This book examines Platos account in the Timaeus of a third kind and its cosmic members, a material principle and place.

Plato’s chief argument against rhetoric is epistemological. Plato claims that rhetoric accomplishes what it does on the basis of experience,not knowledge. In this article I examine Plato’s criticisms of rhetoric in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. I argue that Plato is right to identify rhetoric’s empirical basis, but that having this epistemic basis does not constitute an argument against rhetoric. On the contrary, Plato’s criticism of rhetoric serves to give us an epistemological explanation of rhetoric’s success.

We examine the influences of social capital, source credibility, and fairness perceptions on the judgments of experienced compensation committee members who are considering a proposal to reduce management’s performance targets in the middle of a compensation cycle due to difficult circumstances. Eighty-nine U.S. public company CC members participated in a 2 × 2 experiment with social capital and source credibility each manipulated as low or high, and outcome fairness to management, process fairness to shareholders, and outcome fairness to shareholders included (...) as measured variables. While social capital and source credibility are not significant, we find that outcome fairness to the CEO and outcome fairness to shareholders are significantly related to CC members’ support for reducing performance targets during a compensation cycle. In addition, we find that more experienced CC members are less supportive of changing the performance targets. The significant interactions include one between outcome fairness to shareholders and process fairness to shareholders, which suggests that CC member support for the proposal relies on both process and outcome fairness being present. Finally, the participants’ qualitative responses reflect arguments both for and against adjusting performance targets. Overall, the results highlight the important roles of fairness and director experience in boardroom decisions and provide important insights into factors affecting CC judgments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Age of Grace: “Charis” in Early Greek PoetryDana R. SmithThe Age of Grace: “Charis” in Early Greek Poetry, by Bonnie MacLachlan; xxi & 192 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, $29.95.Bonnie MacLachlan has two concerns in this book. First, she sees early charis, conventionally and inadequately translated as “grace,” as the result of feeling, concrete action, and sometimes concrete objects, fused in such a way that early (...) Greeks did not clearly distinguish these as separate aspects. Second, she focuses on the experience of beauty or pleasure as a crucial part of reciprocity in charis, and argues that many of the now-fashionable models from the social sciences, such as those dealing with reciprocal exchange of goods and favors, are insufficient to account for this particular dynamic of allurement. What later ages sensed, and what we sense, as two or more different kinds of charis “may not have been sensed as such by the archaic Greek mind.” Rather, the early Greeks possessed an integrated sense of these fragments as part of a single experience. “A charis-event, provoked by moral or aesthetic beauty, was disarming; it broke down the barriers of the self, and it demanded that the beneficiary reach out to another.” This study combines extremely able discussions of different sides of this crucial concept with a large vision of their integration into a coherent whole: “[Charis] was the moral glue of their society, linking such other central moral ideas as timê [“honor,” “prerogative,” “price”], dikê [“due portion,” “justice”], themis [“unwritten law”], xenia [“requital of gifts and hospitality”], and aidôs [“reverence,” “awe”].”How well does MacLachlan demonstrate this twofold idea? She deserves high praise for setting forth the essential passages of her authors clearly and succinctly, for giving numerous insights into them, for adducing much pertinent scholarship, and certainly for furthering the development of her important thesis. Her discussion of the earliest conception of charis (chap. 2, “The Charis of Achilles”), focused mainly on Homer, with material from the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod, gives a sensitive and persuasive account of relations among charis, timê, and dikê. She makes excellent points about specific perceptions of beauty, especially visual, although one comes away a bit uncertain as to how these aspects all cohere, and also as to whether there are differences in charis between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Her discussion of the cult dimensions of charis (chap. 3, “The Charites”), while fascinating in itself, contains little direction for using this information so as to understand the thesis. She gives careful readings of her examples of erotic and social charis (chaps. 4 and 5, “Erotic Charis” and “Social Charis”), clearly identifying types that contrast with the earlier prototypical experience, although sometimes her criticism of these is more implicit than stated. A more forceful definition of the “problem” of erotic charis, for example, would have helped unify this discussion with that of erotic charis in Aeschylus. Her discussion of Pindar and Bacchylides (6, “Epinician Charis”), perhaps the high point of the book, shows the richest ties to the multi-dimensional Homeric charis; here we return clearly to the topic of [End Page 172] beauty, see the pertinence of some of the cult information, and sense the transformational dynamics of charis as profoundly important for this genre of poems. She leaves somewhat open, however, the question of whether charis is a single thing in Pindar. The chapter on Aeschylus (7, “Charis in the Oresteia”) presents a powerful reading of different kinds of charis in conflict, private versus public, resulting in a unified view of the trilogy as a whole. Once more we note different senses of charis, but in a way that highlights their collision: the duality of charis is further brought into relation with other dualities, such as that of dikê. This chapter connects well with other parts of the book; erotic and false charis become important issues.If there is a criticism to make of this book, it is that MacLachlan does not do quite enough to work out the relations between her provocative thesis and her discussions of particular poems. Some sections are too dissertation-like in presenting evidence, and more thought about the... (shrink)

