Eugene Garver

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.

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

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...

We are all pluralists today. Ecumenism—in religion, in literary criticism, in philosophy—seems obligatory, although what it requires and how sincere its professions are both are open to dispute. Some people are reluctant pluraliste, disappointed with the inescapable fact of plurality, while others embrace it with delight and hope. Everyone is a pluralist—even people whom no one else thinks of as pluralists assert that they are themselves pluralists. It takes no high theory but brute observation alone to see the omnipresence and inevitability of plurality. The plurality of philosophies seems a permanent part of philosophy in a way that it never did before. A standard introductory ethics course must include sections on Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Mill, but none of those thinkers would have taught ethics by presenting a series of rival points of view; students evaluating my courses have to testify that I encourage the examination and expression of different points of view. Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant were not pluralists and saw no need to try to do justice to competing views, but instead expressed conviction that they were about to put an end to debate and disagreement by putting philosophy on a firm scientific basis. If those older ambitions still exist, they are no longer displayed in public.

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 see more of the complexities of the relation of passion to action, And to give more meaning to aristotle's conception of choice

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Can Virtue Be Bought?Eugene Garver1. The problem: Epistemic elitism or cognitive dominanceDemocracy and rationality can be enemies. Superior intelligence and information can silence people, and the voices of reason can be drowned out by anti-intellectual populism. Given the dearth of both democracy and rationality in contemporary American politics, I hope that each can be fortified by association with the other, but I don't think that mutual reinforcement is easy. I start by giving short quotations from two of the most significant contemporary thinkers who question the relation between democracy and intelligence.First a thesis from James Bohman that sets the challenge for practical intelligence and rhetoric in a democracy: "Deliberative democracy should not reward those groups who simply are better situated to get what they want by public and discursive means; its standard of political equality cannot endorse any kind of cognitive elitism" (1997, 332).1Next, a longer passage from Henry Richardson:The fatal objection to an objectivist interpretation of arbitrary power [in which the public good is thought of as a determinate object] is that it excludes from counting as domination what should be counted as one of its primary cases, namely domination on the basis of superior knowledge and information. Whatever the content of the public good may be, we may suppose—absent liberal justificational restrictions—that there are some people who are relatively expert in discerning it. One way to track the public good with reasonable reliability, then, is to turn political decisions over to those experts or wise persons. If we accept an objectivist interpretation of what "nonarbitrary power" means, then we could not count such Platonic guardians as dominating us. Intuitively, however, I think that we would: They would be dominating us precisely in virtue of their superior knowledge and information about the public good. (2002, 41)2 [End Page 353]Bohman worries about the injustice of unequal powers of eloquence. Richardson worries about what I think is a harder problem, the injustice of unequal powers of practical intelligence, the domination by superior knowledge. These two concerns, rhetorical and epistemic, are related. In Hobbes's wonderful phrase, "eloquence is seeming prudence," everything turns on the permanently contested relation between the appearance of facility with public and discursive means and the reality of superior practical knowledge. The only practical knowledge worth worrying about is manifested practical knowledge.Richardson and Bohman pose the ethical problem of what happens to community when there are claims to superior practical wisdom. The question isn't whether such claims are true or false, but the conditions under which they can be asserted and accepted. When are successful claims to knowledge "arbitrary," "dominating," or in a word, unjust? Thus, David Estlund writes, "Even granting that some people might be far better at making the morally and technically best political decisions, such invidious comparisons among citizens are bound to be open to reasonable disagreement" (2000, 137). But the issue is whether such reasonable disagreement is itself grounds for denying the comparison. Why is a judgment of better and worse necessarily "invidious"? When is disagreement about what is the best political decision a "reasonable" disagreement?Of course we should worry when eloquence silences people. But many other things silence citizens, too. Some argue, for example, that the discursive power of cross-burning "has a silencing effect" since it intimidates African Americans, and similar arguments have been made about how pornography silences women, but it would be strange to call these powers superior eloquence, certainly not in the sense that Bohman, Richardson, and Estlund worry about (Fiss 1996, 119).3 Many forms of coercion and ways of limiting freedom have nothing to do with silencing, as they prevent us from even getting to a point where there can be discussion. Extra-discursive signs of power, such as age, wealth, or difference, can inhibit me from speaking my mind. The personal experience of a purported victim is hard to argue against. So are people with access to powerful symbols.For example, consider the resistance to some forms of victim impact statements. Opponents argue that these are too emotional to have probative value. Their presence is unfair. They are unfair because...

“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. Close examination of Aristotle’s treatise, Garver finds, reveals a significant, practical role for philosophy to play in politics. Philosophers present arguments about issues—such as the right and the good, justice and modes of governance, the relation between the good person and the good citizen, and the character of a good life—that politicians must then make appealing to their fellow citizens. Completing Garver’s trilogy on Aristotle’s unique vision, _Aristotle’s Politics_ yields new ways of thinking about ethics and politics, ancient and modern

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 dominate others has the same psychic source as the desire for friendship and for political reciprocity.