Isocrates and Civic Education

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The origins of the essays in this volume lie in the 1998 Obermann Humanities Symposium, “Civic Education in Classical Athens and Humanities Education Today.” The symposium was held at the University of Iowa under the sponsorship of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies in October 1998. The editors are grateful to the Obermann Center, and especially to its director, Dr. Jay Semel, for his encouragement and support in every phase of this project. We are also grateful to the University of Iowa’s Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry for its cooperation and support, as well as to several cosponsoring departments in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences : Classics, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Communication Studies. We are grateful finally to Humanities Iowa for their grant in support of our symposium , and to Ray Heffner for his thoughtful report to Humanities Iowa. The volume has benefited greatly from the remarks of those who served as respondents at this interdisciplinary Humanities Symposium. These colleagues include Professors Eve Browning Cole, Philosophy, University of Minnesota, Duluth; John Finamore, Classics, University of Iowa; Kenneth Cmiel, History, University of Iowa; the late Michael Calvin McGee, Communication Studies, University of Iowa; Thomas Williams, Philosophy, University of Iowa; Dennis Moore, Rhetoric, University of Iowa; Diana Cates, Religion, University of Iowa. We also wish to thank Professors Helena Dettmer, John Garcia, Peter Green, and Robert Ketterer for chairing the panels and leading the conversation during the symposium. We wish to acknowledge our special debt to John Finamore and Mary Depew who were there for us from the start and through every logistical step on the way. Much credit is due to the contributors to the volume. Their willingness to amplify and revise their work to assure a high degree of integration and mutual illumination among the essays is praiseworthy, as is their patience during the volume’s long process of gestation. We are grateful to the steady hands guiding that process of gestation, the Humanities editor of University of Texas Press, Jim Burr, our anonymous reviewers, and especially Professor Michael Gagarin, Classics, University of Texas, who believed in and guided this project from the very beginning. ix We are most thankful to all the people who helped us finalize various aspects of this project, Bonnie Bender and Lorna Olson for their administrative assistance with the symposium, David Banash, Brian Lain, and Danna Prather for their research assistance, Sandy Mast for her technical support, and especially Adam Roth for his tireless assistance with copyediting. isocrates and c ivic education x ...