Books by Laura Viidebaum
This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of diff... more This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and Isocrates. It highlights the parallel development of the rhetorical tradition that became understood, on the one hand, as a domain of style and persuasive speech, associated with the figure of Lysias, and, on the other, as a kind of philosophical enterprise which makes significant demands on moral and political education in antiquity, epitomized in the work of Isocrates. There are two pivotal moments in which the two rhetoricians were pitted against each other as representatives of different modes of cultural discourse: Athens in the fourth century BCE, as memorably portrayed in Plato's Phaedrus, and Rome in the first century BCE when Dionysius of Halicarnassus proposes to create from the united Lysianic and Isocratean rhetoric the foundation for the ancient rhetorical tradition.
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Papers by Laura Viidebaum
Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome
Dionysius of Halicarnassus' (DH) critical essay on Lysias is a very rich piece of literary cr... more Dionysius of Halicarnassus' (DH) critical essay on Lysias is a very rich piece of literary criticism. In this work DH provides an outline of the critical structure and rhetorical methodology which provide the basis also for his other essays on Attic orators. Yet, his observations on Lysias' style make a strong impression of being left unfinished, an impression that is strengthened by the fact that he leaves significant parts of Lysias' speeches entirely undiscussed. In this paper I concentrate on one of the most intriguing aspects of the essay on Lysias, namely DH’s exploration of the question of χάρις. In order to shed light on the possible ways to interpret DH’s claims of χάρις, an attempt will be made to reconstruct, as far as possible, the context, meanings, and connotations in which χάρις occurs both in DH' other critical essays as well as in earlier writers, from the ancient poets (Homer, Hesiod) to his predecessors in literary criticism (such as Demetrius, On Style). By doing so, this paper addresses and discusses possible ways of understanding DH’s usage of χάρις and focuses especially on exploring why did DH (and indeed why should we?) attribute this characteristic to Lysias in particular.
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Dio Chrysostom poses a crux for classicists: while writing during an extremely productive and int... more Dio Chrysostom poses a crux for classicists: while writing during an extremely productive and interesting period of antiquity (late first early second century CE), his works are difficult to classify and hard to take seriously. In his speeches, Dio refers to himself as a philosopher, but at the same time takes cue from a variety of philosophical doctrines prevalent at the time, and engages in imperial politics in a way that appears to undermine his philosophical commitments. He is surely an eclectic, but the question remains whether he should be considered a philosophical eclectic.
Scholarship on this question is divided: while some modern scholars are happy to characterise Dio as a ‘moral philosopher’ (e.g. Whitmarsh 2001), he is mostly ignored by philosophers and denied a place in the history of philosophy. This paper aims to zoom in to Dio’s engagement with philosophy through a closer focus on his two speeches that have received far less attention in the scholarship than they deserve: speech 70 titled ‘On philosophy’ and 71 ‘On the philosopher’. In these two works, Dio explores the boundaries of what he considers to be philosophical pursuits and the way in which doing philosophy is distinct from any other techne. By trying to establish Dio’s philosophical affiliations, this paper eventually argues that what lies at the core of Dio’s understanding of philosophy is essentially Sokratic ethics, and that it is primarily Dio’s fascination for Sokrates which motivates Dio’s engagement with Stoicism and Cynicism.
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Much of the terminology that is used to describe ancient oratorical texts, be it illustrating its... more Much of the terminology that is used to describe ancient oratorical texts, be it illustrating its literary quality or performative effects, can be traced back to the second and/or first centuries BC – to a time when the context of forensic oratory itself was significantly different from its original fifth-fourth century BC Athenian setting. For instance, one of the first identifiable definitions of ἐνάργεια and ἠθοποιία stems from the first century BC critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus (DH). Admittedly, there are passages in the fragments of his predecessors, most notably in the works of Philodemus (recounting the positions of the so-called kritikoi), that indicate the existence of an elaborated and wide-spread critical terminology at least by a generation before DH. This suggests that various concepts used to discuss literary and performative qualities of oratorical texts had already become part of a shared intellectual property of the theorists of the time.
