The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a Research Seminar given by Ariel Helfer (Associate Professor, Political Science) on the topic of, "Eros and Eris: The Love of Science and the Science of Love in Isocrates's Encomium of Helen".

Abstract: How can we identify the point at which Isocratic and Platonic philosophy diverge? Isocrates’s uncharacteristically playful work, Encomium of Helen, is composed of two parts. The first, shorter section, by criticizing the triviality of paradox-loving sophistry and the pursuit of arcane scientific knowledge, insists on the Isocratic development of sound, practical opinion. But the bulk of the work contains Isocrates’s own model for paradoxical discourse: his attempt at an “Encomium of Helen.” Readers of Isocrates since Aristotle have puzzled over the apparent disjunction between these two disparate parts. In this essay, I propose that Isocrates’s Encomium of Helen helps us to understand how far Isocrates follows the Platonic Socrates in his analysis of love and beauty and how he turns that analysis against the Platonic view of philosophy as the pursuit of science.