Eugene Garver

Socrates encounters Euthyphro as both are on their way to court, Socrates as a defendant against charges of blasphemy and Euthyphro as a prosecutor of his father for negligently causing the death of a slave—a human rights violation. While I argue that piety and pollution supply a productive way of thinking about human rights crime and punishment, Euthyphro is a very troubling model for the human rights prosecutor, since he is an almost paradigmatically unattractive character. Reading the Euthyphro leads to appropriately troubling and ambivalent feelings about contemporary human rights prosecutions.

What is the good life? Posing this question today would likely elicit very different answers. Some might say that the good life means doing good—improving one’s community and the lives of others. Others might respond that it means doing well—cultivating one’s own abilities in a meaningful way. But for Aristotle these two distinct ideas—doing good and doing well—were one and the same and could be realized in a single life. In Confronting Aristotle’s Ethics, Eugene Garver examines how we can draw this conclusion from Aristotle's works, while also studying how this conception of the good life relates to contemporary ideas ofmorality. The key to Aristotle’s views on ethics, argues Garver, lies in the Metaphysics or, more specifically, in his thoughts on activities, actions, and capacities . For Aristotle, Garver shows, it is only possible to be truly active when acting for the common good, and it is only possible to be truly happy when active to the extent of one’s own powers. But does this mean we should aspire to Aristotle’s impossibly demanding vision of the good life? In a word, no. Garver stresses the enormous gap between life in Aristotle’s time and ours. As a result, this book will be a welcome rumination on not only Aristotle, but the relationship between the individual and society in everyday life.

In this major contribution to philosophy and rhetoric, Eugene Garver shows how Aristotle integrates logic and virtue in his great treatise, the _Rhetoric._ He raises and answers a central question: can there be a civic art of rhetoric, an art that forms the character of citizens? By demonstrating the importance of the _Rhetoric_ for understanding current philosophical problems of practical reason, virtue, and character, Garver has written the first work to treat the _Rhetoric_ as philosophy and to connect its themes with parallel problems in Aristotle's _Ethics_ and _Politics._ Garver's study will help put rhetoric at the center of investigations of practice and practical reason.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle’s “De Interpretatione”: Contradiction and Dialectic by C. W. A. WhitakerEugene GarverC. W. A. Whitaker, Aristotle’s “De Interpretatione”: Contradiction and Dialectic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. x + 235. Cloth, $60.00.Traditionally, the De Interpretatione is placed in the Organon between the Categories and the Prior Analytics. Where the Categories is about single terms and the Analytics about inferences, the De Interpretatione is about propositions. That traditional view is presupposed by most contemporary studies of the work, which “concentrate on a small number of passages, which have been treated as isolated oases of philosophical interest in an otherwise barren work,” highlights which include “Aristotle’s semantic theory of philosophy of language” in the first chapter, the first four “linguistic chapters,” and chapter 9 on the Sea Battle (1). I suppose that the square of opposition could be added to Whitaker’s list.Whitaker, in this republication of a doctoral dissertation, wants to challenge both the traditional view and the contemporary concentration by instead studying the work as a coherent whole, whose subject, it turns out, is not propositions after all but “contradictory pairs, which are central to the working of dialectic” (2). The book then proceeds through the De Interpretatione, chapter by chapter. If he succeeds, the De Interpretatione will henceforth be read as preparation for the Topics, rather than for the Analytics. There are also three appendices examining the use of such contradictory pairs in Metaphysics IV, the Topics, and the Posterior Analytics.Thus, the first five chapters of the De Interpretatione explain the nature of assertions, name and verb, and “before that, how language is related to thought and to the real world, and how it is that utterances can make claims about things which are true or false” (8). Where names, verbs, and propositions are part of our ordinary understanding of language, contradictory pairs are not, but are a philosophical understanding of a linguistic structure that has a specifically philosophical, dialectical, purpose. The rest of the De Interpretatione, from chapter 6 on, is the examination of contradiction. Chapters 7–9 classify contradictory pairs by different criteria. Each of these chapters isolates an exception to “the rule that, in every contradictory pair, one member is true and the other false” (79). Chapter 7 looks at the first exception to the rule, “non-universal statements about universals” (91). Whitaker’s project looks good here, since he then shows the dialectical uses of such propositions, and denies their value for the deductive logic of the Analytics. Similarly, in Chapter 8 Aristotle looks at “apparently simple assertions... which are not single” (105), which also have important uses in dialectic. Finally, chapter 9 looks at the third exception to the rule, future singular assertions. One payoff of this book is to place the sea battle discussion in its Aristotelian context. [End Page 459] Whitaker says that most discussions of the sea battle assume that what is at stake is what he calls the “Principle of Bivalence” in which every assertion is either true or false. He instead insists that it is contradictory pairs, not single assertions, that are being tested by future contingents. He thus concludes: “Dialectic is a universal discipline, and its questioning can cover any subject where a question can be posed which has a right and a wrong answer. Chapters 7 to 9... demonstrate that there are limits to the universality of dialectic” (128).Whitaker follows the De Interpretatione chapter by chapter in the remainder of the book. He shows how the later chapters assist the dialectician in “sorting assertions into contradictory pairs” (181). And just as De Interpretatione begins with a consideration of the relation of language, thought, and the world, so it ends by showing the connection between contradictory propositions and opposed beliefs.Whitaker rarely strays from the De Interpretatione to show how our understanding of dialectic is improved by attention to this prerequisite. When he does, for example in a very short discussion of the relation of problems and propositions in the Topics, the results are illuminating. I would have liked more. This book should be useful to the growing numbers of scholars interested in Aristotle’s art of dialectic...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:680 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER 1995 cal advance over the criticisms of the Parmenidesas to say how the Theaetetusshould be called an "Eleatic" dialogue. The Sophist then reintroduces form, but in its epistemological aspect alone. Extensive use is made of the method of division, presented in the commentary as a rigorous method for precise definition, yet the Sophistfails to distinguish sophistry from philosophy. Two reasons are given. The final division locates sophistry under the productive, rather than the acquisitive arts. (The commentary indicates no surprise at sophistry being categorized as an art at all.) Moreover, the method of division makes no use of value, the real distinguishing feature of the two types of art, although Dorter argues that allusion is made to value through references to the Republic'stheory of soul. The Statesman fills in the missing feature by introducing measurement against the standard of the mean as opposed to relative measurement, finally reintegrating both features that Dorter considers salient aspects of Platonic forms: universality (sameness) from the Sophistand now value (the mean) in the Statesman. The commentary finds that the use of division in the Statesman, where it is not strictly dichotomous, evidences a "decline from the rigor and precision of the divisions in the Sophist"(l 8 l), despite the rejection of division by strict halving in the Phaedrusand in Aristotle. Lack of rigor is not, however, a reproach in Dorter's mind. This is a theme he first develops in commenting on the Parmenides. The methods of division and hypothesis "converge in the form of the good" (227). But where Plato would give "content to the Idea of the good, he eschews any formal methodology whatever, and resorts to the ambiguous world of myth" (242). Ultimately, on this view, assertions about the forms, and responses to many of the Parmenides' criticisms rest on analogy (3off.). Since analogy is identified with a breakdown of"rigor, analogy implies not a theory of proper proportions, but the use of poetic metaphor. The explanatory power of the theory of forms comes up short, which is not a fault of the specific theory of forms, but a fault in the nature of all theory. That rigor must inevitably be.jettisoned is a conclusion taken perhaps too much to heart in a commentary that voices the compelling view that these dialogues are masterpieces in metaphysics. DAVID AMBUEL Mary Washington College David J. Furlr and Alexander Nehemas, editors. Aristotle's "Rhetoric": Philosophical Essays. Proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium Aristotelicum. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. xv + 322. Cloth, $45.oo. The Symposium Aristotelicum is a group of Aristotelian scholars who meet every three years, and publish a record of their proceedings. In 199~ they turned their attention to the Rhetoric.This, then, is a series of essays by Aristotelian scholars--more precisely, by scholars of ancient philosophy, since a couple are really specialists on Plato--looking at the Rhetoric. Few are identified as specialists on the Rhetoric itself, and none on the history of rhetoric or on classical oratory. People in those other groups would have very different, but of course not necessarily better, things to say about the Rhetoric. BOOK REVIEWS 68~ Nehemas states the conception of the project in his Introduction: "The essays presented in the 199o symposium and collected here.., address specific texts on the Rhetoric itself, but all of them also connect the Rhetoric with Aristotle's logical, methodological, ethical/political, and poetic views and treatises. A further central concern is, of course, the issue whether Aristotle does or does not respond to Plato's challenge against rhetoric successfully... " (xiii). As I will show, that "of course" is very problematic. The collection is divided into four sections. "The Arguments of Rhetoric" starts with M. F. Burnyeat's "Enthymeme: Aristotle on the Logic of Persuasion," which sets itself the task of determining whether, when Aristotle defines the enthymeme as a sullogismos tis, he means to call rhetorical argument a kind of syliogizing or "a sullogismos of a kind," and along the way offers an account of how Aristotle came later to be read as thinking of the enthymeme as a syllogism with a suppressed premise...