As we have no evidence that would indicate whether and to what extent this critical terminology was used already by the early rhetoricians and speechwriters themselves, this paper addresses the gap between the forensic texts that originate from the fifth-fourth century BC Athens and the reconstructions and theorisations of these texts by later Greek writers/rhetoricians. In particular, this paper takes its cue from the usage of the concept of ἠθοποιία in first century BC literary criticism to refer back to elements of characterisation in Athenian forensic texts, and conducts 'intellectual archaeology' of a sort to explore the development of this term. There seems to have been some confusion over the meaning of both ἦθος and ἠθοποιία among later (i.e. post-Aristotelian) rhetorical theorists (cf. Worman 2002), and this paper traces out the source for this confusion and shows to what extent this confusion among ancient critics is reflected in the contemporary debates of these concepts.
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Cicero has in recent studies emerged as a much more interesting and intelligent philosopher than ... more Cicero has in recent studies emerged as a much more interesting and intelligent philosopher than has been granted for a long time. And the Ciceronian dialogue form has recently begun to receive the attention that it deserves. In this paper, I will address one specific element in Cicero’s dialogues which characterises his particular take on this form of writing: the political and philosophical underpinnings of the dialogue form. It has already been demonstrated how Cicero’s use of historical or philosophical figures is based on ‘his changing argumentative needs, which are closely related to the condition of the Roman commonwealth’, but in this paper I will explore the agonistic or competitive approach to the dialogue form that Cicero uses to express his views from a literary-philosophical as well as from a political point of view. I will argue that Cicero’s writings consciously set up tensions and oppositions that reflect on the one hand his Academic scepticism (a well-known issue), but on the other manifest his commitment to the Republic – a political system which itself, in its Ciceronian interpretation, stems from antagonism, competition and rivalry.
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Dionysius of Halicarnassus' (DH) critical essay on Lysias is a very rich piece of literary critic... more Dionysius of Halicarnassus' (DH) critical essay on Lysias is a very rich piece of literary criticism. In this work DH provides an outline of the critical structure and rhetorical methodology which provide the basis also for his other essays on Attic orators. Yet, his observations on Lysias' style make a strong impression of being left unfinished, an impression that is strengthened by the fact that he leaves significant parts of Lysias' speeches entirely undiscussed.
In this paper I concentrate on one of the most intriguing aspects of the essay on Lysias, namely DH’s exploration of the question of χάρις. In order to shed light on the possible ways to interpret DH’s claims of χάρις, an attempt will be made to reconstruct, as far as possible, the context, meanings, and connotations in which χάρις occurs both in DH' other critical essays as well as in earlier writers, from the ancient poets (Homer, Hesiod) to his predecessors in literary criticism (such as Demetrius, On Style). By doing so, this paper addresses and discusses possible ways of understanding DH’s usage of χάρις and focuses especially on exploring why did DH (and indeed why should we?) attribute this characteristic to Lysias in particular.
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It has been argued that ancient exhortations to philosophy are pre-philosophical works in that th... more It has been argued that ancient exhortations to philosophy are pre-philosophical works in that they give a broad overview of philosophical arguments (without really ‘doing’ philosophy in a strict sense) that will then follow in either other sections of the work or in different environments (e.g. schools for those taking up philosophical study). Indeed, there is some polemical discussion on the nature of protreptics in Plato’s "Cleitophon" in which Sokrates is accused of not delivering any real philosophical content, but merely exhorting people to philosophy. Is this criticism well grounded? And how should we understand the function of protreptics in ancient philosophical writings?
In this paper I will challenge the position that protreptics merely present a ‘generic’ introduction to and/or advertisement of philosophy, both in the way this view is put forth by Cleitophon in the "Cleitophon" and by modern scholars in the scholarship on protreptic writing. Alongside Plato’s "Cleitophon", this paper will take a closer look at the discussion of protreptics in Plato’s "Euthydemus". In the first 'protreptic' section of the dialogue (278e-282e) Sokrates says that he is giving an example (παράδειγμα) of a protreptic discourse as he understands it. By looking closer at the argumentation of this section, it turns out that Sokrates shies away from discussing many crucial parts of his argument (e.g. the question whether wisdom is teachable (282c); what is the relationship between good fortune and wisdom (280b)), and he can afford to do so because his interlocutor confirms their shared (dialectical) understanding of the argument. In the end of the first protreptic section, Sokrates’ ‘paradigm protreptic’ arrives at a neat conclusion (‘it is necessary to philosophise’), but its supressed argumentation leaves the reader (if not the interlocutor) unsure about the method by which this certainty is achieved.
