explain the apparent fit between the world and our knowledge of it. I argue that this strategy suffers from the lack of any principled distinction among various types of elimination. I offer such a distinction and show that there is a species of elimination that is really corrective, that is, which violates the Darwinian principle as Popper understands it.

In the past 250 years, David Hume probably had a greater impact on the field of philosophy of religion than any other single philosopher. He relentlessly attacked the standard proofs for God's existence, traditional notions of God's nature and divine governance, the connection between morality and religion, and the rationality of belief in miracles. He also advanced radical theories of the origin of religious ideas, grounding such notions in human psychology rather than in divine reality. In the last decade of (...) his life Hume wrote 'I cou'd cover the Floor of a large Room with Books and Pamphlets wrote against me'. Indeed, most of these targeted his writings on religion. This, the third part of the Early Responses to Hume series, and perhaps the most eagerly awaited, collects responses to Hume's writings on religion published during his life, namely, 'Of Miracles', 'Of a Particular Providence and a Future State', The Natural History of Religion , and the posthumously published works Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , 'Of Suicide' and 'Of the Immortality of the Soul'. The set covers a wide range of the replies Hume's writings provoked, including contributions by Philip Skelton, William Adams, Thomas Rutherforth, William Warburton, Anthony Ellys, John Douglas, John Leland, Thomas Stona, Voltaire, George Campbell, Herman Andrew Pistorius, Duncan Shaw, William Samuel Powell, Thomas Hayter, Joseph Milner, William Paley, Charles Moore, Richard Joseph Sulivan, John Hey, Samuel Vince, Lord Brougham and Thomas De Quincey. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Social Epistemologists at the Crossroads:Authorizing Agents of ChangeJames H. CollierIn this issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric, Thomas Basbøll and Christine Isager and Sine Just provide a vital, constructive forum for discussing the first and second editions of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge (PREK) and Steve Fuller's broader project of social epistemology. More specifically, both Basbøll's review and Isager and Just's suggest innovative proposals for applying and assessing (...) PREK's ideas and influence. In response, I analyze and counter Basbøll's and Isager and Just's conceptions of how agency is configured, and how criticism is authorized, at the level of textuality. I end by calling for deliberations to sort out what we, as social epistemologists and critical intellectuals, know and what we want to do about it.A Job for Social EpistemologistsIf the reader of PREK wants to "be" a social epistemologist, or "do" social epistemology, what would the job and its duties entail? Thomas Basbøll offers a job description for the social epistemologist as a "postmodern grammarian"—one "who corrects academic texts to suit them for strange times." This description strikes the dissonant chord of being at once pragmatic and abstract. On the one hand, correcting academic texts is a specific task reminiscent of the duties of writing instructors or editors. On the other hand, the specificity of the labor stands in juxtaposition to the surreal working conditions—the "strange times." And in the end, "postmodern grammarian" is hardly a position for which one could apply. Yet the specificity and dissonance in Basbøll's description reveals the difficulty and ambiguity of what Fuller asks the reader to do in PREK. Basbøll gets at this problem by [End Page 269] shifting the subject position of the social epistemologist to the postmodern grammarian. This move is necessary to bring social epistemology down from "the highest level" and make it task oriented. Interestingly, the job that Basbøll describes offers a return to textuality and, I would argue, critical intellectualism. Yet these positions appear somewhat removed from the role of the rhetorician as portrayed in PREK.In proposing a specific job for the social epistemologist, Basbøll develops a microlevel application of Fuller's macrolevel vision. Basbøll's task is not easy: "One of the greatest difficulties encountered in reading PREK is its willingness to make a great many philosophical commitments for openly rhetorical purposes. Not the least of these is the concept of knowledge that a research program and policy platform that calls itself 'social epistemology' is obviously dutybound to provide." The willingness of social epistemologists to occupy many philosophical positions also obscures what labor and service commitments they might make. Moreover, since PREK's initial publication (1993) Fuller has continued to multiply social epistemologists' roles regarding scientific conduct (Science, 1997; The Governance of Science, 2000a; Knowledge Management Foundations, 2002). Further, these commitments shift as Fuller has continued to reinterpret the historical record and to recast philosophical debates (Thomas Kuhn, 2000b; Kuhn vs. Popper, 2003). The ability to both destabilize and maintain such a fluid intellectual environment is something only Fuller, or the postmodern grammarian, could—or would want to—accomplish. More on that idea in a moment.Despite the moving target, defining the subject position of the social epistemologist has been a parallel conversation accompanying much of Fuller's work. I proposed the less "stylish" idea of the social epistemologist as technical communicator in PREK's first edition and in Scientific and Technical Communication (1997). Contemplating the social epistemologist's position as rhetorician, or vice versa, has been taken on by Keith (1995; 1996), Zagacki (1995), and Campbell and Benson (1996) (as summarized by Isager and Just). In contrast to these previous configurations, Basbøll situates the labor of the social epistemologist on the level of reading and writing. As he puts it:And it is precisely because the social epistemologist assists the writer of academic texts in the difficult task of connecting utterances to particular conditions (under which they are read) that social epistemology becomes a critical force. It is not by reconfiguring the knowledge-producing practices themselves [End Page 270] that this... (shrink)

