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Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle
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Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle

This book is a study of the literary strategies which the first professional philosophers used to market their respective disciplines. Philosophers of fourth-century BCE Athens developed the emerging genre of the "protreptic" (literally, "turning" or "converting"). Simply put, protreptic discourse uses a rhetoric of conversion that urges a young person to adopt a specific philosophy in order to live a good life. The author argues that the fourth-century philosophers used protreptic discourses to market philosophical practices and to define and legitimize a new cultural institution: the school of higher learning (the first in Western history).
 
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Tags: protreptic, philosophers, fourth-century, first, market