I will then move on to discussing the ‘second protreptic’ section of the dialogue (288d-293a) in which, I will argue, Sokrates’ philosophical method seems to set an explicit contrast to the first protreptic. It is surely significant that the dialogue (and thus the second protreptic) ends with an aporia: Sokrates has conducted a more in-depth search for the importance of philosophy, but is not able to arrive at such a neat conclusion as in the first section. I will look at the argumentative shifts of this second protreptic in more depth and argue that it presents a contrast to the first protreptic not only because of the aporetic result, but also in the way arguments are handled and conclusions reached. In other words, I conclude that these two ‘protreptic passages’ present mutually exclusive methods for doing philosophy, and that both the "Cleitophon" and the "Euthydemus" make it very clear which one is Plato's preferred option.
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It has become a commonplace to talk about 'metapoetics'. Is there, or should there be, a parallel... more It has become a commonplace to talk about 'metapoetics'. Is there, or should there be, a parallel way to think about and analyse prose texts, a kind of 'metaprosaics'? In this provocative (and work-in-progress) paper I argue that the usage of prose in early Greek literature (in philosophy, science, but also in mimes) suggests that a meta-discourse on prose, in a way that would parallel 'metapoetics', is impossible.
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Workshops and Conferences by Laura Viidebaum
The Politics of Writing:
Literary Form and Philosophical Engagement in Dio Chrysostom and the Ear... more The Politics of Writing:
Literary Form and Philosophical Engagement in Dio Chrysostom and the Early Empire
CONFERENCE
Department of Classics, New York University
27-28 April 2018
Writing is inexhaustible: it has become humanity’s ultimate tool of knowledge, a means both of democratic expression and the spread of information and of totalitarian repression, and an art form in itself. Writing reveals the way we see the world. Two genres seem to have been particularly influential in our engagement with politics – the philosophical essay and the oration/speech.
There is a very long tradition of philosophical engagement with politics at a theoretical level, where close attention is also paid to the form of writing in which arguments are presented. However, Dio Chrysostom and other writers of early imperial Rome go beyond theoretical engagement and seem to have a foot in both the theoretical and the practical. Does this actually mean anything in relation to their work? Can we (or should we) approach their essays and orations differently because of the authors’ overt political ambitions and engagement? How is the ‘political’ manifested in their works? And how do the authors conceive of the form of writing (essay and speech)? As political circumstances have changed under the empire, can we detect through Dio, and through his approach to essay or speech writing in particular, changes in the practices of writing political philosophy?
This conference seeks to explore the form of political writing through a closer look at the way in which ancient authors of imperial Rome made use of the genres of the political essay and the rhetorical speech. In the case of Dio, this will mean looking also beyond the most often discussed works (Euboicus, Kingship Orations etc.) and examining the whole corpus of his literary output, including essays and dialogues that are thematically very diverse. Why did Dio (and his other contemporaries, e.g. Plutarch) decide to write orations and essays? What (if anything) did they contribute to the form of these genres? How does politics work in their essays? Is there a sense of continuity with the past in the form(at) of their writings? We are also interested in the relevance of this investigation for modern audiences: to what extent are we heirs to these particular types of writing? Are the essay or the speech still valid forms of civic participation today? What is the future of political essay writing?
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BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND RHETORIC
NYU WORKSHOP, 13-14 MAY 2017
Even though ancient philosophy and ... more BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND RHETORIC
NYU WORKSHOP, 13-14 MAY 2017
Even though ancient philosophy and rhetoric have many overlapping interests (education, persuasion, politics, etc.), their relationship has long been a contentious subject, especially among ancient philosophers. Contemporary scholarship on the topic is equally divided: philosophers tend to approach the topic primarily through the works of Plato and Aristotle and regard rhetoric (and rhetorical compositions) as a second-rate notion/discipline which has little interest in shedding light on philosophically relevant questions about human nature and society, whereas classicists research oratorical compositions to get a better understanding of Greek prose style, historical details and context, but often shy away from philosophical questions that the texts might hint at. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on ancient rhetoric and argumentative techniques on the one hand, and scholars working on ancient philosophy, on the other in order to open up a space for a constructive engagement with philosophy/rhetoric, one which might enrich our understanding of ancient texts as well as the context in which they were produced.
This Workshop is generously sponsored by the Department of Philosophy (NYU), Department of Classics (NYU) and NYU Center for Ancient Studies.
