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25In Search of Humanity: Essays in Honor of Clifford Orwin (edited book)Lexington Books. 2015.This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy
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19In Search of Humanity: Essays in Honor of Clifford Orwin (edited book)Lexington Books. 2015.This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy
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14Friendship Beyond ReasonThe European Legacy 28 (8): 807-821. 2023.The ancient philosophers aimed to turn us away from thinking about particularizing affection to thinking about justifiable human relations. The aim of their protreptic discourses was to get their readers, who were citizens, sons, and fathers, to think about their lives by putting these relations into question. I show how this conversion works and explore its political consequences by reading the accounts of friendship in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and then comparing those accounts with the vi…Read more
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16Dostoevsky's Political Thought (edited book)Lexington Books. 2013.This book explores Dostoevsky as a political thinker from his religious and philosophical foundation to nineteenth-century European politics and how themes that he had examined are still relevant for us today
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7How Joseph De Maistre Read Plato's LawsPolis 19 (1-2): 29-43. 2002.Maistre's Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg is modeled on Plato's Laws. Plato and Maistre both demand the political control of natural inquiry, and implement these controls through theodictic conversation. Maistre, following the lead of Plato's legislator, publishes an exemplary conversation about providence between a young man tempted by an atheistic Enlightenment and two older, wiser, and more learned men of affairs. Maistre defends providentialism from materialist interpretations of natural scienc…Read more
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1From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First (review)Review of Metaphysics 55 (3): 618-619. 2002.Blattberg is my former Tel Aviv colleague, a bilingual Canadian patriot, and a student of Charles Taylor and Isaiah Berlin. His work attacks the neutralist and pluralist responses to the political problem posed by the plurality of values. The neutralists elaborate procedures for realizing the shared political things that do not depend on our varied value-conceptions. The neutralists understand the fundamental political act as the juridical adjudication of individuals’ rights-claims. The neutrali…Read more
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10How Joseph De Maistre Read Plato’s LawsPolis 19 (1-2): 29-43. 2002.Maistre’s Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg is modeled on Plato’s Laws. Plato and Maistre both demand the political control of natural inquiry, and implement these controls through theodictic conversation. Maistre, following the lead of Plato’s legislator, publishes an exemplary conversation about providence between a young man tempted by an atheistic Enlightenment and two older, wiser, and more learned men of affairs. Maistre defends providentialism from materialist interpretations of natural scienc…Read more
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28Gender and Rhetoric in Plato's Political ThoughtCambridge University Press. 2002.Gender and Rhetoric in Plato's Thought explores the relation between Plato's Republic and Laws on the set of issues that the Laws itself marks out as fundamental to the comparison: the unity of the virtues, the role of women, and the place of the family. Plato aims to persuade men to abandon the view of the good life that Greek cities and their laws inculcate as the only life worth living for those who would be real men and not effeminate weaklings. What we can learn about Plato is the importanc…Read more
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5Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and ArtPennsylvania State University Press. 2009.Michael Kochin’s radical exploration of rhetoric is built around five fundamental concepts that illuminate how rhetoric functions in the public sphere. To speak persuasively is to bring new things into existence—to create a political movement out of a crowd, or an army out of a mob. _Five Chapters on Rhetoric _explores our path to things through our judgments of character and action. It shows how speech and writing are used to defend the fabric of social life from things or facts. Finally, Kochi…Read more
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1The Politics of Gender and the Psychology of Virtue: A Study in the Interpretation of Plato's "Republic" and "Laws"Dissertation, The University of Chicago. 1996.The language and ideals of Greek political life identified citizenship with manliness. Plato saw this engendering of politics as a threat to the unity, stability, and excellence of a city, for the unmoderated manliness of actual cities, he claimed, fosters bigoted patriotism, female dissipation, and unnatural vice. Moreover, these cities' civic pieties could not match the egoistic appeal of tyranny, for the Greek ideal of masculinity itself points to tyranny as the most manly life. ;Plato's proj…Read more
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13Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and ArtPennsylvania State University Press. 2009."Examines concepts for persuasive communication.
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56From Argument to AssertionArgumentation 23 (3): 387-396. 2009.Acceptance or rejection of factual assertions is a far more important process than logical validation of arguments. Not only are assertions more persuasive than arguments; this is desirable, since we want our beliefs and actions to be reasonable and not just rational. When do we resort to argument? Real speeches heavy on arguments aim to present the speaker as calm, serious, and knowledgeable. In public life, one argues not in order to demonstrate the claim for which one is arguing, but to show …Read more
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28Blattberg, Charles. From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First (review)Review of Metaphysics 55 (3): 618-620. 2002.
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55War, Class, and Justice In Plato’s RepublicReview of Metaphysics 53 (2). 1999.WE SCHOLARS WHO WRITE ABOUT THE Republic have found much to say about the education of Plato’s warriors. We carefully and thoughtfully relate their virtues to those of the Republic ’s philosopher-kings, and even to those of Plato’s Socrates. We have found much less to say about Plato’s peculiar account of that for which they are educated— war. I agree with Leon Craig that war and spiritedness are central to the argument of the Republic. Indeed, I will contend, Socrates’ three different accounts …Read more
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81Individual Narrative and Political CharacterReview of Metaphysics 55 (4). 2002.CONSIDER THE PROBLEM OF INTEGRITY: we all aspire to be true to ourselves, to be today what we were yesterday, to fulfill our promises. One way of addressing the need for integrity, the need to be a whole person, is to think about what it would take to make an intelligible narrative out of one’s experiences. As Charles Taylor writes, “It has often been remarked that making sense of one’s life as a story is... not an optional extra; that our lives exist also in this space of questions, which only …Read more
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37Time and Judgment in Demosthenes' De CoronaPhilosophy and Rhetoric 35 (1): 77-89. 2002.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 77-89 [Access article in PDF] Time and Judgment in Demosthenes' De Corona 1 - [PDF] Michael S. Kochin Hannah Arendt concludes the first volume of The Life of the Mind thus: If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from that pseudo-div…Read more
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36Weeds: Cultivating the Imagination in Medieval Arabic Political PhilosophyJournal of the History of Ideas 60 (3): 399-416. 1999.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Weeds: Cultivating the Imagination in Medieval Arabic Political PhilosophyMichael S. KochinAny reader of Plato’s dialogues in their entirety feels the constant tug of two very different solar motions. In the Laws the young field-legates (agronomoi) of the city move in a twelve-month cycle through each of the divisions of the city’s territory (Laws 760) in obedience to the law and the gods of the city. Socrates, too, moves through the…Read more
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26Time and judgment in demosthenes'Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (1): 77-89. 2002.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 77-89 [Access article in PDF] Time and Judgment in Demosthenes' De Corona 1 - [PDF] Michael S. Kochin Hannah Arendt concludes the first volume of The Life of the Mind thus: If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from that pseudo-div…Read more
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15The unity of virtue and the limitations of magnesia: an essay in memory of Arthur AdkinsHistory of Political Thought 19 (2): 125-141. 1998.In the Republic Plato describes the best city; in the Laws, he describes what he calls the ’second-best city’. I argue that Magnesia, the city of the Laws, is second-best because she fails to promulgate a single concept of human virtue that transcends the allegedly separate virtues of men and women. Magnesia institutionalizes philosophy in the Nocturnal Council to mitigate the consequent ethical flaws, but excludes women from the Council and thus from philosophic inquiry. I show that this exclus…Read more
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Tel Aviv UniversityRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |