_Rhetoric_ is the sixth volume in The New Hackett Aristotle series, a series featuring translations, with Introductions and Notes, by C. D. C. Reeve, Delta Kappa Epsilon Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The series will eventually include all of Aristotle's works.

In this article I present an original interpretation of Roy Bhaskar’s project in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. His major move is to separate an ontological dialectic from a critical dialectic, which in Hegel are laminated together. The ontological dialectic, which in Hegel is the self-unfolding of spirit, becomes a realist and relational philosophical anthropology. The critical dialectic, which in Hegel is confined to retracing the steps of spirit, now becomes an active force, dialectical critique, which interposes into the ontological (...) dialectic at the ‘fourth dimension’ of a naturalistically reconfigured account of relational human nature, agency. This account allows Bhaskar to explain and vindicate the crucial role social criticism must play in any realistic project of self-emancipation, and to create a space that didn’t exist in Hegel for an open-ended concrete utopianism. Freedom is thus the actualization of human nature, but is not automatic: the relation of human nature to freedom is mediated historically through dialectical critique, which, informed by concrete utopianism, can have emancipatory power. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 13-44 Authors Craig Reeves, Brunel University Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 12 Journal Issue Volume 12, Number 1 / 2013. (shrink)

Beginning with an introduction to the life and times of Plato, this text is a dialogue between a fictional Plato and a contemporary college student with majors both in business and philosophy.

Aristotle on Practical Wisdom is the first full-scale commentary on Nicomachean Ethics VI to be issued in a century, and the most illuminating ever. A meticulous translation with facing-page analysis enables readers to engage directly with Aristotle's account, while the lucid introduction locates it in the context of his—and later—ethical thought.

In this paper I argue that Theodor W. Adorno 's philosophy of freedom needs an ontological picture of the world. Adorno does not make his view of natural order explicit, but I suggest it could be neither the chaotic nor the strictly determined ontological images common to idealism and positivism, and that it would have to make intelligible the possibility both of human freedom and of critical social science. I consider two possible candidates, Nancy Cartwright 's ‘patchwork of laws’, and (...) Roy Bhaskar 's critical realism. Arguing that Cartwright 's position conflicts with the spirit of Adorno 's philosophy, I suggest that Bhaskar 's realism is compatible with and to a significant extent implicit in Adorno 's position. Whilst Adorno is clearly not a critical realist, Bhaskar 's position does provide the best overall account of the ontological commitments of Adorno 's critical theory. It becomes possible in turn to locate Bhaskar 's arguments in a broader critical tradition and give fuller expression to the concerns that structure his work, in particular by locating the epistemic fallacy in the narrative account of the natural history of subjective reason and its tendency towards ‘identity thinking ’. The discussion goes on to consider the interdependence of reason, nature and freedom in the idea of emancipatory critique, confirming the deeper affinities between critical realism and critical theory. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking work, C. D. C. Reeve uses a fundamental problem--the Primacy Dilemma--to explore Aristotle's metaphysics, epistemology, dialectic, philosophy of mind, and theology in a new way. At a time when Aristotle is most often studied piecemeal, Reeve attempts to see him both in detail and as a whole, so that it is from detailed analysis of hundreds of particular passages, drawn from dozens of Aristotelian treatises, and translated in full that his overall picture of Aristotle emerges. (...) Primarily a book for philosophers and advanced students with an interest in the fundamental problems with which Aristotle is grappling, Substantial Knowledge's clear, non-technical and engaging style will appeal to any reader eager to explore Aristotle's difficult but extraordinarily rewarding thought. (shrink)

Recent months have brought forth a new edition of Nemesianus and a 294-page study of the textual tradition that he shares with Calpurnius. The edition, prepared by P. Volpilhac for Budé , offers nothing new on the tradition beyond reports of a few manuscripts known to previous editors; but Luigi Castagna's book I bucolici latini minori: una ricerca di critica testuale makes an earnest attempt at solving once and for all the problems that survived the last contribution of any weight, (...) Giarratano's edition . Though most of what Castagna says is true, however, his readers may be cushioned against the sharper points by an undue amount of padding, which also fails to hide gaps. Before he proceeds to his own edition of Nemesianus, therefore, a few things can usefully be said. (shrink)

In this essay, I want to explore the possibility that the success of narrative in stimulating empathy comes from the relation that narrative bears to emotion—where emotion is a kind of proto-narrative that possibly accounts for the structure and range of narratives themselves —and that our familiarity with emotions as micro-narratives results in the motivation of narrative. That is, the resolution of events occurs in terms of feeling rather than other forms of closure, since other forms of closure represent literal (...) endings as, quite simply, the cessation of events whereas emotion achieves its end by being felt or translated in empathetic terms and in ways that endure beyond the formality of the fictive event that ends the narrative. I will be using Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart (1999) and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) to discuss narrative and emotions, or the role of emotion in motivating narrative events and the role of narrative in conveying and stirring emotion in the reader. (shrink)

