Today’s class reviews 5 separate articles we’ve read over the past week. The concern here is two-fold:
- First, we want to get a handle on sophistry, to disambiguate it from Plato’s critique, and identify its key players and terms
- Second, we want to trace out the contours of “postmodern” or “poststructuralism,” and try to identify why these movements resonate with non-Platonic conceptions of sophistry
Halloran
What is one name/idea/movement/problem that could inspire future research?
In “Aristotle’s Concept of Ethos, or if not His Somebody Else’s,” what does Halloran mean when he argues that “ethos emphasizes the conventional rather than the idiosyncratic?
In “Aristotle’s Concept of Ethos, or if not His Somebody Else’s,” Halloran connects ethos to?
Sullivan
What is one name/idea/movement/problem that could inspire future research?
In “The Ethos of Epideictic Encounter,” what does Dale L. Sullivan mean when he identifies epideictic rhetoric as a conservative activity?
Which term below does Sullivan use to fill in the blank: “Since epideictic is about ________ and ethos is the portrayal of ________, there is a natural link between the two.”
Carter
What, according to Carter, is the ancient primary purpose of stasis theory?
What are the four levels of stasis?
Carter notes that, unlike stasis,kairosis quite difficult to define. He ties the term to Gorgias and a “relativistic epistemology” (an idea that gets picked up and explicated by McComiskey). Tell me something about what “relativistic epistemology” means. Bonus: why does a relativistic epistemology make rhetoric necessary?
At its simplest, kairos refers to?
What is one name/idea/movement/problem that could inspire future research?
Jarratt
What political archetype does Jarratt connect to sophistry?
I want to pick up Jarratt’s complicated discussion of Moi, Alcoff, and whether poststructuralism can advance feminism, or whether the two movements are ultimately at odds (see p. 31).
Moi’s interest in “exclusion”: “Each individual must agonistically take sides in full knowledge that any position involves unpalatable political choices, acts of exclusion” (p. 32). Rhetoric and exclusion will come up again when we discuss Burke later in the semester. Alcoff’s interest in “positionality” (p. 32). Spivak and the importance of kairotic discourse.
Jarratt’s defense of Cixous’s “women’s writing” and why reverse racism or the menist movement isn’t a thing: “cultural, political, historical context” (p. 33).
When style functions as a disruption (an argument).
What is nomos? How does nomos differ from logos? Why does Jarratt believe nomos is important? (Jarratt, offering a Nietzschean reading of rhetoric: “It [Rhetoric] always reads the “real” both present and past, in terms of future possibilities, specifying “real” for whom, under what conditions, and toward what ends” (p. 38). In other words, rhetoric–by denying any access to a universal or divine Truth–insists that every law, every truth, is a matter of human-cultural production and maintenance. It looks at how these truths get maintained and supported (epideictic) and how these truths might be confronted (Gorgias’s poetic style, Protagoras’s antithesis, Cixous’s “bisexual” writing). It contextualizes truths, pays attention to who truths include and who gets excluded. It decides the undecidable–who must be hurt and forgoes any idealist notion that a Truth can be universally inclusive. It doesn’t, as Nietschze chastises, simply synthesize history into a neat, easily digestible set of laws, binaries, “Truths.” Rather, it reaches for its hammer. (See Beyond Good and Evil or Truth and Lies in An Extra-Moral Sense).
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
What is one name/idea/movement/problem that could inspire future research?
McComiskey
Homework
There’s links to two pieces on the syllabus by Haskins on Isocrates. Wikipedia offers a succinct introduction to Isocrates. I would call attention to one particular passage from his long work, the Antidosis,