Introduction -- "Mediating estrangement: a theory for diplomacy," review of International Studies (April, l987), 13, pp. 91-110 -- "Arms, hostages and the importance of shredding in earnest: reading the national security culture," Social Text (Spring, 1989), 22, pp. 79-91 -- "The (s)pace of international relations: simulation, surveillance and speed," International Studies Quarterly (September 1990), pp. 295-310 -- "Narco-terrorism at home and abroad," Radical America (December 1991), vol. 23, nos. 2-3, pp. 21-26 -- "The terrorist discourse: signs, states, and systems of (...) global political violence," World Security: Trends and Challenges at Century's End, ed. M. Klare and D. Thomas, St. Martin's Press (1991), pp. 237-265. -- "S/N: international theory, balkanisation, and the new world order," Millennium Journal for International Studies (Winter 1991), vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 485-506 -- "Cyberwar, videogames, and the Gulf War syndrome," Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed and War (Cambridge, Ma and Oxford, UK, 1992), pp. 173-202 -- "Act IV: fathers (and sons), mother courage (and her children), and the dog, the cave, and the beef," in Global Voices: Dialogues in International Relations, ed. James N. Rosenau (Boulder, Co and Oxford, Uk: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 83-96 -- "The value of security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche and Baudrillard," in the Political Subject of Violence, ed. G.M. Dillon and David Campbell, Manchester University Press (1993), pp. 94-113 -- "The C.I.A., Hollywood, and sovereign conspiracies," Queen's Quarterly (Summer 1993), vol. 100, no. 2, pp. 329-347 -- "Great men, monumental history, and not-so-grand theory: a meta-review of Henry Kissinger's diplomacy," Forum review article, Mershon International Studies Review (april 1995), vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 173-180 -- "Post-theory: the eternal return of ethics in international relations," New Thinking in International Relations Theory, eds. Michael Doyle and John Ikenberry (New York: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 55-75 -- "Cyber-deterrence," Wired (September 1994), 2.09., p. 116 (plus 7 pages) -- "Global swarming, virtual security, and Bosnia," the Washington Quarterly (Summer 1996), vol. 19, n0. 3., pp. 45- 56 -- "The simulation triangle," 21c (issue 24, 1997), pp. 19-25 -- "Virtuous war and hollywood," the Nation (3 april 2000), pp. 41-44 -- "Virtuous war/virtual theory," International Affairs (fall, 2000), pp. 771-788 -- "Hedley Bull and the case for a post-classical approach," International Relations at LSE: a History of 75 Years (London: Millennium Publishing Group, 2003), pp. 61-87. "the illusion of a grand strategy, op-ed," the New york Times, may 25, 2001 -- "In terrorem: before and after 9/11," Worlds in Collision, eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 101-116 -- "The question of information technology in international relations," Millennium Journal of International Studies (vol. 32, no. 3, 2003), pp. 441-456 -- "The illusion of a grand strategy," op-ed, the New York Times, may 25, 2001. (shrink)

Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology.

