Antidosis and Protrepticus

UPDATE: MOVING TO FRONT 2017 January.

We are making available for scholarly use and comment the latest version of our essay: The Antidosis of Isocrates and Aristotle's Protrepticus.

Abstract: Isocrates' Antidosis ("Defense against the Exchange") and Aristotle's Protrepticus ("Exhortation to Philosophy") were recovered from oblivion in the late nineteenth century. In this article we demonstrate that the two texts happen to be directly related. Aristotle's Protrepticus was a response, on behalf of the Academy, to Isocrates' criticism of the Academy and its theoretical preoccupations. -/- Contents: I. Introduction: Protrepticus, text and context II. Authentication of the Protrepticus of Aristotle III. Isocrates and philosophy in Athens in the 4th century IV. The Protrepticus of Aristotle as a response to the Antidosis of Isocrates V. Conclusion: dueling conceptions of philosophy, still dueling.

The essay, originally based on our talks at the Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 2006 and at Yale University in 2007, has been cited in the following:

1. Blank, D. Aristotle’s ‘Academic Course on Rhetoric” and the end of Philodemus, On Rhetoric VIII’ Cronache Ercolanesi 37 (2007), 5-48. 
2. Himanka, J. et al. On filosofoitava: Jälkipuhe Aristoteleeseen. Niin &; Näin 4 (2008), 52-53 at 53. Available here.
3. Van der Meeren, S. Exhortation à la Philosophie: Le dossier Grec Aristote (Paris, 2011).
4. Vetekeikis, T. References to Isocrates in Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric. Literatura 53 (2011), 7-40. Available online here. 
5. Zbigniew Danek. Przeciw komu występuje Izokrates w swoim Liście do Aleksandra?. Roczniki Humanistyczne 3 (2015), 53-65. Available online here.  
6. Mihai, C.-I. Competing Arts: Medicine and Philosophy in Aristotle's Protrepticus. Hermeneia 17 (2016), 87-96. Available here.

You can also reach the document through a link from the essays page on www.protrepticus.info.

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.

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.