Exhortations to Philosophy

Download or read book Exhortations to Philosophy written by James Henderson Collins and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 4th century bce Athens, the first professional philosophers developed different strategies to market their respective disciplines. Using different genres and discourses, they forged the emerging genre of the 'protreptic'. Simply put, protreptic discourses use a 'rhetoric of conversion' that urges a young person to adopt a specific philosophy among many in order to live a truly good life. Collins argues that the Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle used protreptic discourse to market philosophical practices and to define and legitimise a new cultural institution: the school of higher learning.