Current understandings of the sublime are focused by a single word and by a single author. The sublime is not a word: it is a concept and an experience, or rather a whole range of ideas, meanings and experiences that are embedded in conceptual and experiential patterns. Once we train our sights on these patterns a radically different prospect on the sublime in antiquity comes to light, one that touches everything from its range of expressions to its dates of emergence, (...) evolution, role in the cultures of antiquity as a whole, and later reception. This book is the first to outline an alternative account of the sublime in Greek and Roman poetry, philosophy, and the sciences, in addition to rhetoric and literary criticism. It offers new readings of Longinus without privileging him, but instead situates him within a much larger context of reflection on the sublime in antiquity. (shrink)

This is the first modern attempt to put aesthetics back on the map in classical studies. James I. Porter traces the origins of aesthetic thought and inquiry in their broadest manifestations as they evolved from before Homer down to the fourth century and then into later antiquity, with an emphasis on Greece in its earlier phases. Greek aesthetics, he argues, originated in an attention to the senses and to matter as opposed to the formalism and idealism that were enshrined (...) by Plato and Aristotle, and through whose lens most subsequent views of ancient art and aesthetics have typically been filtered. Treating aesthetics in this way can help us perceive the commonly shared basis of the diverse arts of antiquity. Reorienting our view of the ancient vocabularies of art and experience around matter and sensation, this book dramatically changes how we look upon the ancient achievements in these same areas. (shrink)

Rather than representing a break with his earlier philosophical undertakings, The Birth of Tragedy can be seen as continuous with them and Nietzsche's later works. James Porter argues that Nietzsche's argumentative and writerly strategies resemble his earlier writings on philology in his 'staging' of meaning rather than in his advocacy of various positions. The derivation of the Dionysian from the Apollinian, and the interest in the atomistic challenges to Platonism, are anticipated in earlier works. Also the theory of the (...) all-too-human subject is a thread that runs throughout Nietzsche's oeuvre, critically undoing what his philosophy appears to erect, confirming that Nietzsche is a most unreliable witness to his own meaning. As well as studying the relation of The Birth of Tragedy to later writings, the author examines it on its own terms as a self-standing and complete piece of imagining, with close regard to the self-presentation of the work itself. (shrink)

Two notable thought experiments are discussed in this article: Reid's thought experiment about whether a being supplied with tactile sensations alone could acquire the conception of extension and Strawson's thought experiment about whether a being supplied with auditory sensations alone could acquire the conception of mind-independent objects. The experiments are considered alongside Campbell's argument that only on the so-called relational view of experience is it possible for experiences to make available to their subjects the concept of mind-independent objects. I (...) consider how the three issues ought to be construed as raising questions about woulds, coulds, or shoulds. (shrink)

Kristeller's article ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’ is a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller's historical account can be questioned; alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘the modern system of the arts’ appears to have been neither a system nor (...) an agreed upon entity, but only a historical construct of Kristeller's own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly, while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’ objection has been cleared away. (shrink)

All parts of Heraclitus’ cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs (“biomasses”) cycle endlessly through physical changes in sweeping patterns (“biorhythms”) that are reflected in the dynamic rhythms of Heraclitus’ own thought and language. These natural processes are best examined at a more-than-human level that exceeds individuation, stable identity, rational comprehension, and linguistic capture. B62 (“mortals immortals”), one of Heraclitus’ most perplexing fragments, models these processes in a spectacular fashion: it describes the imbrication not only of humans and (...) gods but of cosmic masses more generally, and its language mimics the natural relations that it names, or rather intimates through its grammatical and syntactical indeterminacy. The remaining fragments amplify the uncertainties and the exhilarations of Heraclitus’ worldview along the same lines. His approach to nature raises urgent questions about how human beings fit into the cosmos, not least by challenging our intuitive conceptions of life and death, our material makeup, and our entanglements with our natural surroundings. In doing so, he provides vital lessons for contemporary ecological awareness, and proves to be an unexpected ally. (shrink)

Roman Stoicism is typically read as a therapeutic philosophy that is centered around the care of the self and presented in the form of a self-help manual. Closer examination reveals a less reassuring and more challenging side to the school’s teachings, one that provokes ethical reflection at the limits of the self’s intactness and coherence. The self is less an object of inquiry than the by-product of a complex set of experiences in the face of nature and society and across (...) any number of flashpoints, from one’s own or others’ beliefs, actions, values, and relationships to the difficulty of sizing up one’s place in the universe. The pressures of natural and ethical reflection put intuitive conceptions of the self at considerable risk. The Roman Stoic self proves to be vulnerable, contingent, unbounded, relational, and opaque—in short, a rich matrix of problems that point beyond the individual self and anticipate contemporary critiques of the self. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines an oddity that has gone unnoticed since Nietzsche first pointed it out to his friend and confidant Erwin Rohde in 1872—namely, that Wilamowitz, in his attack on The Birth of Tragedy, systematically misquotes Nietzsche. A large number of the quotations from The Birth of Tragedy by Wilamowitz in both installments of Zukunftsphilologie! are pseudo-quotations—whether they are off by a word or more or whether they are a collage of phrases drawn freely from Nietzsche's vocabulary. This essay (...) revisits the debate from the angle of nineteenth-century philology in its relation to textual authority. A complete appendix of Wilamowitz's misquotations from The Birth of Tragedy and from Rohde's Afterphilologie lays out, for the first time, this evidence of the practices of the first Nietzschean philologist in history, Wilamowitz himself. (shrink)