Spinoza is the great philosopher of the imagination and the first great philosopher of democracy. Rather than seeing democracy as a form of government that has overcome the need for imagination and symbols, he shows in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that an enlightened state depends on three myths: the myth of the sovereignty of the people so as to reconcile democracy as rule by the people with each individual living as he or she wants to live; the myth that we are a people, emotionally and morally tied to some people more than to others; and, finally, the myth that the people comprises individuals who are responsible for their own destinies. The democratic imagination differs from earlier forms of politics in that the people construct the social imaginary for themselves and are guided by it without deception. It is the social imaginary thus created, or these three myths, that make room for freedom of thought and therefore for democracy.

Spinoza presents a picture of the good human life in which being rational and being reasonable or sociable are mutually supporting: the philosopher makes the best citizen, and citizenship is the best route to philosophy and adequate ideas. Crucial to this mutual implication are the roles of religion and politics in promoting obedience. It is through obedience that people can become “of one mind and one body” in the absence of adequate ideas, through the presence of shared empowering imaginations and emotions.

Politics V presents preserving and destroying the constitution as exhaustive alternatives, leaving no apparent room for improving the constitution. Aristotle claims that ‘if we know the causes by which constitutions are destroyed we also know the causes by which they are preserved; for opposites create opposites, and destruction is the opposite of security’ (V.8.1307b26–29). The first seven chapters present the causes by which constitutions are destroyed, and then chapters 8 and 9 show the causes by which they are preserved. Yet in important ways, the dictum is false: knowing the causes of constitutional change is not equivalent to knowing how constitutions are preserved, and, more radically, destruction and security are not the only alternatives facing someone in potentially revolutionary situations. The many ways in which knowledge of the causes of factions and knowledge of the methods of preservation are not equivalent supply the energy and interest that drive Book V’s argument.