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Drafts by Laura Viidebaum
In socio-political contexts the ancient Greek writers very often appear to discuss polarised oppo... more In socio-political contexts the ancient Greek writers very often appear to discuss polarised opposites: rich vs. poor, noble vs. base, free vs. slave, leisure vs. work, and so on. This seems to be the established basic division and as such is followed by the poets of the eighth century up to the historiographers, dramatists and philosophers of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Yet, at times this basic division is augmented by a third option, the position between two extremes, that more often than not is depicted in a very commending way. The concept of the ‘middle’ is increasingly important in the construction of democratic ideology and plays a constitutive part in its fundamental, even if unstable, notion of equality. Furthermore, the ‘middle’ gained importance in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, being instrumental in their respective theories of ethics and politics. Thus, the aim of this study is to trace the expansion of the idea of the ‘middle’ and to outline its connotations in the political and social environment of the Greek poleis.
At first sight, the Greek authors do not seem to differentiate systematically between these two notions, τὸ μέσον and τὸ μέτρον, and the scholarship has mostly followed this path. On closer examination, however, it is apparent that the texts themselves display an awareness of the differences in these concepts. This study therefore centres more specifically on understanding and delineating the principal connotations of τὸ μέσον and τὸ μέτρον, and goes on to explore their role in the emergence of the 'ideology of the middle', an important topic in Greek political thought.
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Friedrich Nietzsche can be an awkward topic for the classicists, especially since an important pa... more Friedrich Nietzsche can be an awkward topic for the classicists, especially since an important part of his heavily critical philosophy begins as a reaction to and critique of his contemporary classical scholarship, with which he was intimately familiar, being one of the most impressive ‘products’ of its development. Nietzsche was a thinker who in many ways turned the prevalent opinions about Greeks and contemporaries upside down, challenging his predecessors and successors with provocative readings of some of the most cherished philosophies in Western culture.
This project scrutinises Nietzsche’s views of the sophists – an important part of the ancient Greek culture that had suffered under the devastating judgement of Plato and Aristotle and was started to be studied with more care perhaps only in the late 18th century. While today it is a commonplace to treat sophistic thinking as philosophical, this was not the case during Nietzsche’s time and the aim of this paper is to show that Nietzsche, the fierce critic of his contemporary views on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ τέχνη, treated the sophists as teachers and educators of Greece, whose thinking, however, he considered as philosophically less relevant.
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Book reviews by Laura Viidebaum
Review of Georgia Sermamoglou-Souldmaidi's book 'Playful philosophy and serious sophistry' (Berli... more Review of Georgia Sermamoglou-Souldmaidi's book 'Playful philosophy and serious sophistry' (Berlin/Boston, 2014).
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Theatre reviews by Laura Viidebaum
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Lectures by Laura Viidebaum
This lecture discusses both the 'musical' aspects (broadly construed) of Sophocles' tragedies -- ... more This lecture discusses both the 'musical' aspects (broadly construed) of Sophocles' tragedies -- the extent of sung parts, instruments used, the reception of/judgement on his musical skill ('Sophocles the honeybee') -- but also the importance of μουσική as a broader cultural ideal and an additional means of self-fashioning for the poet. We will take a look at music in its associations with both religion and education, and try to locate Sophocles' role in the contemporary preoccupations with μουσική. Given our limited sources on the musical aspects of Sophocles' tragedies, this is also a point where the comparison with Sophocles' contemporaries (most notably with Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes) and critics becomes fruitful.
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OUTREACH PROJECTS AND GRANTS by Laura Viidebaum
Friendship and comradery are among the most characteristic features of the military and war exper... more Friendship and comradery are among the most characteristic features of the military and war experience, yet are also among the most difficult topics to fully understand from the outside. How exactly are friendships in the military formed? What function do they serve in the military? What taboos are not discussed among friends in the military? What functions do these relationships serve outside the military? Do they contribute to or protect against peer alienation (for whatever reason, including politics, race, sexual orientation, gender, etc.)? What if one’s military friends turn out to hold completely irreconcilable views about politics? How to reconnect with one's military friends after the service/war? In a broad sense, this reading group proposes to think about friendship under the volatile circumstances of the military and what happens to these friendships when warriors return home.