From the older handbooks to the more recent scholarly literature, Gorgias's professions about his art are taken literally at their word: conjured up in all of these accounts is the image of a hearer irresistibly overwhelmed by Gorgias's apagogic and psychagogic persuasions. Gorgias's own description of his art, in effect, replaces our description of it. "His proofs... give the impression of ineluctability" . "Thus logos is almost an independent external power which forces the hearer to do its will" . "Incurably (...) deceptive," logos has an "enormous power" that acts upon opinion, which is "easy to change" . Surprisingly, the urge to describe or paraphrase Gorgias's art has caused commentators to overlook the very best witness of it that we have: its enactment, which is to say the performative value of Gorgias's writings, especially the speeches. For if Gorgias's literary remains do nothing else, they demonstrate how one can do things with words without being explicit about what is being done, even if this means contradicting, performatively, what is being said-as for instance in his statements, so unconvincingly made, about the ostensible aims of rhetoric. Was Gorgias persuasive in practice? Was persuasion even the goal? Is logos the solitary arbiter of reality that it is so often made out to be? Through close examination of Gorgias's Helen and parts of On Not-Being, I attempt to show that persuasion is manifestly not the goal of his arguments, which in the first instance are aporetic paradoxes that expose the difficulties of defining the nature of either language or reality, and which in the last instance are instruments of cultural demystification. The only deception at work in Gorgias's writings is that of the self-deception of their audience. It is this that gives these curiously revealing documents of fifth-century Greek culture their "dissuasive," not persuasive, character. (shrink)

James I. The Political Works of James I. Reprinted from the Edition of 1616. With an Introduction by Charles Howard McIlwain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918. cxi, 354 pp. Reprinted 2002 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

Larry Shiner has risen to an impassioned defence against my criticisms of an iconic figure, claiming that I have ‘misrepresent[ed] Kristeller's central aim’ and therefore missed ‘the real shortcomings of Kristeller's essay’ and ‘obscure[d] substantive issues behind simplistic dichotomies’. These, and a series of disagreements over countless small details, take up the first part of his reply. He then proceeds to summarize his own book's achievements in correcting Kristeller's shortcomings. Shiner acknowledges difficulties in Kristeller's formulations, but accepts their purport and (...) actually expands the reach of Kristeller's thesis. Whatever else one might wish to say about these charges (which are quite impressive as a list but each disputable taken in turn), Shiner remains an unrepentant exponent of Kristeller's views. I realize that dogmas die hard, and it is only to be expected that if one challenges the central tenets of a legacy one will meet with entrenched reactions. Given the word-limit I have been allotted for my counter-reply, I will confine myself to the more substantive issues as these concern Kristeller's arguments, reserving for a possible future occasion any difficulties I may have with Shiner's own theses. My response will take the form of a series of questions followed by my own proposed answers. (shrink)

The paper seeks to demystify Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy. Genealogy tells the story of historical origins in the form of a myth that is betrayed fromwithin, while readers have naively assumed it tells a story that Nietzsche endorses—whether of history or naturalized origins. Looked at more closely, genealogy,I claim, tells the story of human consciousness and its extraordinary fallibility. It relates the conditions and limits of consciousness and how these are activelyavoided and forgotten, for the most part in vain. The (...) lessons are these: there is no human time before consciousness; no unconscious activity that is uncontaminated by consciousness or culture; no period of prehistory that isn’t already historical or historicized, hence subject to dehistoricization (for prehistory, Urzeit, always comes after history, in the form of a myth); no primordial “innocence of becoming,” let alone any future condition free of these same constraints. Genealogy is the critique of the myth of knowing critique. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: “Claims to Power” The Rhetoric of the Will to Power “The world viewed from inside”: Nietzsche's Later Atomism “The Logic of Feeling”.

Distinguished international scholars examine the neglected issue of the body and its status in classical antiquity.

This chapter contains sections titled: A Divided Socrates: Ambiguity or Ambivalence? Socratic Constructions Socratic Voices Thematizations.