Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy. A Reading of Homer's Iliad.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Overall very good and clean. - One of the few works to apply features of contemporary philosophy to the interpretation of ancient Greek texts, Turning analyzes the representation of persuasion in pre-Platonic texts, particularly Homer's Iliad. It demonstrates how essential persuasion was in almost every relation between mortals and between mortals and gods in early Greek texts. While being reduced to a mere psychological phenomenon by later Greek philosophy � reduced to the practice and study of rhetoric � persuasion was, for the early Greeks, a pre-ontological �force� associated with a turning toward presence. Michael Naas�s work approaches the "critique of presence" in that it tries to articulate a notion � persuasion, turning � that cannot be squarely located within metaphysics. - Michael Naas teaches philosophy at De Paul University, Chicago. He has published several articles in contemporary French philosophy and has translated, with Pascale-Anne Brault, two works by Jacques Derrida: The Other Healing (1992) and Memoirs of the Blind (1993). ISBN 9780391038219