Narrated in the first person, Peter Carey’s novel about the life of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly incorporates other aspects of speech derived both from Carey’s personal experience and from the editorial process. Kelly's voice is toned down to some extent by virtue of the latter, introducing expressions Kelly himself would not have used. Identifying these elements, along with the specific attributes of Kelly’s own speech, enjoins a diversity of cultural and social groupings that intersect and, in some instances, compete with (...) or contradict one another. Shifts in speakers might be signalled by textual markers or by adopting different expressive qualities and speech patterns, which may or may not include a change in grammatical person. In this novel, at one instance, a shift in person is apparent, but I want to argue, not necessarily a shift in the identity of the speaker because, although the grammatical voice shifts, its qualitative features are largely unaltered. The shift nonetheless introduces a significant change. Paradoxically, as far as literary theory is concerned, the subjective qualities produced through voice mean that stylisations of speech may be indicative of character point of view, rather than what is understood to be narrative voice, because they might function in narrative as inflections of speech that do not correspond to the established voice of the grammatically instanced speaker—offering a focalised perspective instead. The shift in True History presents problems in these terms, however: the point of view instanced here is clearly that belonging to the speaker, though the voice is Kelly’s, for the narrator’s point of view determines the generality of the descriptive terms where once these were specific and personal. Had the novel been narrated wholly in third person, an unproblematic reading of Kelly’s point of view, suggested by the use of his voice, would be possible. But the shift undermines this—Kelly’s point of view gives way to another, instanced in the shift that takes place in narrative voice. Carey, in other words, inverts the convention. This is not an instance of free indirect style or discourse, where grammatical mood is at odds with the speaker’s position and tenses align with the implicated subject position of another. The same features of voice that might identify character point of view must, in absence of any disparity of mood or tone, function in respect to narrative voice to convey something of its speaker’s subjectivity, and this seems apparent here: the speaker shares Kelly’s subjective emotional and intellectual perspective, but no longer occupies the subject position. Carey’s voicing of the bushranger therefore complicates distinctions between voice and point of view by revealing qualitative features of voice to be important to the question of who is speaking the narrative. (shrink)

Using hokku poet Basho’s aesthetics of wandering, as defined by Thomas Heyd, I argue that, by detailing the excruciating pointlessness of work undertaken according to commands that take little or no account of their feasibility, Richard Flanagan’s novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (which takes its title from Basho's work) transforms the features of this aesthetics into the lived experience of prisoners of war on the ‘line’. In doing so, Flanagan transfers Basho’s aesthetics into a represented actuality through (...) the privileging of subjectivity over identity and the dissolution of the body on the line. The three prongs to Basho’s aesthetics are found in Flanagan’s novel. In this, Flanagan is identifying the complexity of meanings evident in the terminology of such aesthetics, rendering what appears positive in the context of Basho’s poetry negative in its practical application as this is articulated through the prisoners’ wartime experiences. Rather than being formative, Flanagan’s novel suggests wartime experience has a complexly ‘opposite’ effect. This is apparent in the complications of identity represented in post-war terms as a disunity (rather than a coherent unity), as articulated through the use of spatial metaphors that reverse the formative intensities of subjectivity and body through symbolic acts of dispersal and dissolution. (shrink)

Benjamin S. Bloom and a large committee of educators did extensive research to develop a taxonomy of global educational goals and of ways to measure their achievement in the classroom. The result was a taxonomy of three domains: Cognitive, Affective, and Motor Skills. This paper examines the cognitive and affective domains and applies them to teaching business ethics. Each of the six levels of the cognitive domain is explained. A six-step case method model is used to illustrate how the six (...) cognitive levels might be used and tested in the classroom. The five levels of the affective domain are also described. They are illustrated behaviorally in terms of a student's increasing interest, motivation and commitment to business ethics. (shrink)

The demand for female labor is a central explanatory component of macrostructural theories of gender stratification. This study analyzes how the structural demand for female labor affects gender differences in labor force participation. The authors develop a measure of the gendered demand for labor by indexing the degree to which the occupational structure is skewed toward usually male or female occupations. Using census data from 1910 through 1990 and National Longitudinal Sample of Youth data from 261 contemporary U.S. labor markets, (...) the authors show that the gender difference in labor force participation covaries across time and space with this measure of the demand for female labor. (shrink)

"Even those already familiar with Aristotle may be surprised to learn that discussions of theological topics can be found in so many of his works. Reeve's idea of packaging these texts sequentially along with commentary and notes is brilliant. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Aristotle's theology."_— S. Marc Cohen_,__Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, University of Washington.

