Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism

The contribution of rhetoric, sophistry, and pragmatism to postmodernist cultural politics.

Steven Mailloux (Edited by)

9780521467803, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 May 1995

264 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.34 kg

"Steven Mailloux's lucid and thoughtful introduction explores relations among rhetoric, pragmitism, and sophistry which explains why all three are object of philosophical disapproval. This collection is more than the sum of its parts. Taken together, the essays promote and exemplify a Deweyan interdisciplinary project of compelling importance. They revise philosophy, intellectual history, an pedagogy to make rhetoric central and to revoke its ancient divorce from dialetic. This this rediscription of our intellectual heritage offers hope that modern rhetoric can both serve and shape the ever-mutating goals of a secular, democratic, and technologically innovative society without discarding the past." Lars Engle, Modern Philology

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.

Introduction: sophistry and rhetorical pragmatism Steven Mailloux
1. Isocrates' philosophia and contemporary pragmatism Edward Schiappa
2. The degradation of rhetoric
or, dressing like a gentleman, speaking like a scholar Jasper Neel
3. Antilogics, dialogics, and sophistic social psychology: Michael Billig's reinvention of Bakhtin from Protagorean rhetoric Don H. Bialostosky
4. The 'genealogies' of pragmatism Tom Cohen
5. Philosophy in the 'new' rhetoric, rhetoric in the 'new' philosophy Joseph Margolis
6. Individual feeling and universal validity Charlene Haddock Seigfried and Hans Seigfried
7. Pragmatism, rhetoric and The American Scene Giles Gunn
8. The political consequences of pragmatism
or, cultural pragmatics for a cybernetic revolution David B. Downing
9. In excess: radical extensions of neopragmatism Susan Jarratt
Selected bibliographies: Rhetoric and recent critical theory
Re-interpretations of the Greek sophists
Developments in the pragmatist tradition.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]