Considering the Classroom as a Safe Space

In the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, Lauren Freeman (2014) advocates that faculty turn their classrooms into “safe spaces” as a method for increasing the diversity of philosophy majors. The creation of safe spaces is meant to make women and minority students “feel sufficiently comfortable” and thereby increase the likelihood that they pursue philosophy as a major or career. Although I agree with Freeman’s goal, I argue that philosophers, and faculty in general, should reject the call for turning classrooms into “safe spaces.” I begin by distinguishing extra-curricular safe spaces from the classroom as a safe space. I then argue that although faculty should not object to extra-curricular safe spaces, they should reject curricular ones. I argue that the classroom as a safe space is currently an impractical and inappropriate goal given the nature of academic philosophy, and that encouraging students to think of classrooms as safe/unsafe does not facilitate learning. Nonetheless, I agree with Freeman that faculty should take steps to ensure that students from all backgrounds have the tools they need to be successful in the classroom. I further argue that faculty calls for safe spaces creates confusion concerning the educative environment one should expect to find at the majority of America universities

The Medo-Persian Ceremonial: Xenophon, Cyrus and the King's Body

The Cyropaedia is a long text involving many different approaches; and yet there is a major split in the work: the taking of Babylon which, at the end of Book 7, marks the end of Cyrus' military conquest. Indeed, while throughout the first part, the young conqueror was at the head of a kind of "travelling Republic" and was deliberately rejecting the slightest display of luxury, the circumstances turn to be entirely different with the defeat and the fall of the enemy capital town. Cyrus settles down in the palace under Hestia's patronage. The last conquests are swiftly reported in just a few sentences. And then, a crucial pattern appears, the development of which gives a framework to the whole beginning of Book 8: the notion that the sovereign must be very parsimonious and cautious in his public appearances. From then on, the conqueror decides to wear the Median dress, as well as shoes with thick soles, and to make up his eyes.For a long time, scholars have been puzzled by this adoption of Eastern pomp – apparently praised by Xenophon. In order to elude the questions raised by this part of the text, some doubts have sometimes been expressed as to its authenticity. Some interpreters have also avoided the problem by assuming that Xenophon mentioned this episode in order to suggest that he was himself keeping his hero at a distance for moral reasons. I will assume here that this adoption of a foreign ceremonial by Xenophon's hero has a political meaning, and not a moral one. The adoption of Eastern pomp is a new governmental technê, which is related to Cyrus' settling in his palace; it is also linked to his wish to deal with issues of imperial deportment and of territorial security and no longer with military problems. For Xenophon, the problem is to find a good and exact balance between what is required by the ruling of such a huge empire – which obliges the ruler to resort to luxurious pomp – and those requirements imposed by the ruling of his own body – and, especially, the necessary inner asceticism of a good leader

Speaking from the Heart: Mediation and Sincerity in U.S. Political Speech

This dissertation is a critique of the idea that the artifice of public speech is a problem to be solved. This idea is shown to entail the privilege attributed to purportedly direct or unmediated speech in U.S. public culture. I propose that we attend to the ethos producing effects of rhetorical concealment by asserting that all public speech is constituted through rhetorical artifice. Wherever an alternative to rhetoric is offered, one finds a rhetoric of non-rhetoric at work. A primary strategy in such rhetoric is the performance of sincerity. In this dissertation, I analyze the function of sincerity in contexts of public deliberation. I seek to show how claims to sincerity are strategic, demonstrate how claims that a speaker employs artifice have been employed to imply a lack of sincerity, and disabuse communication, rhetoric, and deliberative theory of the notion that sincere expression occurs without technology. In Chapter Two I begin with the original problem of artifice for rhetoric in classical Athens in the writings of Plato and Isocrates. Plato values immediate modes of speech because mediation, such as writing, is for him a fundamentally artificial construction of appearance. In contrast, Isocrates placed writing at the center of good thinking and defended the use of logography for the betterment of civil society. He presented a case for what I will call rhetorical literacy: the learned skill of creating and interpreting morally prudent persuasive discourse. In Chapters Three and Four, I turn to two contemporary cases beginning with a context considered to be rife with artifice: political campaigns. In Chapter Three, I discuss how the problem of artifice prompts both a crisis of ethos for political speakers and an opportunity for opponents to strategically point out the presence of artifice. Criticism of Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama often attended to the artifice of their speech, while President George W. Bush's speeches and the myth of unmediated speech indicate the tendency for some technologies to more successfully allow a speaker to conceal her or his rhetorical craft. Chapter Four examines how the appearance of unmediated communication in facilitated dialogue and deliberation requires active concealment and denial of technique. While Open Space Technology might appear to be less staged than National Issues Forums and, therefore, more natural, they both rely on the concealment of the artifice of their technique.Doctor of Philosoph

