It has been a decade since the phrase virtue argumentation was introduced, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that it burst onto the scene, it would be just as much of an understatement to say that it has gone unnoticed. Trying to strike the virtuous mean between the extremes of hyperbole and litotes, then, we can fairly characterize it as a way of thinking about arguments and argumentation that has steadily attracted more and more attention from argumentation (...) theorists. We hope it is neither too late for an introduction to the field nor too soon for some retrospective assessment of where things stand. (shrink)

This paper considers further evidence that five comic poets as opposed to three competed at the Lenaia and City Dionysia festivals in Athens during the Peloponnesian War. Aristophanes’ abuse of his comic rivals Phrynichos, Ameipsias and Lykis in the opening scene ofFrogs, produced at the Lenaia of 405, is interpreted as a response to his immediate competitors at the dramatic contest that year. A survey of the evidence elsewhere in comedy suggests that comic poets usually reserved such attacks on rival (...) poets for occasions when all were in direct competition at the same festival. Further analysis of Aristophanes’ competitive strategies also suggests these poets immediate participation in the festival and therefore that five poets competed at the Lenaia that year. (shrink)

Scholars have long recognized that hypothêkai, or instructional wisdom sayings, served as building blocks for larger structures of Greek wisdom poetry. Yet the mechanism that gets from saying to poem has never been traced in detail. If the transition involves more than piling sayings on top of each other, what intervenes? Focusing on the archaic hexametrical tradition of Homer and Hesiod, the paper develops a repertory of variations and expansions by which the primary genre, the hypothêkê speech-act, is transformed into (...) a secondary genre—the larger-scale wisdom constructions we find in various Homeric speeches and much if not all of the Works and Days. The paper first argues for a precise formal description of the hypothêkê saying in the archaic hexameter; it then develops a toolbox of variations on the saying's basic form. Finally, the toolbox is put to work in order to read a forty-verse excerpt of Hesiod's Almanac. (shrink)

In this article I generalize ecological theory by developing the notion of separate but linked ecologies. I characterize an ecology by its set of actors, its set of locations, and the relation it involves between these. I then develop two central concepts for the linkage of ecologies: hinges and avatars. The first are issues or strategies that "work" in both ecologies at once. The second are attempts to institutionalize in one ecology a copy or colony of an actor in another. (...) The article investigates the first of these concepts using two detailed examples of hinge analysis between the professional and political ecologies. Both concern medical licensing, the first in 19th-century New York and the second in 19th-century England. For the avatar concept, the article analyzes four less detailed cases linking the professional and university ecologies: computer science, criminal justice, clinical psychology, and applied economics. (shrink)

Stephen Toulmin once observed that ”it has never been customary for philosophers to pay much attention to the rhetoric of mathematical debate’ [Toulmin et al., 1979, An Introduction to Reasoning, Macmillan, London, p. 89]. Might the application of Toulmin’s layout of arguments to mathematics remedy this oversight? Toulmin’s critics fault the layout as requiring so much abstraction as to permit incompatible reconstructions. Mathematical proofs may indeed be represented by fundamentally distinct layouts. However, cases of genuine conflict characteristically reflect an underlying (...) disagreement about the nature of the proof in question. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Humanizing Ritual: Finding the Way to Say “I Love You” Plato and Confucius: The Importance of the Father‐Son Relationship The Guide of Excellence: Making Sense of the Master Making Sense of Virtue: Excelling at Relating From Theory to Practice: Wisely Applied Wisely Balancing Discipline Conclusion: Building a Happy Family on Ritual, Excellence, and Wisdom Notes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Classical Rhetoric and the Promotion of the New WorldAndrew FitzmauriceFor many years historians have characterized the relation between the Old World and the New as an encounter in which the New was assimilated to the Old. There is a striking uniformity in the reasons given for this process. It is argued that in their “discovery” the Europeans encountered a world which was radically different from their own and for (...) which they did not possess the concepts to provide a true account. The only available descriptive tools were the categories of European experience. I shall argue that this historical characterization is unsupported by the first English representations of the New World. While it is true that the New World was represented in terms familiar to English audiences, the reason for this translation was dramatically different from that given by historians. The process of conversion to Old World values arises not from an epistemic shock but from the psychology of persuasion found in classical and humanist rhetoric.The purpose of this essay is not to superimpose a new model for under-standing the interaction between Europe and the New World but rather to contribute to recent challenges to precisely the idea that there was a collective European “response” to the New World. Historians who have stressed that the translation of the new into the familiar was imposed by the limits of the European episteme have based these interpretations largely upon accounts of the Spanish conquest, ethnography, and natural history. It has recently been stressed that Europeans differed on the basis of their nationality in their understanding of the issues raised by the conquest of the New World. 1 In this paper I shall argue that the genre of intellectual engagement was equally important to that understanding. [End Page 221]In his seminal lectures The Old World and the New J. H. Elliott compares the Europeans’ discovery of the New World with the response of the Chinese of the T’ang dynasty to the conquest of Nam Viet. Like the Europeans, the “minds and imaginations” of the Chinese “were preconditioned, so that they saw what they expected to see, and ignored or rejected those features of life in the southern lands for which they were mentally unprepared.” 2 Elliott is careful to observe that “what Europeans saw” on the “far side of the Atlantic” inevitably would “depend on the kind of Europeans involved.” 3 From the example of the Chinese experience of Nam Viet, however, he suggests that Europeans shared in a process through which the New World was assimilated, and he argues that this was epistemic: “it may well be that the human mind has an inherent need to fall back on the familiar object and the standard image, in order to come to terms with the shock of the unfamiliar.” 4Stephen Greenblatt has described this process as rhetorical. He stresses that Europeans possessed “many different and conflicting ways of seeing and describing the world” but claims that “the variety is not infinite,” arguing that Europeans shared “a lumbering, jerry built, but immensely powerful mimetic machinery.” 5 “Wonder,” he argues, is “the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference.” 6 For Greenblatt the rhetorical process by which wonder reifies and appropriates the alien arises from an epistemic crisis; that is, wonder is provoked by the “presence of radical difference.” 7 [End Page 222]Underlying many of these accounts, as Mary Fuller has recently observed, is the sense of a New World outside language, a sense that “there is something self-evident, unambiguous, unified on the other side of language.” 8 Fuller explores the rhetoric of New World narratives by demonstrating that this referent is always absent and that the “other” is inside language.For the majority of authors writing in English about the New World, however, it is not the presence or absence of the “other” that produces their conversion of the alien to the familiar. Most Elizabethan and Jacobean tracts concerning the New World were promotional: their mode was persuasion. The tracts were written in terms of the classical and humanist art... (shrink)

Research Articles Andrew Altman, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.