It is difficult to write clearly about any aspect of Plotinus’ thought. There are many reasons for this. One reason is that he is a very systematic thinker. So, for example, to treat his aesthetics one must also discuss his metaphysics, psychology, and his ethics. Anther reason is his well-known subtlety and obscurity of expression. Kuisma’s book on Plotinus’ aesthetics, however, shows that it is possible to write clearly, accurately, and succinctly about Plotinus. This book is a pleasure to read. (...) Kuisma argues against a modern, widely held interpretation of Plotinus’s aesthetics which claims that “Plotinus, in contrast to Plato, accepted the possibility of the artistic imitation of intelligible Forms,” thus giving “a new direction to Platonic art theory”. His thesis is, instead, that “the objects of artistic imitation are limited to the sphere of perceptions,” although this limitation can be overcome to some extent by “the use of symbols and symbolic conventions”, inasmuch as symbolic representations do not convey on the basis of sameness of form. He calls the common view “strong mimesis,” and his own view, “weak mimesis”. Clearly, Kuisma’s view shows Plotinus to be a traditional Platonist. Indeed, it would be odd if Plotinus, of all people, should discount Plato’s doubts about the ability of sensibles to represent eternal form. (shrink)

This is a collection of essays, many of which were given originally as papers at a conference on Ancient Method held at Amherst College in 1994. Few directly address the subject of method in ancient philosophy. Readers whose primary interest is this subject and have high hopes for this new volume from Oxford University Press will be somewhat disappointed. Yet those of us whose interests in ancient philosophy are broader will find not a few excellent essays on important questions by (...) some of the leaders in the field. (shrink)

This is a wonderful book. It is, in my opinion, the best book on Aristotle’s treatment of the physical world to appear in recent years. Still, this book is not one that can be read through on a Sunday afternoon. It resembles a text of Aristotle in the compactness of argument, though not, I am happy to report, in clarity. Like a guide raised in the wild, Lang leads us through a large sector of the forest of arguments in the (...) Physics and De Caelo. This analogy brings me to the following point: Lang’s perspective on Aristotle is extraordinary. Lang is the author of another excellent book, Aristotle’s Physics and Its Medieval Varieties. Discussions of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature through the lens of medieval philosophy and science are not uncommon. These discussions, however, face the peril of attributing, in one way or another, viewpoints to Aristotle that are actually those of his medieval successors. For this reason most work on Aristotle is now done without reference to medieval thought. Perhaps this is as it should be. But one of the great difficulties in understanding Aristotle’s conception of the world is how we are to interpret what he says. Our perspective on the world is largely formed on the basis of early modern rejections of medieval Aristotelian views. That is to say that built into our perspective is a negative response not to Aristotle directly but to medieval interpretation of Aristotle. This fact makes it extremely difficult for us to see Aristotle clearly. Here lies the advantage of knowing the “medieval varieties” of Aristotle’s natural philosophy when we try to make sense of Aristotle. Knowing this helps us distinguish more clearly between our own perspective and its roots and Aristotle’s. Aristotle’s perspective is in fact fundamentally different from ours. For example, Lang points out that to insert the notion of “speed” into Aristotle’s discussion of motion is “seriously misleading” because speed is conceptually distinguishable from moving bodies and is so treated, whereas motion, for Aristotle, is always the actualization of a capacity intrinsic to a moved body; therefore motion can neither be quantified nor abstracted from what is moved. (shrink)

This Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical ideas and political theories of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). As a survivor of the Holocaust, Arendt's life informed her work exploring the meaning and construction of power, evil, totalitarianism, and direct democracy. Through insightful readings of Arendt's best-known works, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Life of the Mind (1978), Dana Villa traces the importance of Arendt's ideas for today's reader. In so doing, Villa explains how Arendt gained world-wide (...) fame with the publication of Origins, and went on to have a distinguished career as a political theorist and public intellectual. A sometimes controversial figure, Arendt is now recognised as one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century and her works have become an acknowledged part of the Western canon of political theory and philosophy"--From the publisher. (shrink)

