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From Puzzles to Principles?: Essays on Aristotle's DialecticLexington 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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54Spinoza's "Ethics": Don't Imitate God; There's a Model of Human Nature for YouPhilosophy 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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67Review of Judith N. Shklar: Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory (review)Ethics 80 (4): 323-323. 1970.
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3Truth in Politics- Ethical Argument, Ethical Knowledge, and Ethical TruthQuest - and African Journal of Philosophy 16 (1-2): 220-237. 2002.
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11Review of Richard H. Brown: A Poetic for Sociology: Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences (review)Ethics 89 (2): 217-220. 1979.
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13Spinoza and the Cunning of ImaginationUniversity 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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18Plato’s Crito On the Nature of Persuasion and ObediencePolis 29 (1): 1-20. 2012.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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17Charmides and the Virtue of Opacity: An Early Chapter in the Hitory of the IndividualReview of Metaphysics 71 (3). 2017.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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13Narratice, Rhetorical Argument, and Ethical AuthorityLaw 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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38 Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Prudence in the Interpretation of the ConstitutionIn 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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After Virtu: rhetoric, prudence and moral pluralism in MachiavelliHistory of Political Thought 17 (2): 195-223. 1996.
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4Aristotle's Politics V As An ExampleHistory 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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31Spinoza’s Democratic ImaginationThe European Legacy 19 (7): 833-853. 2014.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 …Read more
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7Factions and the Paradox of Aristotelian Practical SciencePolis 22 (2): 181-205. 2005.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' . The first seven chapters present the causes by which constitutions are destroyed, and then chapters 8 and 9 show the causes by which they …Read more
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37Prolegomenon to a history of prudence: A critical synthesisSocial Epistemology 1 (1). 1987.No abstract
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16Colloquium 2: Living Well and Living Together: Politics VII 1-3 and the Discovery of the Common LifeProceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 25 (1): 43-67. 2010.
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1120 Love Is All You Need: Freedom of Thought versus Freedom of ActionIn Francis J. Mootz (ed.), On Philosophy in American Law, Cambridge University Press. pp. 167. 2009.
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28Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance (review)New Vico Studies 5 (n/a): 198-199. 1987.
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51Aristotle's metaphysics of moralsJournal of the History of Philosophy 27 (1): 7-28. 1989.The distinction from the "metaphysics" between rational and irrational potencies is inadequate to explicate the idea of moral virtue as a "hexis prohairetike", A habit concerned with choice. Aristotle's definition of virtue articulates a connection between potency and act more complex than either possible or necessary in the theoretical sciences. In ethics, The actuality to be explained is not this good action but this action "qua" the action of a good man. Analysis of that relation allows us to…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Law |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |