Logos without Rhetoric

Description

A germinal examination of rhetoric's beginnings through pre-fourth-century Greek texts

How did rhetoric begin and what was it before it was called "rhetoric"? Must art have a name to be considered art? What is the difference between eloquence and rhetoric? And what were the differences, if any, among poets, philosophers, sophists, and rhetoricians before Plato emphasized—or perhaps invented—their differences? In Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language before Plato, Robin Reames attempts to intervene in these and other questions by examining the status of rhetorical theory in texts that predate Plato's coining of the term rhetoric (c. 380 B.C.E.). From Homer and Hesiod to Parmenides and Heraclitus to Gorgias, Theodorus, and Isocrates, the case studies contained here examine the status of the discipline of rhetoric prior to and therefore in the absence of the influence of Plato and Aristotle's full-fledged development of rhetorical theory in the fourth century B.C.E.

The essays in this volume make a case for a porous boundary between theory and practice and promote skepticism about anachronistic distinctions between myth and reason and between philosophy and rhetoric in the historiography of rhetoric's beginning. The result is an enlarged understanding of the rhetorical content of pre-fourth-century Greek texts.

Edward Schiappa, head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing and the John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, provides an afterword

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie du langage
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• PHILOSOPHY
• The Unwritten
• Stoicism
• The Philosopher
• Callicles
• Superiority (short story)
• Philosophy of language
• Pseudo-Plutarch
• Platonic Academy
• Declamation
• Platonism
• Obscurantism
• Disputation
• Antithesis
• Zeno's paradoxes
• Semantics
• Rhetoric
• Mythology
• Language
• Nous
• Disputatio
• Langage
• Paradox
• Sine qua non
• Myth
• Logos
• Gorgias

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 19 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611177695
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Logos without Rhetoric
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
Logos without Rhetoric

The Arts of Language before Plato
Edited by
Robin Reames
Afterword by
Edward Schiappa

The University of South Carolina Press
2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-768-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-769-5 (ebook)
Front cover photograph: antpkr/istockphoto.com

