Abstract

My dissertation connects the reclusiveness of contemporary philosophy to philosophy's voice. That is, the professional philosopher speaks to human beings through his or her writing, yet the conventional writing style employed by most contemporary philosophers is not human. That style--in its implicit commitment to logical argument, intertextuality, and universality --"transcends humanity," in the words of Martha Nussbaum . Nussbaum proposes to "add the study of certain novels to the study of works, on the grounds that without them we will not have a fully adequate statement of a powerful ethical conception ... a fully human philosophy." ;I hope to blur the line between professional and non-professional philosophy. By studying an ancient contrast in philosophical voice, between the deceptively "poetic" voice of Plato and the "scientific" voice of Aristotle; by justifying the conception of moral philosophy as the study of how to live; and by tracing the development of the transcendent, contemporary philosophical voice; I develop a sense of how to humanize that voice, to bring philosophy's pursuit of how to live, out of the cave