Aristotle on natural slavery

Aristotle's claim that natural slaves do not possess autonomous rationality (Pol. 1.5, 1254b20-23) cannot plausibly be interpreted in an unrestricted sense, since this would conflict with what Aristotle knew about non-Greek societies. Aristotle's argument requires only a lack of autonomous practical rationality. An impairment of the capacity for integrated practical deliberation, resulting from an environmentally induced excess or deficiency in thumos (Pol. 7.7, 1327b18-31), would be sufficient to make natural slaves incapable of eudaimonia without being obtrusively implausible relative to what Aristotle is likely to have believed about non-Greeks. Since Aristotle seems to have believed that the existence of people who can be enslaved without injustice is a hypothetical necessity, if those capable of eudaimonia are to achieve it, the existence of natural slaves has implications for our understanding of Aristotle's natural teleology

Engineering a Dialogue with Klara, or Ethical Invention with Generative AI in the Writing Classroom

In this teaching practice article, we discuss the possibilities of integrating AI into the writing classroom utilizing prompt engineering techniques. We propose a strategy for prompt engineering in which we see AI as an audience and interlocutor during the invention process. We consider using the method in preparation for argument composition and with that we propose an ethical model for teaching writing based on a view of rhetoric as both technê and praxis. To draw attention to the ethical question in relation to human—non-human interactions, we use as metaphor for AI tools the image of Klara, an android who serves as a children’s companion in Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021)

Dynamic Modalities and Teleological Agency:Plato and Aristotle on Skill and Ability

In the course of discussing the nature of justice in the first book of the Republic, a number of claims are made concerning the nature of technê and what it is to be skilful or to have an ability. Nawar shows how three of these claims, which do significant conceptual work in both Plato and Aristotle, can be explained and defended. The first claim, by Socrates, concerns the ‘two-way’ nature of certain skills. For instance, the person who is skilful at hitting is not only proficient at hitting well, but also proficient at avoiding being hit. The second claim, by Thrasymachus, is that the practitioner of a technê is, in a certain way, infallible and cannot fail to bring about what they intend. The third claim, made by Socrates, is that technai are not value-neutral, but rather are directed at the good of their object. Namar examines these claims, clarifies them, and attempts to explain them (so far as possible). Furthermore, he shows that these claims play an important role in Aristotle’s thought and examines how Aristotle aims to incorporate or adapt these claims in his own discussion of the modal and teleological aspects of skills and rational capacities.<br/

The Greek sophists : teachers of virtue

This dissertation is a study of the Greek sophists as teachers of aretê (virtue or human excellence) and a study of the conflict between sophistic and Socratic political values as portrayed in the dialogues of Plato. The first section offers a new definition of the term sophist based on ancient sources and attempts to present as clear a picture as is historically possible of the sophists\u27 activities. The second section examines and evaluates Plato\u27s criticisms of the sophists drawing attention especially to the dependence of certain criticisms upon a questionable set of epistemological assumptions about the role of knowledge in ethical action. And the final section describes in detail what the sophists understood aretê to entail and how they went about teaching it

What are Collections and Divisions Good for?

This article defends three claims. First, that collection and division in the Phaedrus are described as procedures that underlie human speaking and thinking in general, as well as philosophical inquiry, and are not identified with either. Second, that what sets the dialectical use of these procedures apart from their ordinary use are philosophical suppositions independent of the procedures of collection and division themselves; for that reason, collection and division cannot be identified with dialectic as such. Third, that the second part of the Phaedrus is concerned with the broader question how noble or beautiful speaking, in general, may be said to depend on dialectic as much as it is concerned with the question how rhetoric, as a kind of expertise, is related to dialectic