Henry Bowles
DPhil Student
Faculty of Classics, Christ Church
Summary of doctoral thesis: My doctoral thesis, ‘Against “Nature”: Ancient Rhetoric and the Birth of the Tabula Rasa’, argues that Greek and Latin rhetoric houses a robust constructivist tradition. By oversampling philosophy at the expense of literary theory, modern scholarship has underrepresented nurture-first accounts of cognition. This has encouraged the notion that constructivism is a product of the Enlightenment. I rectify this by analysing models of mind in Gorgias, Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian, and Hermogenes of Tarsus.
Other research interests: literature and philosophy; literary theory; intellectual history; psychology.
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