2 (2007): 192-214, and more generally to other recent accounts of the Nicomachean Ethics as a
protreptic work (see his 193 n.
Protreptic Aspects of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
[...] In relation to the Socratic practice of dialectic inquiry, the original (archaic) insight into or idealized vision of the Good or the Being of the virtues serves at once as the origin from out of which the inquiry emerges, is given life, and is also the controlling (ruling) power that structures and orders the dialectic inquiry in ways that guide and facilitate its unfolding and development (the 'law' or so-called Logos of its unfolding--to which the
protreptic component contributes its hortatory and persuasive power to exhort the participants in their continuing philosophical pursuit of the virtues.
Their philosophical importance is not merely rhetorical or
protreptic. The poetic appeal to the imagination makes it easier to interest people in philosophical questions, but that is not all.
Instead, Busy interrupts and famously debates with Dionysius until Busy is "converted." Edwards's conversion of the tyrant King Dionysius follows a
protreptic two-hour dramatization of the virtues of amity.
Bonaventure's Collationes in Hexaemeron: Fractured Sermons and
Protreptic Discourse," Franciscan Studies 63 (2005) 107-29.
A perfect illustration of this
protreptic imagery is found in Epode 7.
The topics include Augustine between Manichaean and Catholic Christianity, understanding a universal religion with exclusivist practices, the few and the many as a motif of Augustine's controversy with the Manichaeans, a
protreptic to a liminal Manichaean at the center of Augustine's Confessions, and Manichaean self-designations in the Western tradition.
Mathematics for Plato is an advanced branch of philosophy; allegedly, an inscription at Plato's Academy read, "No one who does not know mathematics may enter here." But, at the same time, mathematics was just a necessary propaedeutic and
protreptic to the most advanced form of investigation, analysis and synthesis, the pursuit of what Plato calls dialektike (dialectic).
According to Kamtekar, the primary purpose of personification for Plato is
protreptic: hence, for example, the image in the Republic, book 9 of the soul as a multiform creature is intended to encourage us identify with, and develop, the best part of ourselves--the rational, 'human' part--while also drawing our attention to the necessity of 'taming' the 'lion-like' and 'beast-like' parts of ourselves.
See Socrates' account of his own
protreptic task as a philosopher in Ap.
Arguably, then, while the metaphysical superimposition of a pyramidal 'spatialized structure' was the Classical Greek medium, it was not its intention to incentivize xenophobic hatred of the Other: as a cognitive emotion, hatred would have categorically exploded the
protreptic (Socratic, moral) underpinning of philosophy as an extended, forward-looking process of rational inquiry--one driven by a special sense of Eros.