Exhortations to Philosophy

UPDATE: See now the excellent review of Exhortations to Philosophy
by Diego De Brasi at Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2015.12.16. 

Hot off the press! And highly recommended...

In Exhortations to Philosophy: the protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle (Oxford 2015), James Henderson Collins II has written a history of the development of the protreptic / hortatory genre, focusing on the crucial figures of Plato and Isocrates.  He also includes an Epilogue "Aristotelian Protreptic and a Stabilized Genre" (pp. 242-264). Here is the abstract from the OUP website:

This book is a study of the literary strategies which the first professional philosophers used to market their respective disciplines. Philosophers of fourth-century BCE Athens developed the emerging genre of the "protreptic" (literally, "turning" or "converting"). Simply put, protreptic discourse uses a rhetoric of conversion that urges a young person to adopt a specific philosophy in order to live a good life. The author argues that the fourth-century philosophers used protreptic discourses to market philosophical practices and to define and legitimize a new cultural institution: the school of higher learning (the first in Western history). Specifically, the book investigates how competing educators in the fourth century produced protreptic discourses by borrowing and transforming traditional and contemporary "voices" in the cultural marketplace. They aimed to introduce and promote their new schools and define the new professionalized discipline of "philosophy." While scholars have typically examined the discourses and practices of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle in isolation from one another, this study rather combines philosophy, narratology, genre theory, and new historicism to focus on the discursive interaction between the three philosophers: each incorporates the discourse of his competitors into his protreptics. Appropriating and transforming the discourses of their competition, these intellectuals created literary texts that introduced their respective disciplines to potential students.

 If I may quote myself, here is what I said in a blurb on the back cover:

This book delineates a sharper picture showing how Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle developed literary tools originating in archaic poetry into the forms of philosophic and scientific discourse that we still depend on today, tools that have since antiquity turned readers away from worse forms of argument towards better ones.

And Paul Woodruff said:

Collins is the first to bring out how a rich, complex literary genre came to be. Protreptic belongs to a unique approach to philosophy; ancient Athens was a marketplace for ways of living philosophically. Anyone seeking to understand the climate of ideas in the fourth century should read this masterly study.

In a later post I hope to discuss his conclusions about the "stabilized genre" of protreptic as it is reflected in the Protrepticus of Aristotle. In the meantime, check it out.

Digital version of key Iamblichus manuscript available online

The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana is digitizing many of the manuscripts from its Plutei collection. Among those that have already been digitized and made available online is Plut.86.03, the most important manuscript of Iamblichus' work De Pythagorica secta (usually referred to in apparati critici as "F"). The manuscript includes: De vita pythagorica, Protrepticus, De communi mathematica scientia, and part of the Introduction to Arithmetic of Nicomachus of Geresa, and some other things. It dates from 1300-1400.

Doug and I have twice traveled to Florence in order to inspect the manuscript, with the assistance of the very helpful Laurenziana librarians and invigilators. We have also worked off of microfilm and printed out copies. But this high-resolution, color version (which can be enlarged) makes this work much easier. Check it out! (Thanks to Stephen Menn for the pointer.)

To the first folio of the whole manuscript:
http://teca.bmlonline.it/ImageViewer/servlet/ImageViewer?idr=TECA0001001287&keyworks=iamblichus

To the first page of the Protrepticus:
http://teca.bmlonline.it/ImageViewer/servlet/ImageViewer?idr=TECA0001001287#page/104/mode/1up

To the eighteenth century catalogue entry:
http://teca.bmlonline.it/ImageViewer/servlet/ImageViewer?idr=TECA0000004361#page/172/mode/1up

To the English instructions for searching the whole database:
http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index_ENG.html

Ettore Bignone (1879-1953)

Ettore Bignone is another titan of 20th century research on Aristotle's early works, and their relationship to Hellenistic Philosophy (especially Epicurus). See our bibliography for references to his publications on the Protrepticus specifically. The source of the above photograph and signature is the frontispiece of:

Epicurea in memoriam HECTORIS BIGNONE: Miscellanea philologica. Università di Genova facoltà di lettere: Instuto di filologia classica, 1959.

Earlier we featured Ingemar Düring.

Notre Dame Workshop on Ancient Philosophy

Isocrates and the Philosophers: Review of Tarik Wareh, The Theory and Practice of Life

I recently reviewed for The Journal of Hellenic Studies Tarik Wareh's monograph The Theory and Practice of Life: Isocrates and the Philosophers (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2012). The review is available in PDF here. From the review:

Wareh makes great progress by giving fuller consideration to the indispensible evidence of Aristotle’s Protrepticus, which has long been recognized as interrelated with Isocrates’ Antidosis, but has not yet been brought to bear on the reconstruction of Isocrates’ own educational methods and priorities, even by more recent scholars of Isocrates. We are only fairly lately beginning to profit greatly from the fortuitous 19th-century recovery of all of Isocrates’ Antidosis and part of Aristotle’s Protrepticus, as Wareh’s careful sifting of the evidence shows. And yet the Antidosis and its immediate context is crucial, since this is the work in which Isocrates defends his educational principles and conception of philosophy at greatest length, in part by attacking the abstract preoccupations and impracticable priorities of the Academy. Aristotle’s defence of theoretical and mathematical science as the heart and soul of philosophical education in the Protrepticus apparently went so far as to produce speeches against theoretical and mathematical philosophy in the voice of an Isocratean character which were then refuted by Aristotle in his own voice, an innovation in the dialogue genre and philosophical polemics that was embraced and imitated by Cicero in his own dialogues.

Ingemar Düring (1903-1984)

I just came across this image and autograph of one of the titans of twentieth-century Aristotle Studies: Ingemar Düring. Download our bibliography for details on his editions, translations, edited anthologies, and articles related to the Protrepticus.

Source: Frontispiece of Untersuchungen Zur Eudemischen Ethik. Akten des 5. Symposium Aristotelicum (Oosterbeek, Niederlande, 21.-29. August 1969). Moraux, Paul, and Harlfinger, Dieter, eds. (Berlin 1971).

Protreptic Aspects of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Our essay "Protreptic Aspects of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics" has been published in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, ed. R. Polansky (Cambridge 2014), pp. 383-409. We have posted it to the "essays" section of www.protrepticus.info (PDF available here).

We hope to show that the overall protreptic plan of Aristotle's ethical writings is based on the plan he used in his published work Protrepticus (Exhortation to Philosophy), by highlighting those passages that primarily offer hortatory or protreptic motivation rather than dialectical argumentation and analysis, and by illustrating several ways that Aristotle adapts certain arguments and examples from his Protrepticus. In this essay we confine our attention to the books definitely attributable to the Nicomachean Ethics (thus excluding the common books).

The volume contains an abundance of good material, including a very useful bibliography by Thornton Lockwood as well as an essay by him on "Competing Ways of Life and Ring Composition (NE x 6-8)", an essay by Rachana Kamtekar on "The Relationship between Aristotle's Ethical and Political Discourses (NE x 9), and an essay by Lawrence Jost on "The Eudemian Ethics and Its Controversial Relationship to the Nicomachean Ethics". So readers of this volume can get a very good overview of the relationship of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics not only to the other works of practical philosophy in the Aristotle Corpus, but also to his most famous (and now fragmentary) popular work. There are 15 other essays on topical aspects of the work, by some of the leading scholars in the field. Check out the list of contributors and table of contents here at the Cambridge University Press (US) website.