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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

What role should it play? And are claims to rationality liberating or oppressive? For the Sake of Argument addresses questions such as these to consider the relationship between thought and character.

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. (shrink)

“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, (...) class='Hi'>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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Politics V presents preserving and destroying the constitution as exhaustive alternatives, leaving no apparent room for improving the constitution. Aristotle claims that 'if we know the causes by which constitutions are destroyed we also know the causes by which they are preserved; for opposites create opposites, and destruction is the opposite of security' . The first seven chapters present the causes by which constitutions are destroyed, and then chapters 8 and 9 show the causes by which they are preserved. Yet (...) in important ways, the dictum is false: knowing the causes of constitutional change is not equivalent to knowing how constitutions are preserved, and, more radically, destruction and security are not the only alternatives facing someone in potentially revolutionary situations. The many ways in which knowledge of the causes of factions and knowledge of the methods of preservation are not equivalent supply the energy and interest that drive Book V's argument. (shrink)

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 many (...) in order for him to obey. If Socrates and the Laws cannot talk to each other, it is because philosophy and politics are incommensurable. If there is common ground, it is because persuasion can make the two, philosophy and politics, commensurable to each other. Socrates exhibits the philosopher’s task as transforming himself from a universal thinker into a particular agent, while the Laws face the opposite challenge, aspiring to a generality that makes them rational and normative, and so open to discourse and persuasion. The many whom Socrates constantly denigrates have the particularity of being fickle and changeable, while the Laws look rigid. Socrates, as he says in the Apology, is always the same. Both sides look to the flexibility and adaptability to circumstances central to rhetoric. (shrink)

Spinoza is the great philosopher of the imagination and the first great philosopher of democracy. Rather than seeing democracy as a form of government that has overcome the need for imagination and symbols, he shows in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that an enlightened state depends on three myths: the myth of the sovereignty of the people so as to reconcile democracy as rule by the people with each individual living as he or she wants to live; the myth that we are (...) a people, emotionally and morally tied to some people more than to others; and, finally, the myth that the people comprises individuals who are responsible for their own destinies. The democratic imagination differs from earlier forms of politics in that the people construct the social imaginary for themselves and are guided by it without deception. It is the social imaginary thus created, or these three myths, that make room for freedom of thought and therefore for democracy. (shrink)

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.

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 understood by juxtaposing it to transparency and opacity, in the issue of whether someone (...) with knowledge of, say, the science of medicine, also knows the subject of medicine, health, or whether health is opaque to that second-order knowledge, and whether such opacity would be a defect or an advantage. In identifying self-knowledge with the knowledge of knowledge, as in many other things, Critias is a parody of Socrates. Critias’s knowledge of knowledge is a form of architectonic knowledge that, because of opacity, makes unnecessary any appeal to an objective truth and goodness beyond their political determinations. As such, it creates a serious challenge to Socratic claims that such appeals are unavoidable. (shrink)

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... (shrink)

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 Euthyphro leads to (...) appropriately troubling and ambivalent feelings about contemporary human rights prosecutions. (shrink)

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 cultivated, and not simply overcome. ​Spinoza initially presents imagination as an inadequate and confused way of thinking, always inferior to ideas that adequately represent things as they are. It would seem to follow that one ought to purge the mind of imaginative ideas and replace them with rational ideas as soon as possible, but as Garver shows, the Ethics don’t allow for this ultimate ethical act until one has cultivated a powerful imagination. This is, for Garver, “the cunning of imagination.” The simple plot of progress becomes, because of the imagination, a complex journey full of reversals and discoveries. For Garver, the “cunning” of the imagination resides in our ability to use imagination to rise above it. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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... (shrink)

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 to apply Aristotle’s (...) analysis to a phenomenon that did not yet exist for him, that of authority, by asking how the acts of asserting and accepting authority can be ethical acts. I take as a test case a peculiarly unfortunate and inept appeal to authority, that offered by the counsel for the District of Columbia in arguing Bolling v Sharp who cited Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott to clinch his point. By seeing just what goes wrong in such a maladroit appeal, I explore the rational, voluntary and ethical dimensions of a decision to accept a given commitment to authority. I use Joseph Raz’s analysis of authority and the relation of reason to authority, yet think I go beyond Raz by exploring the deliberate and voluntary nature of submission to authority. Choosing to be bound by an authority is an ethical act. As such it is always rational and yet never purely rational. The Supreme Court’s choice of authorities is part of its making itself into an authority, and is a paradigm of the ethical act of choosing to be obligated. Choosing to be committed or obligated is a central paradox of political theory and considerations of authority and obligation, at least since early social contract theorists. However, its importance for judicial reasoning, which at the same time chooses to submit to authority and itself becomes an authority, has not been noted. Consideration of the relations between the ethical and the logical can help us better to articulate the constitution of ethical authority. (shrink)