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| Author | : Susan C. Jarratt |
| Publisher | : SIU Press |
| Total Pages | : 186 |
| Release | : 1998 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 9780809322244 |
In "rereading" the sophists of fifth-century Greece, Susan C. Jarratt reinterprets classical rhetoric, with implications for current theory in rhetoric and composition. -- Provided by publisher
| Author | : Verity Harte |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 323 |
| Release | : 2017-12-28 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 1107194970 |
Revisits central texts and themes in ancient philosophy in order to throw fresh light on some familiar passages and debates.
| Author | : |
| Publisher | : A&C Black |
| Total Pages | : 265 |
| Release | : 2013-10-10 |
| Genre | : Education |
| ISBN | : 1472521196 |
The Sophists were bold, exciting innovators with new ideas about Athenian society. The first to arrive, in about 444 BC, was Protagoras. During the last half of the fifth century BC he was followed by a succession of 'new age' itinerant instructors who were skilled in teaching. Mainly they taught the young ambitious men of Athens, instilling in them the skills they sought in order to become successful, that is, rich and influential. The Athenians flocked to hear them and enrol in their courses. The Sophists dared to charge high fees for their instruction and their students willingly paid.The Sophists were versatile and multi-talented. It seems that there was nothing one or other of them could not teach, but perhaps their greatest legacy to western society was their development of language, which, naturally, also benefited them in their work.Plato criticised the Sophists for promoting dangerous ideas which threatened the traditional structure of society. They taught their students how to argue convincingly and to turn the weaker argument into a winning argument against the stronger. Plato was markedly vitriolic in his criticism of the Sophists. Perhaps he was justified.Were the Sophists clever, rather than wise? Where does the truth lie? This book, with its lively, comprehensive treatment of the subject by twenty leading scholars in the field, will help the reader to decide.
| Author | : Steven Mailloux |
| Publisher | : Cornell University Press |
| Total Pages | : 224 |
| Release | : 2018-09-05 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 1501728431 |
In his earlier Rhetorical Power, Steven Mailloux presented an innovative and challenging strategy for combining critical theory and cultural studies. That book has stimulated wide-ranging discussion and debate among diverse audiences—students and specialists in American studies, speech communications, rhetoric/composition, law, education, biblical studies, and especially literary theory and cultural criticism. Reception Histories marks a further development of Mailloux's influential critical project, as he demonstrates how rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. Reception Histories works out in detail what rhetorical hermeneutics means in terms of poststructuralist theory (Part One), nineteenth-century U.S. cultural studies (Part Two), and the contemporary history of curricular reform within the so-called Culture Wars (Part Three). Mailloux situates, defends, and elaborates the theory he first proposed in Rhetorical Power, and he exemplifies it with a new series of provocative reception histories. He also both critiques and reconceptualizes the version of reader response criticism he developed in his first book, Interpretive Conventions. Throughout Reception Histories, Mailloux demonstrates his distinctive blend of neopragmatism and cultural rhetoric study. By tracing the rhetorical paths of thought, this book offers a new way to read the current volatile debates over higher education and contributes its own original proposals for shaping the future of the humanities.
| Author | : Steven Mailloux |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 268 |
| Release | : 1995-05-18 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 9780521467803 |
The anti-sceptical relativism and self-conscious rhetoric of the pragmatist tradition, which began with the Older Sophists of Ancient Greece and developed through an American tradition including William James and John Dewey has attracted new attention in the context of late twentieth-century postmodernist thought. At the same time there has been a more general renewal of interest across a wide range of humanistic and social science disciplines in rhetoric itself: language use, writing and speaking, persuasion, figurative language, and the effect of texts. This book, written by leading scholars, explores the various ways in which rhetoric, sophistry and pragmatism overlap in their current theoretical and political implications, and demonstrates how they contribute both to a rethinking of the human sciences within the academy and to larger debates over cultural politics.
| Author | : Robin Reames |
| Publisher | : University of Chicago Press |
| Total Pages | : 244 |
| Release | : 2018-07-23 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 022656715X |
The widespread understanding of language in the West is that it represents the world. This view, however, has not always been commonplace. In fact, it is a theory of language conceived by Plato, culminating in The Sophist. In that dialogue Plato introduced the idea of statements as being either true or false, where the distinction between falsity and truth rests on a deeper discrepancy between appearance and reality, or seeming and being. Robin Reames’s Seeming & Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory marks a shift in Plato scholarship. Reames argues that an appropriate understanding of rhetorical theory in Plato’s dialogues illuminates how he developed the technical vocabulary needed to construct the very distinctions between seeming and being that separate true from false speech. By engaging with three key movements of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship—the rise and subsequent marginalization of “orality and literacy theory,” Heidegger’s controversial critique of Platonist metaphysics, and the influence of literary or dramatic readings of the dialogues—Reames demonstrates how the development of Plato’s rhetorical theory across several of his dialogues (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Theaetetus, Cratylus, Republic, and Sophist) has been both neglected and misunderstood.
