Mark D. Jordan

"Porphyry is right to suggest that Plotinus' teaching "voice" has about it something particular , speaking as if inspired and from his own experience rather than out of the tradition. The rhetorical ch…"

"The claim of philosophy to be about the whole can be secured only if the many "ordinary" languages in the whole can be taken over by an act of persuasion into a language about the whole."

"The end of philosophic education, on many ancient views, is not a body of propositions to be measured against an equally propositional and already apprehended truth. The end is, rather, the having of …"

"One reason that Christian theology is so detached from larger intellectual or artistic movements is that it has not suffered consciously a crisis of its expressive forms. At a cultural moment when mos…"

"Aristippus is credited with having said that those who stop short of philosophy in the preparatory studies are like Penelope's suitors: they marry the maids, but not the mistress."

"Socratic trustworthiness depends upon devices of irony, both spoken and acted. … The irony of words prevents Socrates from being taken as the source of doctrines. The irony of actions prevents Socrate…"

"Historiography cannot, by itself, answer the question about the criterion for pedagogical authenticity. So much is obvious in the construction of the historical account, which must assume some princip…"

"Academic writing excuses itself from rhetorical care in the selfless service of some precise truth—and then deforms our only means for speaking truth."