How should international law figure into the practical reasoning of agents who fall under its jurisdiction? How should the existence of an international legal norm regulating some activity affect a subject’s decision-making about that activity? This is a question concerning the general moral authority of international law. It concerns not simply the kind of authority international law claims, but the character of the authority it actually has. An authority, as I will use the term, is moral obligation producing: if x (...) (e.g., a person, institution, or law) has authority over an agent, then the directives of x produce a significant reason for the agent to comply with the terms of the directive. This paper concerns the sense in which international law, and the law of nascent legal systems generally, generate moral obligations for their subjects, i.e., for those who fall under their claimed jurisdiction. (shrink)

This article considers and criticizes criminal law‘s assumption of the moral autonomy of individuals, showing how that view rests on questionable and obscure Kantian commitments about the self, and proposes a naturalistic alternative developed through a synthetic reading of Adorno‘s and Bhaskar‘s account of the subject in relation to nature and society. As an embodied, emergent, changing subject whose practically rational powers are emergent, polymorphous, and contingent, the subject‘s moral autonomy is dependent on the conditions for experiences of solidarity in (...) four-planar nature. This view makes criminal theory‘s Autonomy Assumption look deeply questionable; autonomy must be a complex, nuanced open question, not an abstract, a priori default assumption. (shrink)

In his much-explored argument for the tripartition of the soul in book IV of the Republic, Socrates makes use of two principles, which I shall call the principle of opposition and the principle of qualification. The aim of the present paper is to explain, in particular, the second of these principles, so as to reveal its role in that argument and in the conception of an appetite and of the appetitive part that is central to the larger argument of the (...) Republic as a whole. Section 1 briefly introduces the principle of opposition, analyzes the principle of qualification, and presents the argument for tripartition. Section 2 uses the analysis of the principle of qualification to interpret a claim Socrates makes about the soul and its relation to the good, which seems at odds with the account of appetites uncovered in Sect. 1. Then, in Sect. 3, the relevance of the principle of qualification to Socratic intellectualism—the view that knowledge is sufficient for virtue—is explored. In Sect. 4, appetites are returned to with the focus now on the varieties of them that Socrates recognizes. In Sect. 5, a view is put forward about the nature of the appetitive part (Appetite), its beliefs, and its ability to be persuaded by the rational part (Reason). In Sect. 6, it is argued that Appetite and Reason are both souls, capable of working in harmony, but also of being opposed, thereby underwriting an important part of the analogy between the polis and the soul on which much of the Republic relies. (shrink)

Val Plumwood argued for a reworking of our concept of wilderness in ways that would both recognize indigenous influence and expand the official "fake" history to include perspective from the Others'side. Borrowing from Plumwood's logic of colonization, I explore how the official history of wilderness in the United States of America is similar to Tasmania's "fake" history. I offer a philosophical analysis of Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in the case of Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823) where the "wilderness" finds its (...) first legal articulation. I argue that although multiple erasures of the Other as found in Marshall's concept of wilderness are serious problems, they do not support wilderness scepticism. Rather, in order to reshape the concept of wilderness in a new non-colonizing way, its antecedents must be clearly understood. Only then can we escape the precedents of control and find an ethical basis to repair the nature/culture split ending the war on the Other. (shrink)

Endeavours to map out a piece of the intellectual history of this century which once almost faded from memory. In 1941 William Temple, then Archbishop of York, called for a Christian social philosophy and in so doing voiced a concern that had been gathering momentum all through the 30s, sharpened by the challenge of authoritarian regimes, left and right, and had formed the focus of the Oxford Conference of Church, Community and State in 1937.

Purpose As data-driven tools increasingly shape our life and tech ethics crises become strikingly frequent, data ethics coursework is urgently needed. The purpose of this study is to map the field of data ethics curricula, tracking relations between courses, instructors, texts and writers, and present a proof-of-concept interactive website for exploring these relations. This method is designed to be used in curricular research and development and provides multiple vantage points on this multidisciplinary field. Design/methodology/approach The authors use data science methods (...) to foster insights about the field of data ethics education and literature. The authors present a semantic, linked open data graph in the Resource Description Framework, along with proof-of-concept analyses and an exploratory website. Its framework is open-source and language-agnostic, providing the seed for future contributions of code, syllabi and resources from the global data ethics community. Findings This method provides a convenient means of exploring an overview of the field of data ethics’ social and textual relations. For educators designing or refining a course, the authors provide a method for curricular introspection and discovery of transdisciplinary curricula. Research limitations/implications The syllabi the authors have collected are self-selected and represent only a subset of the field. Furthermore, this method exclusively represents a course’s assigned literature rather than a holistic view of what courses teach. The authors present a prototype rather than a finished product. Originality/value This curricular survey provides a new way of modeling a field of study, using existing ontologies to organize graph data into a comprehensible overview. This framework may be repurposed to map the institutional knowledge structures of other disciplines, as well. (shrink)

A problem is posed: Is pleasure choiceworthy, or not? The answerer claims that yes, it is. The questioner must refute him by asking questions—by offering him premises to accept or reject. The questioner succeeds if he forces the answerer to accept a proposition contrary to the one he undertook to defend, and fails if the answerer always accepts or rejects premises in a way consistent with that proposition. To a first approximation, dialectic is the distinctive method of Aristotelian philosophy. At (...) the heart of dialectic is the dialectical deduction. This article discusses Aristotle's philosophical method, focusing on dialectical premises, endoxa, and aporiai. It also examines the uses of dialectic in intellectual training, ordinary discussion, and the philosophical sciences, as well as in regard to scientific starting points or first principles. The article concludes by returning to dialectic and philosophy and an important difference between them. (shrink)