This project is supported by the 'National Endowment for the Humanities' and 'Aquila Theatre', and aims to bring together veterans with different military backgrounds (e.g. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars) and rankings to discuss the complexity of friendship within the military forces. The Reading Group proposes a multidisciplinary approach drawing on ancient and contemporary works of literature and art that examine the complexity of friendship in the military during war as well as peacetime.
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Conference Presentations by Laura Viidebaum
Conference Programme - University of Manchester - Constructing the 'Public Intellectual' in the Premodern World - Project GENEALOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE, 2019
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Books by Laura Viidebaum
Papers by Laura Viidebaum
Scholarship on this question is divided: while some modern scholars are happy to characterise Dio as a ‘moral philosopher’ (e.g. Whitmarsh 2001), he is mostly ignored by philosophers and denied a place in the history of philosophy. This paper aims to zoom in to Dio’s engagement with philosophy through a closer focus on his two speeches that have received far less attention in the scholarship than they deserve: speech 70 titled ‘On philosophy’ and 71 ‘On the philosopher’. In these two works, Dio explores the boundaries of what he considers to be philosophical pursuits and the way in which doing philosophy is distinct from any other techne. By trying to establish Dio’s philosophical affiliations, this paper eventually argues that what lies at the core of Dio’s understanding of philosophy is essentially Sokratic ethics, and that it is primarily Dio’s fascination for Sokrates which motivates Dio’s engagement with Stoicism and Cynicism.
As we have no evidence that would indicate whether and to what extent this critical terminology was used already by the early rhetoricians and speechwriters themselves, this paper addresses the gap between the forensic texts that originate from the fifth-fourth century BC Athens and the reconstructions and theorisations of these texts by later Greek writers/rhetoricians. In particular, this paper takes its cue from the usage of the concept of ἠθοποιία in first century BC literary criticism to refer back to elements of characterisation in Athenian forensic texts, and conducts 'intellectual archaeology' of a sort to explore the development of this term. There seems to have been some confusion over the meaning of both ἦθος and ἠθοποιία among later (i.e. post-Aristotelian) rhetorical theorists (cf. Worman 2002), and this paper traces out the source for this confusion and shows to what extent this confusion among ancient critics is reflected in the contemporary debates of these concepts.
In this paper I concentrate on one of the most intriguing aspects of the essay on Lysias, namely DH’s exploration of the question of χάρις. In order to shed light on the possible ways to interpret DH’s claims of χάρις, an attempt will be made to reconstruct, as far as possible, the context, meanings, and connotations in which χάρις occurs both in DH' other critical essays as well as in earlier writers, from the ancient poets (Homer, Hesiod) to his predecessors in literary criticism (such as Demetrius, On Style). By doing so, this paper addresses and discusses possible ways of understanding DH’s usage of χάρις and focuses especially on exploring why did DH (and indeed why should we?) attribute this characteristic to Lysias in particular.
In this paper I will challenge the position that protreptics merely present a ‘generic’ introduction to and/or advertisement of philosophy, both in the way this view is put forth by Cleitophon in the "Cleitophon" and by modern scholars in the scholarship on protreptic writing. Alongside Plato’s "Cleitophon", this paper will take a closer look at the discussion of protreptics in Plato’s "Euthydemus". In the first 'protreptic' section of the dialogue (278e-282e) Sokrates says that he is giving an example (παράδειγμα) of a protreptic discourse as he understands it. By looking closer at the argumentation of this section, it turns out that Sokrates shies away from discussing many crucial parts of his argument (e.g. the question whether wisdom is teachable (282c); what is the relationship between good fortune and wisdom (280b)), and he can afford to do so because his interlocutor confirms their shared (dialectical) understanding of the argument. In the end of the first protreptic section, Sokrates’ ‘paradigm protreptic’ arrives at a neat conclusion (‘it is necessary to philosophise’), but its supressed argumentation leaves the reader (if not the interlocutor) unsure about the method by which this certainty is achieved.
I will then move on to discussing the ‘second protreptic’ section of the dialogue (288d-293a) in which, I will argue, Sokrates’ philosophical method seems to set an explicit contrast to the first protreptic. It is surely significant that the dialogue (and thus the second protreptic) ends with an aporia: Sokrates has conducted a more in-depth search for the importance of philosophy, but is not able to arrive at such a neat conclusion as in the first section. I will look at the argumentative shifts of this second protreptic in more depth and argue that it presents a contrast to the first protreptic not only because of the aporetic result, but also in the way arguments are handled and conclusions reached. In other words, I conclude that these two ‘protreptic passages’ present mutually exclusive methods for doing philosophy, and that both the "Cleitophon" and the "Euthydemus" make it very clear which one is Plato's preferred option.
