Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle - Hardcover

Collins II, James Henderson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199358591 ISBN 13: 9780199358595

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

James Collins is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California. His dissertation was entitled "Philosophical Advertisements: Protreptic Marketing in Fourth-century Greek Culture."

Review:

"The organization of the work is unbalanced...This imbalance, however, works well in proving the main thesis of the book: that, in the fourth century, there is no protreptic genre, but only progress towards it. Collins has given a modern facelift to this type of study, which broadens the readership of the book to include not only the handful of specialists in generic composition but also scholars of philosophy, rhetoric, education, and intellectual history." --Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, The Classical World

"[Collins] succeeds in highlighting the carefulness by which fourth-century philosophers addressed possible students of their new form of education that required an unseen commitment to the art and challenged traditional values of political prestige. The book offers
valuable new perspectives and refreshing insights about important texts, especially concerning the interplay of intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrative levels. Less attention is
given to the problem of identifying the ideal reader of these texts, the study of which would be a useful supplement to contextualise the results of this welcome addition to the scholarship on the intellectual world of fourth-century Athens." --Thomas G.M. Blank, The Classical Review

"...[An] inspring book.... Collins' book is an altogether welcome contribution to our understanding of the cultural context in which Plato's philosophy originated." --Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"...this book makes a convincing case for the dazzling subtlety of so-called 'philosophical' school-masters' student-luring literary self-representations. Scholars concerned with the 'protreptic' genre should study it carefully, as well as those working on the Euthydemus, Isocrates' speeches about 'philosophy,' and mid-fourth-century Athenian intellectual history." --Classical Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0199358591
• ISBN 13: 9780199358595
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320