St. Thomas Aquinas developed his account of the instrument doctrine by carefully attending to the work of St. John Damascene, in particular Book III of his On the Orthodox Faith. The Damascene himself was drawing upon a long tradition of reflection on Christ’s humanity that reaches as far back as Origen. In this chapter, John’s account of the doctrine and its basis in Maximus the Confessor’s writings is assessed, and five synthetic propositions are brought forward to summarize the doctrine. These propositions are nearly the same as what we find in Aquinas’s mature Christology. This chapter shows that far from being unique to Aquinas’s own Christology, the instrument doctrine is a basic patristic desideratum.

The introduction states the biblical premise of the book’s argument. In Scripture, God saves human beings through the actions and sufferings of Christ in the flesh. St. Thomas Aquinas developed a theological account of the Incarnation that attempts to account for the way Scripture speaks, namely, that Christ’s humanity is the instrumental cause of salvation, or as the book calls it, "the instrument doctrine." The introduction then gives an overview of the book’s argument: this doctrine best accounts for how Jesus Christ saves Christians in virtue of his humanity. It outlines the argument of the seven following chapters.

This chapter poses the most difficult objection for the instrument doctrine, in particular as Aquinas conceives of it. For Aquinas, a created cause, Christ’s humanity, produces divine effects as an instrumental cause. But the tradition has affirmed that God alone is the cause of grace in the soul, and no created cause can produce grace. John Duns Scotus puts this objection to Aquinas’s account of instrumental causality, and this chapter argues that the criticism appears to succeed. If a created cause participates in the production of grace, as Aquinas argues, then Scotus argues that Aquinas fails to maintain the distinction of natures and powers in Christ basic to Chalcedonian Christology. For Christ’s humanity is taken up into God’s power and brings about the deification of the human person immediately, something only divine power can do. The ground is prepared for a response to this objection in the following chapter.

This chapter is the heart of the book’s analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on Christ’s humanity as the instrument of the divinity. It explores the various details of Aquinas’s account, outlining it in five synthetic propositions. These propositions, taken together, form the instrument doctrine as St. Thomas conceives of it. Various ambiguities in Aquinas’s account are presented for consideration, and the chapter makes some judgments about how best to understand Aquinas in his mature works. The chapter concludes with a section on the relationship of language to reality in Christology and why reduplicative propositions, used in a standard mode of theological analysis in the thirteenth century, can clarify how to understand the instrument doctrine.

This chapters argues that Plato’s notion of personal autonomy is closely linked to his understanding of the social dimension of rational deliberation. It begins with an assessment of Miranda Fricker’s influential account of epistemic authority and social power and raises some objections against the discursive notion of reason she develops. To substantiate these objections, it turns to Plato’s Cratylus and to Socrates’ analysis of logos as a language mediated form of rational deliberation. It argues that while Socrates suggests that the constitutive parts of language, the names (ta onomata), are ambivalent and deceptive, leaving discursive reason in doubt, Plato, at the same time, shows that it nevertheless can function to identify unwarranted claims of epistemic authority, as a form of codependent philosophical conversation. From this emerges a notion of Platonic autonomy closely tied to Plato’s analysis of the social dimension of rational deliberation and its embodiment in the Platonic dialogue.

This chapter explores Locke’s theory of language in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its history of influence on judicial thinking about hearsay evidence. Hearsay is distrusted because it is language all the way down – testimony based on second-hand narrative – rather than language grounded in the empirical world. The chapter analyzes three contemporary US Supreme Court opinions using this framework, Ohio v. Roberts (1980), Crawford v. Washington (2004), and Davis v. Washington/Hammon v. Indiana (2006).

If a Christian account of mythopoiesis owns that not only do all things depend upon God for their being, but that ‘all things exist in Christ’, then following Ward, we can assert that mythopoiesis, as a cultural artefact, is shot through with God’s presence: it is a means by which God is revealing God’s self to us. To the degree a myth speaks truly of God it can be understood as participating in God’s self-disclosure to creation; to the degree it is enmeshed in and occluded by sin, myth speaks less truly. Following Henri de Lubac, I argue that the nature–grace distinction can be overstated and that a paradoxical affirmation of the operation of grace within nature without violating the proper autonomy of creation is necessary in order to meaningfully express how human action (mythopoiesis) apart from Christian formation can be said to speak of God (theology). The interplay of the cultural mediation of God’s grace and God’s already-there-ness in nature offers a way of speaking about mythopoiesis’ theological possibilities without necessarily resorting to a doctrine of ‘anonymous Christianity’.

Was the stylistic exuberance and formal ambition of twelfth-century classicizing prose linked to the unprecedented study of ancient poetry during this period? Why would aspiring prose writers have been nurtured largely in verse? Long accustomed to regard Byzantine interest in ancient poetry as culturally antiquarian in nature, we have been less alert to the formal lessons available to aspiring Byzantine authors, most of whom would go on to compose in prose instead of verse. By tracing the long history of poetry as the school of prose, this chapter draws examples from Eustathios’ Parekbolai or ‘commentaries’ on Homeric epic in a bid to illustrate attempts to render Byzantine prose more ‘poetic’. The author thus hopes to underline the reciprocal and often seamless relation between prose and verse in the twelfth century and what this may teach us about both during what is widely regarded as the most innovative period in Byzantine literature.

This chapter considers the relationship between the historical Gorgias of Leontini and Plato’s portrayal of him and his ideas in the Gorgias. By drawing on fragments and testimonia of the historical figure, it shows that Plato’s understanding of Gorgias and his views informs both his characterization of the orator himself in the Gorgias, as well as that dialogue’s philosophical content and aims. In particular, three of the central themes of the Gorgias – ones that the character himself introduces – are prominent in Gorgias’ own works and in the doxographical reception of him: (1) the conception of speech as a form of power or dunamis; (2) the relation between power and wish or boulēsis and their joint role in human action; and (3) the contrast between – and contrasting relationships speech itself has with – belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other. Whether the historical Gorgias was ever personally committed to the relevant ideas in question or not, the chapter argues that he at least gave voice to them in his works, and that Plato, at least, evidently took them seriously as expressions of Gorgianic theory and practice.