Workshops and Conferences by Laura Viidebaum
Literary Form and Philosophical Engagement in Dio Chrysostom and the Early Empire
CONFERENCE
Department of Classics, New York University
27-28 April 2018
Writing is inexhaustible: it has become humanity’s ultimate tool of knowledge, a means both of democratic expression and the spread of information and of totalitarian repression, and an art form in itself. Writing reveals the way we see the world. Two genres seem to have been particularly influential in our engagement with politics – the philosophical essay and the oration/speech.
There is a very long tradition of philosophical engagement with politics at a theoretical level, where close attention is also paid to the form of writing in which arguments are presented. However, Dio Chrysostom and other writers of early imperial Rome go beyond theoretical engagement and seem to have a foot in both the theoretical and the practical. Does this actually mean anything in relation to their work? Can we (or should we) approach their essays and orations differently because of the authors’ overt political ambitions and engagement? How is the ‘political’ manifested in their works? And how do the authors conceive of the form of writing (essay and speech)? As political circumstances have changed under the empire, can we detect through Dio, and through his approach to essay or speech writing in particular, changes in the practices of writing political philosophy?
This conference seeks to explore the form of political writing through a closer look at the way in which ancient authors of imperial Rome made use of the genres of the political essay and the rhetorical speech. In the case of Dio, this will mean looking also beyond the most often discussed works (Euboicus, Kingship Orations etc.) and examining the whole corpus of his literary output, including essays and dialogues that are thematically very diverse. Why did Dio (and his other contemporaries, e.g. Plutarch) decide to write orations and essays? What (if anything) did they contribute to the form of these genres? How does politics work in their essays? Is there a sense of continuity with the past in the form(at) of their writings? We are also interested in the relevance of this investigation for modern audiences: to what extent are we heirs to these particular types of writing? Are the essay or the speech still valid forms of civic participation today? What is the future of political essay writing?
NYU WORKSHOP, 13-14 MAY 2017
Even though ancient philosophy and rhetoric have many overlapping interests (education, persuasion, politics, etc.), their relationship has long been a contentious subject, especially among ancient philosophers. Contemporary scholarship on the topic is equally divided: philosophers tend to approach the topic primarily through the works of Plato and Aristotle and regard rhetoric (and rhetorical compositions) as a second-rate notion/discipline which has little interest in shedding light on philosophically relevant questions about human nature and society, whereas classicists research oratorical compositions to get a better understanding of Greek prose style, historical details and context, but often shy away from philosophical questions that the texts might hint at. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on ancient rhetoric and argumentative techniques on the one hand, and scholars working on ancient philosophy, on the other in order to open up a space for a constructive engagement with philosophy/rhetoric, one which might enrich our understanding of ancient texts as well as the context in which they were produced.
This Workshop is generously sponsored by the Department of Philosophy (NYU), Department of Classics (NYU) and NYU Center for Ancient Studies.
Drafts by Laura Viidebaum
At first sight, the Greek authors do not seem to differentiate systematically between these two notions, τὸ μέσον and τὸ μέτρον, and the scholarship has mostly followed this path. On closer examination, however, it is apparent that the texts themselves display an awareness of the differences in these concepts. This study therefore centres more specifically on understanding and delineating the principal connotations of τὸ μέσον and τὸ μέτρον, and goes on to explore their role in the emergence of the 'ideology of the middle', an important topic in Greek political thought.
This project scrutinises Nietzsche’s views of the sophists – an important part of the ancient Greek culture that had suffered under the devastating judgement of Plato and Aristotle and was started to be studied with more care perhaps only in the late 18th century. While today it is a commonplace to treat sophistic thinking as philosophical, this was not the case during Nietzsche’s time and the aim of this paper is to show that Nietzsche, the fierce critic of his contemporary views on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ τέχνη, treated the sophists as teachers and educators of Greece, whose thinking, however, he considered as philosophically less relevant.
