In this chapter, I show how Plato’s conception of and norms for comedy provide a framework for understanding the Euthydemus as an ideal comedy, and I argue that Plato employs techniques of comedic characterization, in particular borrowing from Aristophanes’ Clouds, in order to portray the enemies of philosophy as ridiculous and self-ignorant. In particular, I argue that he portrays the sophist brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, as imposters, who wrongly believe that they possess deep and important wisdom because of their skill in eristic argumentation, that is, argument that uses any means necessary to win. Socrates inhabits the role of the ironist, who ironically praises his interlocutors and then ultimately exposes them as ridiculous and self-ignorant. My analysis of the dialogue in terms of the interplay of these comedic character types not only allows us to see the nature, scope and function of Socratic irony in a new light, but it also shows how the dialogue’s overt concern with fallacy and argument ultimately is a question of character and virtue. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal comedy articulated in Chapter 1.

How we create believable characters. Resisting the urge to decide exactly who your character is before you know who your story needs them to be. The interdependence of character and plot and the emotional journey of the character. Moving beyond ‘show; don’t tell’: the interaction between characters allows the reader to get to know characters by observation rather than instruction. Managing minor characters. Conflict, consistency and contradiction all have a part to play in plausible characterisation. Characters come from you but they’re not you: the importance of freeing ourselves as writers from ourselves as people.

How we use dialogue to develop character and advance plot. Overcoming anxiety about dialogue; the dangers of avoiding dialogue. Reported speech lacks energy; dialogue enlivens a scene. Dialogue reveals character, indicates relationship and conveys information, but has to appear authentic. Strong dialogue combines multiple functions. Punctuating and attributing dialogue; adverbs qualifying tone.

This chapter develops the case against the dominant view of moral heroism, which I call the ‘virtue approach.’ It posits moral virtues in moral heroes which play a pivotal role in every phase of how we understand and respond to moral heroism. On this view, the virtues of moral heroes are what explain their extraordinary behavior, and what set them apart from the rest of us. Moral virtues are what moral heroes offer to us as we attempt to learn from them and emulate them. It is the virtues of moral heroes that make them fit and useful as components in programs in moral education. And the virtue of the hero is what attracts our admiration, what calls out for honor and commemoration.

I introduce three theoretical desiderata for a theory of moral heroism: accuracy, related phenomena, and fitting responses. The arguments of this chapter target accuracy, showing that the virtue approach misunderstands moral heroism. Many moral heroes are poor candidates for virtue, and the patterns by which we draw inferences about virtue and moral heroism align poorly. We need a different approach to capture the significance and nature of moral heroism.

How to communicate the world of your story. The traditional character portrait and scene-setting description contrasted with the dominant contemporary development of character and context as the plot evolves. The function of description. Avoiding inappropriate lyricism. Immersion in time and place; repurposing our own experience and editing for focus. The subjective nature of description. Conveying, rather than merely describing, emotion, atmosphere, environment. The familiar and the unfamiliar. The effect of description on pace; discerning the extent and necessity for description. Embedding description in action. Using telling details.

Morgan’s legacy was twofold: his development of processes for handling crises and his recruitment of people during crises who would live on long after he died to influence the practice of last resort lending specifically and central banking more generally.

Kant gives analogies a central place in cognition: We can apply concepts to objects of experience because we recognize similarities between them. The cognitive function is evident in Kant’s own use of metaphors and analogies, which shows how linguistic expression conveys philosophical content. For Kant, linguistic symbols and analogies serve a cognitive function: Symbols present concepts whose instances are nontangible to the senses and thereby provide a practical understanding of an abstract concept, whereas analogies illustrate structural similarities between two dissimilar objects and allow us to transfer an understanding of one relationship to the other. Kant’s theory of symbols and analogies suggests that his own metaphors and analogies might serve a cognitive function that could help us understand the nature of reason and its endeavors better. This chapter confronts Kant’s images drawn from law, biology, geography, and construction with his account of symbols and analogies and argues that each group of images illustrates a different aspect of Kant’s account of reason and systematic philosophy.

This chapter examines representations of and responses to the law’s attempts to regulate poverty in early nineteenth-century England. Drawing upon poems by William Wordsworth, periodical essays, legislative reports, legal cases, and popular treatises, the chapter shows how writers alternately affirmed and interrogated the law’s efforts to strip paupers of agency. It focuses on the legal discourse that governed metropolitan paupers and that some paupers themselves deployed in the service of self-representation. Many writers cast beggary as a professional mode characterized by inventiveness and effort, qualities that paupers were thought to lack. In mobilizing the theatricality of which they stood accused, paupers emerge as both competent and competitive, internally well-regulated and chaotic, criminalized by their very performance of selfhood. By defending their own character in both law courts and the court of public opinion, beggars interrogated legal constructs such as property and testimony.