For maximum effect, stories should be deployed strategically. That requires understanding the art of persuasion, the stages of a successful story, scene setting, and how to use the stories of others to illustrate important points. But by far the most powerful of all is knowing and using the stories which only you can tell.

This chapter explores several fundamental features of ancient Greek and Roman ethics and considers some ways in which these features are still influential in contemporary education. Ancient ethics was generally undergirded by a substantive cosmology and related philosophical anthropology; ancient thinkers often affirmed the existence of some sort of objective logos that served as the ordering principle of the cosmos and in accordance with which human beings ought to order their lives. This two-fold commitment resulted in a focus on cultivating virtue. The chapter also discusses three educational arenas in which commitment to features of ancient ethics is manifested today: arguments for “flourishing” as an aim of education, “character education” initiatives, and the contemporary K-12 “classical education” movement.

The second chapter touches more firmly on the philosophical debate and the arguments for human exceptionalism put forward over its course. The chapter puts Xanthus (the prophetic horse from Homer’s Iliad) as the first and prototypical speaking animal in the Western tradition in conversation with other famous speaking animals, including Plutarch’s speaking pig Grunter (Gryllus), a speaking rooster who claims to be a re-incarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras, and Kafka’s Red Peter. The chapter shows that the figure of the speaking animal is central to Western conceptions of the human. In classical antiquity, it features in stories that confirm the vertical relationship between humans (at the top) and animals (below). And yet, at the same time, right from the start of the conversation in the ancient world, the apparent anthropomorphism of the speaking animal was also used to critique the very idea of human exceptionalism. There is a direct line between how some modern animal fables point to man’s animal nature and the concept of the human explored in parts of the ancient evidence.

This volume is intended to introduce students and general readers to the theory and practice of rhetoric. Part I offers classic statements of rhetoric in Plato (in the Gorgias), Aristotle (in the Art of Rhetoric) and other seminal thinkers—both what rhetoric is and what its potential virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, are. The rest of Part I is devoted to explaining Aristotle’s classic and influential account of rhetoric: its three main kinds (deliberative, epideictic, and judicial) and the three “modes of persuasion” or proofs characteristic of it (those that appeal to the speaker’s ethos or character, to the pathos or emotion of the audience, and to logos or the logic of the speech itself). Part II offers a broad range of exemplary speeches, ancient and modern, grouped thematically. There is a preference throughout for political speeches, as distinguished from essays, letters, and other forms of communication; and our collection boasts a diversity of speakers.

This section consists of excerpts from Aristotles Rhetoric in which Aristotle discusses the three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, and logos) and of speeches illustrating each mode. There are three speeches that illustrate how one may be persuasive by appealing to passions (pathos), three that appeal to the good character of the speaker (ethos), and two that appeal to rational arguments (logos). The speeches range from the fifth century BC to the twenty-first century of our era.

The word ‘making’ does too much work. This chapter teases apart the etymological senses of three words that are sometimes employed interchangeably as synonyms for making. They are ‘Invention’, ‘Creation’, and ‘Production’. To list them in this order is to list them in a sequence that is broadly, but not strictly, chronological. Invention indicates the initiation of the making process, Creation describes the development stage, and Production describes the presentation or publication of the created thing. This chapter argues for a return to those original etymological distinctions as a way of distilling different significations from our undifferentiated talk of ‘making’. Perhaps it is not a return that is called for, so much as a fresh acknowledgement of etymological distinctions that still survive just below the surface of our discourse. That survival explains why, for example, one can ‘produce’ a rabbit from a hat, but one cannot ‘invent’ a rabbit, or ‘create’ a rabbit from a hat.

This chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s 1955–56 interpretation of the principle of reason as a principle that resonates or sounds variously in the history of philosophy. The principle is first fully formulated by Leibniz as the principle of sufficient reason, which states that there is no true fact or proposition without sufficient reason for it being so and not otherwise. Heidegger takes Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason to be a historically specific version of the principle of reason, which is a fundamental ontological principle holding that nothing is without a reason or ground, and so that being is ground/reason. Heidegger hears this association between being and ground resonating in the ancient Greek concept of logos, which is taken up but distorted by the Romans in the concept of ratio. From there, the ontological principle develops into the principle articulated by Leibniz and comes to express the distinctive commitments of modern philosophy and technology. While Heidegger’s historical story is not entirely plausible and contains significant omissions, attempting to reconstruct it reveals why this purported history of the principle of reason is relevant to Heidegger’s broader ontological project.

Traditional logic dominates Western thinking by centering thinking on propositions and thereby restricting the meaning of "being" to its derivative, categorial meaning. In Heidegger’s view, it fails in this way to realize the promise of a philosophical logic, one that is capable of tracing traditional logic and thinking generally back to their foundation, i.e., the being/unconcealment of the logos from which they are derived. This chapter examines how, as a first step toward realizing that promise, Heidegger questions the supremacy of logic in Western thinking through a “critical deconstruction” of four theses underlying it: the thesis that judgment is the place of truth rather than vice versa, that the copula exhausts the meaning of "being," that nothingness originates from negation rather than vice versa, and that the predicative structure of propositions constitutes the essence of language. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that the construction ultimately accompanying Heidegger’s deconstruction is to be found, not in language as Dasein’s comportment, but in the revealing capacity of tautology to which he appeals in his final seminar (1973).