Phillip J. Donnelly is Associate Professor of Literature in the Honors College at Baylor University, where he teaches in the Great Texts Program and the English Department. His research focuses on the historical intersections between philosophy, theology, and imaginative literature, with particular attention to Renaissance literature and the reception of Classical educational traditions. He is author of Milton's Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Before coming to Baylor, he taught at the University of Ottawa and at Texas Tech University.

His research interests focus on the historical intersections between philosophy, theology, and imaginative literature, with particular attention to Renaissance literature and the reception of Classical educational traditions.  The topics of his published work range from St. Augustine and post-modern critical theory to the Renaissance poetry of George Herbert and John Milton. He is a contributor to the new Milton Encyclopedia, edited by Thomas N. Corns (Yale University Press) and to the Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, edited by Karla Pollmann and Willemien Otten (Oxford University Press).

Abstract:  Rhetoric and Dialectic in Paradise Lost

The first stage of this argument establishes how Paradise Lost as a whole engages the central claims of Plato's Republic. In view of that larger structural engagement, the second part of the essay considers how Milton implicitly proposes biblical paraphrase poetry as an alternative to Socratic dialectic. Ultimately, I suggest that Milton's epic response to the "ancient quarrel" between philosophy and poetry involves a doxological synthesis of rhetoric and dialectic.