| Author | : Barbara Cassin |
| Publisher | : Fordham University Press |
| Total Pages | : 230 |
| Release | : 2019-10-22 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 0823285766 |
Sophistry, since Plato and Aristotle, has been philosophy’s negative alter ego, its bad other. Yet sophistry’s emphasis on words and performativity over the fetishization of truth makes it an essential part of our world’s cultural, political, and philosophical repertoire. In this dazzling book, Barbara Cassin, who has done more than anyone to reclaim a mode of thought that traditional philosophy disavows, shows how the sophistical tradition has survived in the work of psychoanalysis. In a highly original rereading of the writings and seminars of Jacques Lacan, together with works of Freud and others, Cassin shows how psychoanalysis, like the sophists, challenges the very foundations of scientific rationality. In taking seriously equivocations, jokes, and unfinishable projects of interpretation, the analyst, like the sophist, allows performance, signifier, and inconsistency to reshape truth. This witty, brilliant tour de force celebrates how psychoanalysts have become our culture’s key dissidents and register, in Lacan’s words, “the presence of the sophist in our time.”
| Author | : Bruce McComiskey |
| Publisher | : SIU Press |
| Total Pages | : 188 |
| Release | : 2002 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 9780809323975 |
In Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric, Bruce McComiskey achieves three rhetorical goals: he treats a single sophist's rhetorical technê (art) in the context of the intellectual upheavals of fifth-century bce Greece, thus avoiding the problem of generalizing about a disparate group of individuals; he argues that we must abandon Platonic assumptions regarding the sophists in general and Gorgias in particular, opting instead for a holistic reading of the Gorgianic fragments; and he reexamines the practice of appropriating sophistic doctrines, particularly those of Gorgias, in light of the new interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric offered in this book. In the first two chapters, McComiskey deals with a misconception based on selective and Platonic readings of the extant fragments: that Gorgias's rhetorical technê involves the deceptive practice of manipulating public opinion. This popular and ultimately misleading interpretation of Gorgianic doctrines has been the basis for many neosophistic appropriations. The final three chapters deal with the nature and scope of neosophistic rhetoric in light of the non-Platonic and holistic interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric McComiskey postulates in his opening chapters. He concludes by examining the future of communication studies to discover what roles neosophistic doctrines might play in the twenty-first century. McComiskey also provides a selective bibliography of scholarship on sophistic rhetoric and philosophy in English since 1900.
| Author | : Susan C. Jarratt |
| Publisher | : Southern Illinois University Press |
| Total Pages | : 221 |
| Release | : 2019-11-08 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 0809337533 |
Barred from political engagement and legal advocacy, the second sophists composed and performed epideictic works for audiences across the Mediterranean world during the early centuries of the Common Era. In a wide-ranging study, author Susan C. Jarratt argues that these artfully wrought discourses, formerly considered vacuous entertainments, constitute intricate negotiations with the absolute power of the Roman Empire. Positioning culturally Greek but geographically diverse sophists as colonial subjects, Jarratt offers readings that highlight ancient debates over free speech and figured discourse, revealing the subtly coded commentary on Roman authority and governance embedded in these works. Through allusions to classical Greek literature, sophists such as Dio Chrysostom, Aelius Aristides, and Philostratus slipped oblique challenges to empire into otherwise innocuous works. Such figures protected their creators from the danger of direct confrontation but nonetheless would have been recognized by elite audiences, Roman and Greek alike, by virtue of their common education. Focusing on such moments, Jarratt presents close readings of city encomia, biography, and texts in hybrid genres from key second sophistic figures, setting each in its geographical context. Although all the authors considered are male, the analyses here bring to light reflections on gender, ethnicity, skin color, language differences, and sexuality, revealing an underrecognized diversity in the rhetorical activity of this period. While US scholars of ancient rhetoric have focused largely on the pedagogical, Jarratt brings a geopolitical lens to her study of the subject. Her inclusion of fourth-century texts—the Greek novel Ethiopian Story, by Heliodorus, and the political orations of Libanius of Antioch—extends the temporal boundary of the period. She concludes with speculations about the pressures brought to bear on sophistic political subjectivity by the rise of Christianity and with ruminations on a third sophistic in ancient and contemporary eras of empire.
