• 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
  • Machiavelli and the History of Prudence
    Philosophy and Rhetoric 24 (1): 73-76. 1991.
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    Why Pluralism Now?
    The Monist 73 (3): 388-410. 1990.
    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 …Read more
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    How to Develop Ideas
    Teaching Philosophy 6 (2): 97-102. 1983.
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    The Ethical Criticism of Reasoning
    Philosophy and Rhetoric 31 (2). 1998.
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    Euthyphro Prosecutes a Human Rights Violation
    Philosophy and Literature 38 (2): 510-527. 2014.
    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 Euthyph…Read more
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    Spinoza and the Discovery of Morality
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 23 (4). 2006.
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    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 …Read more
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    Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character
    University of Chicago Press. 1994.
    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 …Read more