‘The Personified Will’ examines how the faculty of the will was depicted as a personified character in English Renaissance plays. The will was portrayed in a variety of benevolent and malevolent guises, yet the function of these characters has not yet been integrated into our appreciation of the era’s dramatic conventions. I argue that we may more fully appreciate the ways that dramatists queried the practical expression of individual liberty, identity, and civil harmony by attending to a historically disregarded set of Will characters (from Sebastian Westcott’s The Marriage of Wit and Science to William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night). The performance of the personified will offers important, but hitherto overlooked, evidence of how playwrights attempted to scrutinize the nature of human freedom and social concord, and the extent to which personifications of the will were used to legitimize contemporary systems of status and authority. Exploring the actions of honourable and corrupt personifications of the will provides a way to elucidate the ethical predicaments associated with will’s performance, which the second chapter of this book examines in more detail.

Starting from an anecdote about Pablo Picasso’s fascination with faces recounted by Gertrude Stein, the Introduction argues that literary modernism revised nineteenth-century physiognomy. The Introduction posits a narrative arc that moves from Georg Simmel’s diagnosis of the centrality of the face in modernity to Mina Loy’s creative appropriation of the face through the concept of “auto-facial-construction.” Both Simmel and Loy framed the face as a form. The Introduction draws out the urgency of thinking about the face as form across a set of contemporary debates: the face as the site for the technologization of subjectivity, the face as a node of biometric surveillance, the face as a battleground for the politics of race, the face as a screen for the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, the face as a capitalist commodity and contestations thereof.

How are virtues constituted psychologically? The virtues of caring or substantive virtues are dispositional concerns for the good in its various aspects: the well-being of people and other animals, the avoidance or relief of their suffering, the reconciliation of enemies, knowledge and truth, justice, proper formation of sensual desire and pleasure, and one’s duties. Generosity, compassion, forgivingness, justice, and the sense of duty are examples of virtues constituted by such caring. Because the caring is virtuous only if directed to real goods, the concerns need to be shaped by correct thought (understanding). The virtues of caring divide into direct (for example, generosity) and indirect (for example, justice). Another class of virtues – the enkratic – are powers, abilities, or skills of self-management. These, too, require understanding – of self and how to manage it in the various situations and influences of life. Examples are self-control, courage, patience, and perseverance.

This introduces the principal methodological and substantive arguments of the book, with a particular focus on what is meant by ‘character’ as part of a historiography of philosophy, and on briefly articulating MacCormick’s character in particular. The chapter also gives an overview of the chapters in the book and includes a note on the book’s sources.

This short epilogue concludes the book, with a brief reflection on MacCormick’s final book, Practical Reason in Law and Morality (2008), where MacCormick confronted his own impending death from cancer, and where he once again articulated a relational approach to ethics, politics, and law.

Nationalism represents, advances, and protects the interests of a national “people,” but the metaphor of bodily nativity at the core of claims to national unity proved increasingly implausible for a United States that, in the buildup to and the aftermath of the Civil War, proved to be more of a politically divided house than a corporeally singular nation. Efforts of mid-century writers like John W. Deforest and Walt Whitman to imagine a US nation-state as a heterosexual conjugal union between a single, feminized, national body and its governing state-as-husband would face challenges from later writers like William Dean Howells, who imagined increasingly intensive ways for racial difference within this single national body to undermine national unity figured as corporeal nativity. Responding at century’s end to such racial fractures in corporeal unity, W. E. B. Du Bois would displace the now-untenable conjugal union of the US nation-state with a double-consciousness located within the US citizen’s individual self. This hyphenated identity, grounded in a color line, installs the failed legacy of nineteenth-century US nationalism at the core of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century US citizens understand and describe their own and others’ imperial Americanness.

This introduction serves as a preface to the volume and provides an overview of the purpose of this Companion, and a paragraph about each essay in the collection.

The historian’s task is to narrate, but he must also win credibility for that narrative: his task is therefore also to persuade his audience that he is the proper person to tell the story and, moreover, that his account is one that should be believed. In his capacity as persuader, the historian will often try to shape the audience’s perception of his character and to use this as an additional claim to authority; indeed, among the Roman historians, where explicit professions of research are rarer than with the Greeks, the shaping of the narrator’s character takes on a correspondingly larger role. But most of the historians, Greek and Roman, try to shape their audience’s perception of their character. Nor is this surprising when we consider the teachings of rhetoric.