Factors such as subsistence turnover, warfare, or interaction between different groups can be major sources of cultural change in human populations. Global demographic shifts such as the transition to agriculture during the Neolithic and more recently the urbanization and globalization of the twentieth century have been major catalysts for cultural change. Here, we test whether cultural traits such as patri/matrilocality and postmarital migration persist in the face of social upheaval and gene flow during the past 150 years in postcolonial South (...) Africa. The recent history of South Africa has seen major demographic shifts that resulted in the displacement and forced sedentism of indigenous Khoekhoe and San populations. During the expansion of the colonial frontier, the Khoe-San admixed with European colonists and enslaved individuals from West/Central Africa, Indonesia, and South Asia, introducing novel cultural norms. We conducted demographic interviews among Nama and Cederberg communities representing nearly 3,000 individuals across three generations. Despite the history of colonial expansion, and the subsequent incorporation of Khoe-San and Khoe-San-descendant communities into a colonial society with strong patrilocal norms, patrilocality is the least common postmarital residence pattern in our study populations today. Our results suggest that more recent forces of integration into the market economy are likely the primary drivers of change in the cultural traits examined in our study. Birthplace had a strong effect on an individual’s odds of migration, distance moved, and postmarital residence form. These effects are at least partially explained by the population size of the birthplace. Our results suggest that market factors local to birthplaces are important drivers of residence decisions, although the frequency of matrilocal residence and a geographic and temporal cline in migration and residence patterns also indicate the persistence of some historic Khoe-San cultural traits in contemporary groups. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt, whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated by admirers who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and (...) Nietzschean theme of a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics.Villa's book, however, is much more than a mere correction of misinterpretations of a major thinker's work. Rather, he makes a persuasive case for Arendt as the postmodern or postmetaphysical political theorist, the first political theorist to think through the nature of political action after Nietzsche's exposition of the death of God. After giving an account of Arendt's theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, Villa shows how Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions they drew from their critiques. The result is a wide-ranging discussion not only of Arendt and Heidegger, but of Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Habermas, and the entire question of politics after metaphysics. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's rich and varied political thought is more influential today than ever before, due in part to the collapse of communism and the need for ideas that move beyond the old ideologies of the Cold War. As Dana Villa shows, however, Arendt's thought is often poorly understood, both because of its complexity and because her fame has made it easy for critics to write about what she is reputed to have said rather than what she actually wrote. (...) Villa sets out to change that here, explaining clearly, carefully, and forcefully Arendt's major contributions to our understanding of politics, modernity, and the nature of political evil in our century.Villa begins by focusing on some of the most controversial aspects of Arendt's political thought. He shows that Arendt's famous idea of the banality of evil--inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann--does not, as some have maintained, lessen the guilt of war criminals by suggesting that they are mere cogs in a bureaucratic machine. He examines what she meant when she wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism, explaining that she believed Nazi and Soviet terror served above all to reinforce the totalitarian idea that humans are expendable units, subordinate to the all-determining laws of Nature or History. Villa clarifies the personal and philosophical relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, showing how her work drew on his thought while providing a firm repudiation of Heidegger's political idiocy under the Nazis. Less controversially, but as importantly, Villa also engages with Arendt's ideas about the relationship between political thought and political action. He explores her views about the roles of theatricality, philosophical reflection, and public-spiritedness in political life. And he explores what relationship, if any, Arendt saw between totalitarianism and the "great tradition" of Western political thought. Throughout, Villa shows how Arendt's ideas illuminate contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and democracy and how they deepen our understanding of philosophers ranging from Socrates and Plato to Habermas and Leo Strauss.Direct, lucid, and powerfully argued, this is a much-needed analysis of the central ideas of one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This essay takes a critical look at the rubric “age of terror,” a rubric which has enjoyed a certain amount of theoretical and philosophical cachet in recent years. My argument begins by noting the continuity between this hypostatization and contemporary “war on terror” rhetoric, a continuity that is, in certain respects, ironic given the politics of the “age of terror” theorists. It then moves—via Machiavelli, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendt—to a consideration of the topics of state violence (on the one (...) hand) and totalitarian terror (on the other). I use Arendt’s theorization of totalitarian terror for a dual purpose: first, to emphasize the gap between totalitarian terror and the more familiar “terror as means”; second, to question the characterization of recent Islamic terrorism as totalitarian in essence. Arendt’s distinctions between violence, terror and totalitarian terror help us avoid the Schmittian logic installed by advocates of the “war on terror” and by a variety of writers anxious to identify a ill-defined and generic “totalitarianism” as the transhistorical and transcultural “other” of liberalism. Keywords : terror; islamic terrorism; Hannah Arendt; Max Weber; totalitarianism; “Age of Terror”; liberalism; Machiavelli; evil as policy (Published online: 25 August, 2008) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics 2008. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v1i3.1861. (shrink)

