egarver@csbsju.edu

612-625-6563

Department of Philosophy at Saint John's University

I have spent my career trying to understand practical reason, especially how the virtues of practical reason vary over time. Currently, I am exploring the history of prudence in two research projects. First, I promised in Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character that attention to the Rhetoric would shed new light on Aristotle's Ethics and Politics. Aristotle often develops his accounts of the moral virtues and phronesis in the Ethics through contrast with the arts. Rhetoric is a rational power for proving opposites which lies very close to practical wisdom and the moral virtues without itself becoming a virtue. Therefore seeing what rhetoric has that the good person lacks, or what the good person has that the able rhetorician lacks, allows me to fill in unnoticed parts of the picture presented by the Ethics.

My second project also starts from Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. The Rhetoric is an especially important work because Aristotle articulates a conception of character that emerges out of the activity of reasoning. The relation between thought and character seems especially useful for thinking about problems for which our standard categories of the rational and the irrational or emotional seem inadequate. Trust, commitment, and authority don't make sense as purely rational or emotional, but can be profitably thought about in terms of a kind of ethical rationality or rational character.

Selected Publications

For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character and the Ethics of Belief, University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Pluralism in Theory and Practice: Richard McKeon and American Philosophy. Edited with Richard Buchanan. Vanderbilt University Press, forthcoming.

"The Ethical Criticism of Arguments." Philosophy and Rhetoric 31 (1998).

"Politics III and the Incompleteness of the Normative." Ancient Philosophy 18 (1998).

"Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Prudence in the Interpretation of the Constitution." In Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, eds. Walter Jost and Michael Hyde. Yale University Press, 1996.

Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.