It is perhaps a true proverb, which says that the beginning of anything is the most important; hence it is also the most difficult. For, as it is very powerful in its effects, so it is very small in size and therefore very difficult to see. When, however, the first beginning has been discovered, it is easier to add to it and develop the rest. This has happened, too, concerning rhetorical speeches, and also practically all the other arts.
Aristotle On Sophistical Refutations
Contents
Series Editor s Preface
Preface and Acknowledgments
A Note on Translations
Introduction
Unity, Dissociation, and Schismogenesis in Isocrates
Terry L. Papillon
Theodorus Byzantius on the Parts of a Speech
Robert N. Gaines
Gorgias On Non-Being : Genre, Purpose, and Testimonia
Carol Poster
Parmenides: Philosopher, Rhetorician, Skywalker
Thomas Rickert
Heraclitus Doublespeak: The Paradoxical Origins of Rhetorical Logos
Robin Reames
Rhetoric and Royalty: Odysseus Presentation of the Female Shades in Hades
Marina McCoy
M tis, Themis , and the Practice of Epic Speech
David C. Hoffman
It Takes an Empire to Raise a Sophist: An Athens-Centered Analysis of the Oikonomia of Pre-Platonic Rhetoric
Michael Svoboda
Afterword: Persistent Questions in the Historiography of Early Greek Rhetorical Theory
Edward Schiappa
Appendix A: A Timeline of the Life of Gorgias of Leontini
Carol Poster
Appendix B: A Summary of Gorgias Work and Activity
Carol Poster
Appendix C: A New Testimonium of Theodorus Byzantius
Robert Gaines
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Series Editor s Preface
What are the origins of rhetoric in Western culture? To this day most students new to the study of the history of rhetoric are introduced to the story of Corax and Tisias, who were said by the Greeks to have written the first handbooks on oratory in the fifth century B.C.E . in Sicily and whose teachings quickly migrated to Athens. But earlier practices of argument and persuasion reach back to the origins of literacy and beyond in the mists of memory in oral culture. Against this tradition of gradually developing practice and increasingly self-conscious practice, Edward Schiappa, writing in the 1990s, offered a contrasting view. In 1990, Schiappa argued that it was not until fourth-century Athens, with Plato s dialogue Gorgias , that the term rhetoric ( rh torik ) was coined, and that the naming of the art enabled the foundation of what may truly be called rhetorical theory.
In Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language before Plato , Robin Reames and the contributors she has brought together consider the intellectual and material history of rhetoric, eloquence, and oratory before Plato. The result is a fascinating, vivid, and learned journey, guided by scholars of distinction and originality-Terry L. Papillon, Robert N. Gaines, Carol Poster, Thomas Rickert, Marina McCoy, David C. Hoffman, and Michael Svoboda, along with Robin Reames as editor and contributor and an afterword by Edward Schiappa.
The intellectual delights of this richly documented and theoretically dazzling volume are augmented by a spirit of intellectual generosity that shines through every contending theoretical and historical argument. The result is a work that is important, original, and at the same time lucid and accessible-a model of scholarly eloquence.
Thomas W. Benson
Preface and Acknowledgments
The idea for this volume began as a panel on Heraclitus that I organized for the Rhetoric Society of America biennial conference, which included presentations by Jason Helms, David Hoffman, Carol Poster, and myself. I am grateful to the lively discussion of the panel presenters and the attendees for inspiring the larger work of this volume, which aims to gather and reconsider some of the intellectual antecedents for the ascendance of rhetoric in fourth-century B.C.E . Greece. Although originally the discussion focused exclusively on Heraclitus, and considered the hermeneutic traditions that exclude his thought from the history of rhetoric, our considerations led us to entertain more broadly how these hermeneutic traditions constrain our view of many other figures as well, where strict and firm distinctions between poets, philosophers, sophists, and rhetoricians anachronistically dictate how and to what extent these thinkers are viably associated with the birth of rhetoric and rhetorical theory. I am grateful to all of the contributors, whose enthusiasm for this theme brought the project into being.
In addition the contributors, I wish to thank Jim Denton, Linda Fogle, and the editorial staff at the University of South Carolina Press, whose hard work has made this volume possible, and to the eagle-eyed copyeditors who see the errors of our ways. We the authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers who offered invaluable feedback and commentary at earlier stages of the project. I also wish to thank Bentley University; the Jeanne and Dan Valente Center for Arts and Sciences at Bentley, and its director, Christopher Beneke. The center s generous support made beginning the work for this volume possible. I am grateful as well to the librarians and library services at Harvard s Widener and Houghton libraries, whose outstanding collections are nothing less than inspirational. Thanks also are due to my colleagues and students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in particular Ralph Cintron, Monica Westin, and Nathan Shephard, as well as William McNeill of DePaul University, all of whom participated in a roundtable discussion of this and other work. And of course, heartfelt thanks goes to Edward Schiappa, whose scholarship on the beginning of rhetorical theory in Greece laid a firm foundation on which to build this work, and whose interest in this project is generously offered in the afterword.
Finally, I wish to thank my partner, Drew Dalton, whose support, encouragement, generosity, and vast knowledge of the history of philosophy make my work both more possible and more worthwhile, and my daughter, Thea, whose laughter, love, and patience make all of it more fun.
Earlier versions of two of the essays in this volume appeared previously as journal articles. An early version of my essay on Heraclitus appeared as The Logos Paradox: Heraclitus, Material Language, and Rhetoric in Philosophy and Rhetoric 46:3, 328-50 ( 2013 Pennsylvania State University Press), and a previous version of Thomas Rickert s essay on Parmenides appeared as Parmenides, Ontological Enaction, and the Prehistory of Rhetoric in Philosophy and Rhetoric 47:4, 472-93 ( 2014 Pennsylvania State University Press). Although the essays included here differ substantially from those earlier versions, they are used with the permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press.
A Note on Translations
The authors of these essays have consulted various translations for the primary ancient texts. For this reason, the primary texts are cited throughout the volume and in the bibliography by the translators last names. Primary ancient texts that are not specifically quoted, either in the original Greek or in translation, are not listed in the bibliography. All complete works by ancient authors referenced but not quoted in this book (for example, Homer, Hesiod, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius) are available in the Loeb Classical Library published by Harvard University Press. Partial works and fragments of ancient authors are available in Barnes (1982 and 1987) and Sprague (1972). The authors include the original or transliterated Greek text where they feel it would be valuable for readers of Greek.
Introduction
There are primarily two ways of accounting for the beginning of rhetoric: one we might call the narratological account and the other the nominal account. We inherit the narratological account from the ancient rhetoricians themselves, who told stories of the beginning of their craft. In this account, the art of rhetoric was introduced to Athens in the fifth century B.C.E . by the Sicilians Corax and Tisias, who, we are told, were the first to write handbooks on the subject and brought those handbooks with them to Athens. According to the nominal account, by contrast, rhetoric only truly emerged as a distinct art once it was deliberately and self-consciously named rh torik (by Plato, in the Gorgias dialogue) as a means of separating it from other language arts or log n techn . By the former view, rhetoric began with the material introduction of a new cultural habit-a habit that would eventually require a systematic theory and a name to correctly identify its function in the polis and in education. This would have evolved gradually during a period of time when Athens was both expanding her imperial reach and opening herself to the suasory techniques of eloquent foreigners. By the latter view, the naming of the practice was precisely what created the boundaries that distinguished rhetoric from both eloquence in general and other language arts, including dialectic and sophistry, in particular. And, moreover, this occurred radically and abruptly, spurred by the radical and abrupt changes that were wrought on the Greek culture once literacy became widespread.
The question of when and how rhetoric b