Over the course of 2023-2024, we stuck to schedule and succeeded in reading together Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Poetics and the logical works that constitute the so-called Organon, as well as parts of Eudemian Ethics. We provided an account of our activities until Christmas 2023 during the closing session of the event On Christopher Rowe’s Eudemian Ethics held at Durham on 25th-26th January 2024 in honour of our wonderful colleague and Advisory Board Chairman, Christopher Rowe; the other speakers and chairs, besides Phillip, Edith and Christopher, were Friedemann Buddensiek, George Gazis, Giulia Bonasio, Anna Marmodoro, Robert Mayhew, Sara Uckelman, Sophia Connell, Giulio di Basilio, Bjorn Wastvedt, Daniel Ferguson, Karen Margrethe Nielsen and Raphael Woolf. Christopher was presented with Aristotle-themed gifts and a cake iced to match our project’s image.
May and June 2024 were particularly busy. The project sponsored an excellent workshop on 22nd to 23rd May entitled Oneirata. Sleep, Dreams, and Divination in Aristotle and his Predecessors, convened by two PhD students, Maria Cristina Mennuti (Durham) and Marco Picciafuochi (Università Roma Tre-Tor Vergata/Durham). Both Phil and Edith contributed papers, and the organisers are preparing a proposal to send to a publisher for consideration.
June 27th-29th saw us decamping en masse to Coimbra to speak at the V Congreso Internacional de Filosofía Griega. To a packed lecture room (standing room only!) we delivered a panel jointly with Edith’s other funded research project, Aristotle beyond the Academy in Britain and Ireland 1660-1922. We all spoke on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and its (implied and actual) audiences:
Alessandro Vatri, ‘Is the observer observed? πάντες, ἄνθρωποι and the first-person plural in Aristotle’s Rhetoric’.
Rosie Wyles, ‘Aristotle’s use of endoxa in Rhetoric: the language of “everybody’”. Phillip Horky, ‘Aristotle’s Ideal Spectator: Mimesis and Cognition from the
Aristotelian Stage’.
Edith Hall, ‘How Hobbes took the dēmos out of Aristotle’s Rhetoric’.
Arlene Holmes-Henderson, ‘Courting Aristotle: the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in British legal education and proceedings 1600-1922’.
Unfortunately, the other Researcher on Aristotle beyond the Academy, Dr Peter Swallow, an Aristophanes and Classical Reception expert as well as an Aristotelian, was unavailable for the excellent reason that he was campaigning to be elected Bracknell’s first ever Labour MP on July 5th; his campaign was successful! We wish him every success as he exercises his skills in Aristotelian rhetoric and follows up on his commitment to achieving a virtuous and happy polity for all of us in the UK. His maiden speech was on Special Needs Education and he will be campaigning to expand classics education in the state sector.
We consoled ourselves for his absence by locating Aristotle both in statuary and wall art, and submitting a proposal to have our papers published as a Special Issue by the journal Rhetorica. It has been accepted and will appear in due course.
