Sophistical Practice

Sophistical Practice PDF Author: Barbara Cassin
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823256413
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Sophistics is the paradigm of a discourse that does things with words. It is not pure rhetoric, as Plato wants us to believe, but it provides an alternative to the philosophical mainstream. A sophistic history of philosophy questions the orthodox philosophical history of philosophy: that of ontology and truth in itself. In this book, we discover unusual Presocratics, wreaking havoc with the fetish of true and false. Their logoi perform politics and perform reality. Their sophistic practice can shed crucial light on contemporary events, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where, to quote Desmond Tutu, “words, language, and rhetoric do things,” creating things like the new “rainbow people.” Transitional justice requires a consistent and sustainable relativism: not Truth, but truth for, and enough of the truth for there to be a community. Philosophy itself is about words before it is about concepts. Language manifests itself in reality only as multiplicity; different languages perform different types of worlds; and difficulties of translation are but symptoms of these differences. This desacralized untranslatability undermines and deconstructs the Heideggerian statement that there is a historical language of philosophy that is Greek by essence (being the only language able to say what “is”) and today is German. Sophistical Practice constitutes a major contribution to the debate among philosophical pluralism, unitarism, and pragmatism. It will change how we discuss such words as city, truth, and politics. Philologically and philosophically rethinking the sophistical gesture, relying on performance and translation, it proposes a new paradigm for the human sciences.

Sophistical Practice

Sophistical Practice PDF Author: Barbara Cassin
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823256413
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sophistics is the paradigm of a discourse that does things with words. It is not pure rhetoric, as Plato wants us to believe, but it provides an alternative to the philosophical mainstream. A sophistic history of philosophy questions the orthodox philosophical history of philosophy: that of ontology and truth in itself. In this book, we discover unusual Presocratics, wreaking havoc with the fetish of true and false. Their logoi perform politics and perform reality. Their sophistic practice can shed crucial light on contemporary events, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where, to quote Desmond Tutu, “words, language, and rhetoric do things,” creating things like the new “rainbow people.” Transitional justice requires a consistent and sustainable relativism: not Truth, but truth for, and enough of the truth for there to be a community. Philosophy itself is about words before it is about concepts. Language manifests itself in reality only as multiplicity; different languages perform different types of worlds; and difficulties of translation are but symptoms of these differences. This desacralized untranslatability undermines and deconstructs the Heideggerian statement that there is a historical language of philosophy that is Greek by essence (being the only language able to say what “is”) and today is German. Sophistical Practice constitutes a major contribution to the debate among philosophical pluralism, unitarism, and pragmatism. It will change how we discuss such words as city, truth, and politics. Philologically and philosophically rethinking the sophistical gesture, relying on performance and translation, it proposes a new paradigm for the human sciences.

Theory, Text, Context

Theory, Text, Context PDF Author: Christopher Lyle Johnstone
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791431085
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Leading scholars of classical rhetoric address contemporary topics in Greek rhetoric and oratory.

Google Me

Google Me PDF Author: Barbara Cassin
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823278085
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
“Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy.” In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data. Enlisting her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition, Cassin demolishes the Google myth of a “good” tech company and its “democracy of clicks,” laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naiveté that underwrites its founding slogans: “Organize the world’s information,” and “Don’t be evil.” For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world. While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google’s playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining and other languages become provincial “flavors” folded into an impoverished Globish, or global English.

The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology

The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology PDF Author: Joseph Barber Lightfoot
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description


Imprisoned by History

Imprisoned by History PDF Author: Martin L. Davies
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135178453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This book analyzes what history does in contemporary culture. It argues that contemporary society is, in historical terms, already historicized, shaped by history - and thus history loses sight of the world, seeing it only as a reflection of its own self-image. By illustrating the ways in which history enforces socially coercive attitudes and forms of behavior, the author argues that history is in itself ideological and exists as an instrument of political power. Contending that this ideological function is the "normal" function of professional academic history, he repudiates the conventional view that only biased or "bad" history is ideological. By finding history projecting onto the world and getting reflected back at it the exacting, history-focused thinking and behavior on which the discipline and the subject rely, he concludes that history's very "normality" and "objectivity" are inherently compromised and that history works only in terms of its own self-interest.

The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology

The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 840

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Book Description


Dialectics

Dialectics PDF Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110321289
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Few ideas have played a more continuously prominent role throughout the history of philosophy than that of dialectic, which has figured on the philosophical agenda from the time of the Presocratics. The present book explores the philosophical promise of dialectic, especially in its dialogical version associated with disputation, debate, and rational controversy. The book’s deliberations examine what lessons can be drawn to exhibit the utility of dialectical proceedings for the theory of knowledge in reminding us that the building-up of knowledge is an interpersonally interactive enterprise subject to communal standards.

The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology

The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology PDF Author: Joseph Barber Lightfoot
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108053513
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
The first three issues of a short-lived academic journal, published in 1854, illuminate classics and theology in mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge.

Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric

Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric PDF Author: Bruce McComiskey
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809323975
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
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.

Apropos of Something

Apropos of Something PDF Author: Elisa Tamarkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645312X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
"Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin's sweeping cultural history of a key shift in consciousness: the arrival, around 1800, of "relevance" as the means to grasp how something previously disregarded becomes important and interesting. At a time when so much makes claims to attention every day, how does one decide what is most valuable right now? This is not only a contemporary problem. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the question for the nineteenth century was how, in the immensity and "succession" of objects, anything becomes a proper object of experience. How that question was finally defined as one of relevance is the story of Apropos of Nothing. Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was primarily an Anglo-American concept. It engaged major intellectual figures, centrally the pragmatists-William James, Alain Locke, and John Dewey-and before them thinkers including Emerson and Alfred North Whitehead. Most of all, relevance was a problem for the worlds of art, literature, education, and criticism. These were fascinated by how old, boring, distant, or unfamiliar things get taken in; how they are admitted as meaningful; how they come home to us like the ludicrous raven comes to Edgar Allan Poe's student in the middle of the night in some obscure connection with himself. Many nineteenth-century American artists saw their paintings as pragmatic works that make relevance-that suggest versions of events that feel apropos of our world the moment we see them. (Tamarkin's book is richly illustrated, in color, with works by Winslow Homer, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Edgar Degas, and others.) Relevance remains a conundrum, especially for the humanities. It obliges us to say why we admit Poe's poem-or, say, a line of Emerson's-is interesting enough to study it, to dedicate ourselves to understanding it, to affirming that this effort is, in Emerson's words, "relevant to me and mine, to nature, and the hour that now passes.""--