• From Puzzles to Principles?: Essays on Aristotle's Dialectic
    with Allan Bäck, Robert Bolton, J. D. G. Evans, Michael Ferejohn, Lenn E. Goodman, Edward Halper, Martha Husain, Gareth Matthews, and Robin Smith
    Lexington Books. 1999.
    Scholars of classical philosophy have long disputed whether Aristotle was a dialectical thinker. Most agree that Aristotle contrasts dialectical reasoning with demonstrative reasoning, where the former reasons from generally accepted opinions and the latter reasons from the true and primary. Starting with a grasp on truth, demonstration never relinquishes it. Starting with opinion, how could dialectical reasoning ever reach truth, much less the truth about first principles? Is dialectic then an …Read more
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    Spinoza's "Ethics": Don't Imitate God; There's a Model of Human Nature for You
    Philosophy and Theology 24 (2): 155-190. 2012.
    The Preface to Part 4 of Spinoza’s Ethics claims that we all desire to formulate a model of human nature. I show how that model serves the same function in ethics as the creed or articles of faith do in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the function of allowing the imagination to provide a simularcrrum of rationality for finite, practical human beings.
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    Truth in Politics- Ethical Argument, Ethical Knowledge, and Ethical Truth
    Quest - and African Journal of Philosophy 16 (1-2): 220-237. 2002.
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    Review of Gene Sharp: The Politics of Nonviolent Action (review)
    Ethics 84 (3): 266-273. 1974.
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    The Politics of Nonviolent Action
    Political Theory 2 (4): 465-467. 1974.
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    Review of Peter Singer: Democracy and Disobedience (review)
    Ethics 86 (2): 175-179. 1976.
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    Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination
    University of Chicago Press. 2018.
    Spinoza’s Ethics, and its project of proving ethical truths through the geometric method, have attracted and challenged readers for more than three hundred years. In Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination, Eugene Garver uses the imagination as a guiding thread to this work. Other readers have looked at the imagination to account for Spinoza’s understanding of politics and religion, but this is the first inquiry to see it as central to the Ethics as a whole—imagination as a quality to be cultivat…Read more
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    The Crito dramatizes the impossibility, and the indispensability, of persuasion sby locating it between two extremes, Socrates and the Laws, the truths of philosophy and the force of politics. The question is whether those two limits are themselves inside or outside rhetoric. Can philosophy persuade, ormust it always be an alternative sto persuasion? Socrates insists on ignoring the opinion, and the power, of the many, and so the Laws have to show themselves as different from the opinion of the …Read more
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    The Charmides, searching for a definition of temperance, constantly confronts problems of reflexivity, transparency and opacity. Transparency and opacity structures the Charmides, from the dramatic beginning of Socrates peeking inside Charmides’ cloak, to Charmides’ initial depiction of sôphrosynê as concealing what one can do. The final two proposed definitions of temperance in the Charmides, self-knowledge and the knowledge of knowledge, are explicitly reflexive. That reflexivity is best under…Read more
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    Narratice, Rhetorical Argument, and Ethical Authority
    Law and Critique 10 (2): 117-146. 1999.
    The great challenge of rhetorical argument is to make discourse ethical without making it less logical. This challenge is of central importance throughout the full range of practical argument, and understanding the relation of the ethical to the logical is one of the principal contributions the humanities, in this case the study of rhetoric, can make to legal scholarship. Aristotle’s Rhetoric shows how arguments can be ethical and can create ethical relations between speaker and hearer. I intend…Read more
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    8 Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Prudence in the Interpretation of the Constitution
    In eds Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde (ed.), Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader, Yale University Press. pp. 171-195
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    Aristotle's Politics V As An Example
    History of Political Thought 26 (2): 489-208. 2005.
    Virtuous people, unlike the rich and poor, do not form factions. What, then, is the role of philosophical argument within political argument? Politics V can be read as a handbook of practical advice that will help any rulers to stay in power, but it in fact develops a more subtle, and radical, role for philosophy in political argument. Like virtue, philosophy cannot be partisan, but the philosophical understanding of faction that Aristotle presents here makes its own contribution to political st…Read more
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    Aristotle's Politics: Living Well and Living Together
    University of Chicago Press. 2011.
    “Man is a political animal,” Aristotle asserts near the beginning of the _Politics_. In this novel reading of one of the foundational texts of political philosophy, Eugene Garver traces the surprising implications of Aristotle’s claim and explores the treatise’s relevance to ongoing political concerns. Often dismissed as overly grounded in Aristotle’s specific moment in time, in fact the _Politics_ challenges contemporary understandings of human action and allows us to better see ourselves today…Read more
  • Machiavelli and the Politics of Rhetorical Invention
    Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 14 (2). 1985.
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    Aristotle and the Will to Power
    Philosophy in the Contemporary World 13 (2): 74-83. 2006.
    Once we get past moral outrage, Aristotle’s notorious discussion of slavery has several ever more disquieting challenges to modern thinking. Not only are slaves in a certain sense “natural,” but so is the master/slave relationship and so is mastery. While he thinks that living the right kind of state and having the right kind of character is a permanent solution to problems of slavishness, problems of mastery, of the despotic cast of mind, are permanent political problems, since the desire to do…Read more
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    Spinoza's "Ethics"
    Philosophy and Theology 24 (2): 155-190. 2012.
    The Preface to Part 4 of Spinoza’s Ethics claims that we all desire to formulate a model of human nature. I show how that model serves the same function in ethics as the creed or articles of faith do in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the function of allowing the imagination to provide a simularcrrum of rationality for finite, practical human beings.
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    What role should it play? And are claims to rationality liberating or oppressive? For the Sake of Argument addresses questions such as these to consider the relationship between thought and character.
  • Aristotle's "Rhetoric": An Art of Character
    Philosophy and Rhetoric 29 (4): 436-440. 1996.
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    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…Read more