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

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.