Today’s plan
- Set up Twitter accounts and some follows
- Share a blog post or two
- Discuss Isocrates (Question: tell me about what kind of math courses you have taken)
- Homework
Today we will take a bit of class time to set up Twitter accounts. Some of you might already have Twitter accounts, and if you do, then feel free to use it.
I will take a few minutes to go over the basics of Twitter:
- Favorites
- Retweeting
- Hash Tags
- Following
I also have a few accounts that I would like everyone to follow:
- The Chronicle of Higher Education
- Inside Higher Ed
- Guardian Higher Education
- PEW Center Research: honestly, everyone in Professional Writing and Technical Communication should follow PEW not only for the quality of information they convey, but also for the integrity, concision, and neutrality with which they convey it
- Pew Research Internet
- Politifact.com
- FactCheck.org
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be asking you to retweet articles with the course hashtag. Your tweets should also offer some kind of reaction or response. Obviously, brevity is the order of the day on twitter. You will also need to blog about a few of these articles, offering short summaries and reactions. Let me do a sample. [copy/paste: Moving from standardization to individuation, Rose and Ogas offer a vision for rethinking
The Faulty Foundation of American Colleges https://shar.es/1ho6Vd via @chronicle]
Unpacking the Reading
Reading question: Benoit notes that Plato and Isocrates shared similar objections to the sophists. What were they?
Reading question: Benoit notes that both Plato and Isocrates conceptualize rhetoric as persuasion, however, he also notes that there are important differences between them. What are some of these differences?
There is one passage from Benoit that warrants close attention. Summing up their differences regarding epistemology, or the study and state of knowledge, Benoit writes:
Thus, while neither writer accepts the sophists’ apparent unconcern for truth, Plato adheres to a considerably more stringent requirement for knowledge in rhetoric that Isocrates. The contrast between Isocrates’ pragmatism and Plato’s idealism is quite sharp. In fact, one could say that for Isocrates, rhetoric constitutes knowledge, giving rhetoric primacy over knowledge; for Plato, knowledge (obtained through dialectic) precedes rhetoric, which is clearly secondary to and dependent upon knowledge.
Quick thought: Isocrates seems more concerned with affairs of state, and Plato with improving the souls of audience members. Looking back on your own education, what do you think your schools prioritized? Think of each of the dominant subjects: english, history, math, science?
On that point, should we teach people how to argue both sides of an issue? Or only the right side? (Benoit 66). Other questions in rhetorical education: if we agree that the basis of education is three abilities: ability, knowledge, and practice, then what kinds of practice has your education afforded?
Haskins
Central question: what happens if we shift from Aristotle to Isocrates? What are the classroom implications? What are the socio-political implications?
I want to point to a long passage worthy of examination, in which Haskins identifies what kind of theoretical position underlies Isocrates’ approach to rhetoric:
Still, the implicit theory position does not carry us far enough, I believe, because it does not delve into the respective attitudes of Isocrates and Aristotle towards the culture of imitative performance. Isocrates does not simply profess eloquence by example, but furnishes an early model of a political identity constructed and sustained through literary performance. Isocrates’ performative model rests upon an understanding of language that Kenneth Burke would call “dramatistic”-language is a continuous and repetitive action that shapes both individual and collective identities, that constitutes speakers’ political authority and calls audiences into being. To train oneself in all the genres in which “logos expresses itself,” to immerse oneself in a variety of culturally significant speech, is for Isocrates a way to become an active member of a political community. Perform- ance implicates the speaker (or writer) in a relationship with an audi- ence, and the speaker’s reputation is intimately tied to this audience’s approval or disapproval. The audience’s response is not simply a mat- ter of agreement or disagreement with the statements about the past or future, or judgments about the rhetorician’s ability to use words (as Aristotle’s Rhetoric would have it); rather, it either ratifies or invali- dates one’s very position within the political sphere.
And:
Aristotle does not embrace this performative approach to cit- izenship. Following in Plato’s steps, he disengages the conditions of virtue and citizenship from the messy context of democratic interde- pendence and performative contingency. Thanks to Plato, the term mimesis, associated with training in verbal and bodily excellence, acquired a derogatory connotation of unreflective mimicry, of “monkey see monkey do.” Impersonation of someone else’s speaking style is tan- tamount to taking on that person’s character, and if performance is enacted in front of an audience, the audience, too, becomes emotionally involved in the image created by the performer. To Plato, this scenario exhibits the epistemological and political dangers inherent in imitat- ive pedagogy: not only does it replace truth with simulacra; it also creates social chaos by confusing people about their proper roles in the political hierarchy.
And one more: this one perhaps most critical (since it revisits the distinction she makes above, albeit in perhaps more difficult terms):
Circumscribing the domain of the rhetorical in this way allows Aristotle to insulate loftier forms of deliberation, exercised by persons who possess practical wisdom, from the pedestrian rationality of the hoi polloi. This, I have argued, is a reaction to Isocrates, who describes logos as a guide in both public deliberation and private reckoning. By coupling the terms phronein and legein, Isocrates refuses to separate the conditions of thought and knowledge from the culturally entrenched verbal means of articulating this knowledge. Perhaps most important, Isocrates proposes that logos constitutes a social com- munity out of division, rather than simply ratifies the already existing political relationships. It is Isocrates who offers us a classical antece- dent of the concept of identification, championed by Kenneth Burke more than half a century ago.
Homework
On Canvas, read the Barlow read on Cicero. Cicero is writing a few centuries after Isocrates and Plato, as the Roman empire has risen to power. Generally, the Romans were skeptical of the value of Greek philosophy, feeling it was too abstract to be practical. Cicero believed otherwise, and argued that statesmen and orators could benefit from exposure to abstract philosophy, so long as they weren’t overexposed.
Additionally, read Rose and Ogas’ recent Chronicle article The Faulty Foundation of American Colleges. As you read, try to focus on the three basic elements of argumentation: what is the claim that Rose and Ogas make? What do they offer as evidence to support this claim? In what ways do they anticipate criticism?