Book reviews by Laura Viidebaum
Theatre reviews by Laura Viidebaum
Lectures by Laura Viidebaum
OUTREACH PROJECTS AND GRANTS by Laura Viidebaum
This project is supported by the 'National Endowment for the Humanities' and 'Aquila Theatre', and aims to bring together veterans with different military backgrounds (e.g. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars) and rankings to discuss the complexity of friendship within the military forces. The Reading Group proposes a multidisciplinary approach drawing on ancient and contemporary works of literature and art that examine the complexity of friendship in the military during war as well as peacetime.
Conference Presentations by Laura Viidebaum
Scholarship on this question is divided: while some modern scholars are happy to characterise Dio as a ‘moral philosopher’ (e.g. Whitmarsh 2001), he is mostly ignored by philosophers and denied a place in the history of philosophy. This paper aims to zoom in to Dio’s engagement with philosophy through a closer focus on his two speeches that have received far less attention in the scholarship than they deserve: speech 70 titled ‘On philosophy’ and 71 ‘On the philosopher’. In these two works, Dio explores the boundaries of what he considers to be philosophical pursuits and the way in which doing philosophy is distinct from any other techne. By trying to establish Dio’s philosophical affiliations, this paper eventually argues that what lies at the core of Dio’s understanding of philosophy is essentially Sokratic ethics, and that it is primarily Dio’s fascination for Sokrates which motivates Dio’s engagement with Stoicism and Cynicism.
As we have no evidence that would indicate whether and to what extent this critical terminology was used already by the early rhetoricians and speechwriters themselves, this paper addresses the gap between the forensic texts that originate from the fifth-fourth century BC Athens and the reconstructions and theorisations of these texts by later Greek writers/rhetoricians. In particular, this paper takes its cue from the usage of the concept of ἠθοποιία in first century BC literary criticism to refer back to elements of characterisation in Athenian forensic texts, and conducts 'intellectual archaeology' of a sort to explore the development of this term. There seems to have been some confusion over the meaning of both ἦθος and ἠθοποιία among later (i.e. post-Aristotelian) rhetorical theorists (cf. Worman 2002), and this paper traces out the source for this confusion and shows to what extent this confusion among ancient critics is reflected in the contemporary debates of these concepts.
In this paper I concentrate on one of the most intriguing aspects of the essay on Lysias, namely DH’s exploration of the question of χάρις. In order to shed light on the possible ways to interpret DH’s claims of χάρις, an attempt will be made to reconstruct, as far as possible, the context, meanings, and connotations in which χάρις occurs both in DH' other critical essays as well as in earlier writers, from the ancient poets (Homer, Hesiod) to his predecessors in literary criticism (such as Demetrius, On Style). By doing so, this paper addresses and discusses possible ways of understanding DH’s usage of χάρις and focuses especially on exploring why did DH (and indeed why should we?) attribute this characteristic to Lysias in particular.
In this paper I will challenge the position that protreptics merely present a ‘generic’ introduction to and/or advertisement of philosophy, both in the way this view is put forth by Cleitophon in the "Cleitophon" and by modern scholars in the scholarship on protreptic writing. Alongside Plato’s "Cleitophon", this paper will take a closer look at the discussion of protreptics in Plato’s "Euthydemus". In the first 'protreptic' section of the dialogue (278e-282e) Sokrates says that he is giving an example (παράδειγμα) of a protreptic discourse as he understands it. By looking closer at the argumentation of this section, it turns out that Sokrates shies away from discussing many crucial parts of his argument (e.g. the question whether wisdom is teachable (282c); what is the relationship between good fortune and wisdom (280b)), and he can afford to do so because his interlocutor confirms their shared (dialectical) understanding of the argument. In the end of the first protreptic section, Sokrates’ ‘paradigm protreptic’ arrives at a neat conclusion (‘it is necessary to philosophise’), but its supressed argumentation leaves the reader (if not the interlocutor) unsure about the method by which this certainty is achieved.
I will then move on to discussing the ‘second protreptic’ section of the dialogue (288d-293a) in which, I will argue, Sokrates’ philosophical method seems to set an explicit contrast to the first protreptic. It is surely significant that the dialogue (and thus the second protreptic) ends with an aporia: Sokrates has conducted a more in-depth search for the importance of philosophy, but is not able to arrive at such a neat conclusion as in the first section. I will look at the argumentative shifts of this second protreptic in more depth and argue that it presents a contrast to the first protreptic not only because of the aporetic result, but also in the way arguments are handled and conclusions reached. In other words, I conclude that these two ‘protreptic passages’ present mutually exclusive methods for doing philosophy, and that both the "Cleitophon" and the "Euthydemus" make it very clear which one is Plato's preferred option.