Many critics bemoan the lack of civic engagement in America. Tocqueville's ''nation of joiners'' seems to have become a nation of alienated individuals, disinclined to fulfill the obligations of citizenship or the responsibilities of self-government. In response, the critics urge community involvement and renewed education in the civic virtues. But what kind of civic engagement do we want, and what sort of citizenship should we encourage? In Socratic Citizenship, Dana Villa takes issue with those who would reduce citizenship (...) to community involvement or to political participation for its own sake. He argues that we need to place more value on a form of conscientious, moderately alienated citizenship invented by Socrates, one that is critical in orientation and dissident in practice. Taking Plato's Apology of Socrates as his starting point, Villa argues that Socrates was the first to show, in his words and deeds, how moral and intellectual integrity can go hand in hand, and how they can constitute importantly civic--and not just philosophical or moral--virtues. More specifically, Socrates urged that good citizens should value this sort of integrity more highly than such apparent virtues as patriotism, political participation, piety, and unwavering obedience to the law. Yet Socrates' radical redefinition of citizenship has had relatively little influence on Western political thought. Villa considers how the Socratic idea of the thinking citizen is treated by five of the most influential political thinkers of the past two centuries--John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. In doing so, he not only deepens our understanding of these thinkers' work and of modern ideas of citizenship, he also shows how the fragile Socratic idea of citizenship has been lost through a persistent devaluation of independent thought and action in public life.Engaging current debates among political and social theorists, this insightful book shows how we must reconceive the idea of good citizenship if we are to begin to address the shaky fundamentals of civic culture in America today. (shrink)

Villa critically examines, among other topics, the promise and limits of civil society and associational life as sources of democratic renewal; the effects of mass media on the public arena; and the problematic but still necessary ideas of civic competence and democratic maturity."--BOOK JACKET.

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her particular interests have made her one of the most frequently cited thinkers of our time. This Companion examines the primary themes of her multi-faceted work, from her theory of totalitarianism and her controversial idea of the 'banality of evil' to her classic studies of political action and her final reflections on judgment and the life of the mind. Each essay examines the political, philosophical, and historical (...) concerns which shaped Arendt's thought, and which prompted her to become one of the most unapologetic champions of the political life in the history of Western thought. (shrink)

The relation of Hannah Arendt's political theory to Martin Heidegger's philosophy is a fraught topic. This essay explores the basic structure of Arendt's appropriation of Heidegger, the better to defend her theory of political action against oft-repeated charges of elitism and exclusion. In my view, Arendt's critical reading of the canon is deeply indebted to Heidegger, even though her ultimate goal--the recovery of human plurality as a basic and irreducible dimension of politics and the public world--is radically un-Heideggerian in nature.

In this essay I trace the relationship between philosophy and politics in Hannah Arendt’s work, with specific reference to the tension between her Socratic commitments and her appeal to “common sense” or sensus communis. I argue Arendt’s idea of a “common sense of the world” gives rise to a conception of the public realm that has too much shape and integrity to fit the often misty and particulate nature of contemporary reality. This is not the familiar critique of Arendt as (...) a nostalgic Grecophile. Rather, it is a critique aimed at the phenomenological concept of “world” underlying her analysis. This concept—derived, but notably different, from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective conceptions—relies on background practices and understandings that are thick enough to sustain both a common public culture and a shared “sense of the world.” I suggest that Arendt’s appeal to a sensus communis runs aground of the moral and value pluralism that both Weber and Berlin have suggested are constitutive features of modernity. I conclude with some remarks on the relationship between Arendt’s critique of modernity and Socratic philosophical critique and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. (shrink)

The relation of Hannah Arendt's political theory to Martin Heidegger's philosophy is a fraught topic. This essay explores the basic structure of Arendt's appropriation of Heidegger, the better to defend her theory of political action against oft-repeated charges of elitism and exclusion. In my view, Arendt's critical reading of the canon is deeply indebted to Heidegger, even though her ultimate goal--the recovery of human plurality as a basic and irreducible dimension of politics and the public world--is radically un-Heideggerian in nature.