Literary Form and Philosophical Engagement in Dio Chrysostom and the Early Empire
CONFERENCE
Department of Classics, New York University
27-28 April 2018
Writing is inexhaustible: it has become humanity’s ultimate tool of knowledge, a means both of democratic expression and the spread of information and of totalitarian repression, and an art form in itself. Writing reveals the way we see the world. Two genres seem to have been particularly influential in our engagement with politics – the philosophical essay and the oration/speech.
There is a very long tradition of philosophical engagement with politics at a theoretical level, where close attention is also paid to the form of writing in which arguments are presented. However, Dio Chrysostom and other writers of early imperial Rome go beyond theoretical engagement and seem to have a foot in both the theoretical and the practical. Does this actually mean anything in relation to their work? Can we (or should we) approach their essays and orations differently because of the authors’ overt political ambitions and engagement? How is the ‘political’ manifested in their works? And how do the authors conceive of the form of writing (essay and speech)? As political circumstances have changed under the empire, can we detect through Dio, and through his approach to essay or speech writing in particular, changes in the practices of writing political philosophy?
This conference seeks to explore the form of political writing through a closer look at the way in which ancient authors of imperial Rome made use of the genres of the political essay and the rhetorical speech. In the case of Dio, this will mean looking also beyond the most often discussed works (Euboicus, Kingship Orations etc.) and examining the whole corpus of his literary output, including essays and dialogues that are thematically very diverse. Why did Dio (and his other contemporaries, e.g. Plutarch) decide to write orations and essays? What (if anything) did they contribute to the form of these genres? How does politics work in their essays? Is there a sense of continuity with the past in the form(at) of their writings? We are also interested in the relevance of this investigation for modern audiences: to what extent are we heirs to these particular types of writing? Are the essay or the speech still valid forms of civic participation today? What is the future of political essay writing?
NYU WORKSHOP, 13-14 MAY 2017
Even though ancient philosophy and rhetoric have many overlapping interests (education, persuasion, politics, etc.), their relationship has long been a contentious subject, especially among ancient philosophers. Contemporary scholarship on the topic is equally divided: philosophers tend to approach the topic primarily through the works of Plato and Aristotle and regard rhetoric (and rhetorical compositions) as a second-rate notion/discipline which has little interest in shedding light on philosophically relevant questions about human nature and society, whereas classicists research oratorical compositions to get a better understanding of Greek prose style, historical details and context, but often shy away from philosophical questions that the texts might hint at. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on ancient rhetoric and argumentative techniques on the one hand, and scholars working on ancient philosophy, on the other in order to open up a space for a constructive engagement with philosophy/rhetoric, one which might enrich our understanding of ancient texts as well as the context in which they were produced.
This Workshop is generously sponsored by the Department of Philosophy (NYU), Department of Classics (NYU) and NYU Center for Ancient Studies.
At first sight, the Greek authors do not seem to differentiate systematically between these two notions, τὸ μέσον and τὸ μέτρον, and the scholarship has mostly followed this path. On closer examination, however, it is apparent that the texts themselves display an awareness of the differences in these concepts. This study therefore centres more specifically on understanding and delineating the principal connotations of τὸ μέσον and τὸ μέτρον, and goes on to explore their role in the emergence of the 'ideology of the middle', an important topic in Greek political thought.
This project scrutinises Nietzsche’s views of the sophists – an important part of the ancient Greek culture that had suffered under the devastating judgement of Plato and Aristotle and was started to be studied with more care perhaps only in the late 18th century. While today it is a commonplace to treat sophistic thinking as philosophical, this was not the case during Nietzsche’s time and the aim of this paper is to show that Nietzsche, the fierce critic of his contemporary views on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ τέχνη, treated the sophists as teachers and educators of Greece, whose thinking, however, he considered as philosophically less relevant.
This project is supported by the 'National Endowment for the Humanities' and 'Aquila Theatre', and aims to bring together veterans with different military backgrounds (e.g. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars) and rankings to discuss the complexity of friendship within the military forces. The Reading Group proposes a multidisciplinary approach drawing on ancient and contemporary works of literature and art that examine the complexity of friendship in the military during war as well as peacetime.