Download or read book Sophistry and Political Philosophy written by Robert C. Bartlett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was Nietzsche who first identified the similarities between the radical sophistry of antiquity and the contemporary relativism that has come to characterize modern thought. The anti-foundationalism of contemporary thought can be said to have been born with the Sophists, and, of all the Sophists who have come down to us, Protagoras is the most famous and challenging of them. Robert Bartlett s masterful book is the first to examine Plato s Protagoras and Theaetetus together to uncover what lies at the heart of Protagoras teaching, both its moral and political components and its theoretical and epistemological groundings. His superb exegesis of these two dialogues allows one to see more clearly the power of radical relativism: its strengths and its deficiencies. Bartlett notes that political philosophy has been supplanted in the modern era either by the study of the history of political philosophy or by relativism. Although "Understanding Political Philosophy and Sophistry" can certainly be taken as an example of the former, it is much more than that. It seeks to uncover what Socrates, in responding to that teaching, begins to reveal of his own understanding and characteristic activity. It helps us begin to understand, in other words, the phenomenon of philosophy, not just as a system of thought, but as Socrates lived it."

Download or read book Rhetoric Sophistry Pragmatism written by Steven Mailloux and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-05-18 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Plato s Dream of Sophistry written by Richard Marback and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Plato's Dream of Sophistry, Richard Marback shows that Plato's vision was remarkably accurate. Against histories of rhetoric that described Plato's influence mainly in terms of his overarching dominance, Marback argues that Plato's lasting influence results not from the force of the dialogues themselves but from continued investments in arguing about the dialogues.

Download or read book Sophistry written by Jonathan Marc Sherman and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 1995 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: The subjective nature of truth within sexual relationships is the theme of this play about college life in modern-day America. The self-absorbed lives of a group of students at a small New England college are disrupted when they're sudde

Download or read book Postmodern Sophistry written by Gary A. Olson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2004-03-11 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intensive examination of the theoretical writings of cultural and literary critic Stanley Fish.

Download or read book Philosophy Sophistry Antiphilosophy written by Matthew R. McLennan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou's work in philosophy, though daunting, has gained a receptive and steadily growing Anglophone readership. What is not well known is the extent to which Badiou's positions, vis-à-vis ontology, ethics, politics and the very meaning of philosophy, were hammered out in dispute with the late Jean-François Lyotard. Matthew R. McLennan's Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy is the first work to pose the question of the relation between Lyotard and Badiou, and in so doing constitutes a significant intervention in the field of contemporary European philosophy by revisiting one of its most influential and controversial forefathers. Badiou himself has underscored the importance of Lyotard for his own project; might the recent resurgence of interest in Lyotard be tied in some way to Badiou's comments? Or deeper still: might not Badiou's philosophical Platonism beg an encounter with philosophy's other, the figure of the sophist that Lyotard played so often and so ably? Posing pertinent questions and opening new discursive channels in the literature on these two major figures this book is of interest to those studying philosophy, rhetoric, literary theory, cultural and media studies.

Download or read book Sophistry and Twentieth Century Art written by Haim Gordon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with a rejection of the widespread fakeries that have emerged in twentieth-century art, which we call by their Platonic name, sophistry. The book also presents brief descriptions of some of the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Nicolas Berdyaev as to what constitutes a beautiful work of art, and how an authentic relation to the beauty in a work of art enhances human existence.

Download or read book Philosophy Rhetoric and Sophistry in the High Roman Empire written by Jeroen Lauwers and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it possible that modern scholars have labelled Maximus of Tyre, a second-century CE performer of philosophical orations, as a sophist or a ‘half-philosopher’, while his own self-presentation is that of a genuine philosopher? If we take Maximus’ claim to philosophical authority seriously, his case can deepen our understanding of the dynamic nature of Imperial philosophy. Through a discursive analysis of twelve Imperial intellectuals alongside Maximus’ dialexeis, the author proposes an interpretative framework to assess the purpose behind the representation of philosophy, rhetoric, and sophistry in Maximus’ oeuvre. This is thus as yet the first book-length attempt at situating the historical communication process implicit in the surviving Maximean texts in the concurrent context of the Imperial intellectual world.

Download or read book Sperone Speroni and the Debate over Sophistry in the Italian Renaissance written by Teodoro Katinis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sperone Speroni and the Debate over Sophistry in the Italian Renaissance Teodoro Katinis mines a number of little or unstudied primary sources and offers the first book on the rebirth of ancient sophists in the Italian literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Leonardo Bruni to Jacopo Mazzoni, with a focus on the Italian writer and philosopher Sperone Speroni (1500-1588). Katinis convincingly argues that Speroni is a unique case of an early modern thinker who explicitly rejected Plato’s demonization and defended the public role of the sophistic rhetoric, which enhanced the debate over the sophistic arts and scepticism in a variety of fields and anticipated some of the most revolutionary modern thoughts.

Download or read book Postmodern Sophistry written by Gary A. Olson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen prominent scholars from a range of academic disciplines—legal studies, critical legal studies, political science, Jewish studies, rhetoric, and literary studies—explore various aspects of cultural and literary critic Stanley Fish's work. They examine Fish's understanding of how interpretation functions, the various philosophical issues that Fish has addressed or failed to address in his work, and the political consequences of Fish's thought. Stanley Fish responds to the ideas put forth in this book in a detailed Afterword.

Download or read book Metaphysics Sophistry and Illusion written by Mark Balaguer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion does two things. First, it introduces a novel kind of non-factualist view, and argues that we should endorse views of this kind in connection with a wide class of metaphysical questions, most notably, the abstract-object question and the composite-object question. (More specifically, Mark Balaguer argues that there's no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as abstract objects or composite objects—or material objects of any other kind.) Second, Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion explains how these non-factualist views fit into a general anti-metaphysical view called neo-positivism, and explains how we could argue that neo-positivism is true. Neo-positivism is the view that every metaphysical question decomposes into some subquestions—call them Q1, Q2, Q3, etc.—such that, for each of these subquestions, one of the following three anti-metaphysical views is true of it: non-factualism, or scientism, or metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism. These three views can be defined (very roughly) as follows: non-factualism about a question Q is the view that there's no fact of the matter about the answer to Q. Scientism about Q is the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific question about some contingent aspect of physical reality, and Q can't be settled with an a priori philosophical argument. And metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism about Q is the view that Q asks about the truth value of a modal sentence that's metaphysically innocent in the sense that it doesn't say anything about reality and, if it's true, isn't made true by reality

Download or read book Seduction Sophistry and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure written by Michelle Ballif and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ballif questions why the profession wants to retain these beliefs in the face of vociferous arguments from "new rhetorics" that the discipline no longer posits a foundational self or truth, and in the face of the poststructuralist critique, which has demonstrated that founding truth is always accomplished by first positing and then negating an "other." As an alternative to this negative and violent rhetorical process, Ballif suggests a turn to sophistry as embodied in the figure of Woman, one with the power to seduce us (literally, to lead astray) from our truth and our demand for it."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Playful Philosophy and Serious Sophistry written by Georgia Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-08-29 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an interpretation of Plato’s Euthydemus as a unified piece of literature, taking into account both its dramatic and its philosophical aspects. It aims to do justice to a major Platonic work which has so far received comparatively little treatment. Except for the sections of the dialogue in which Socrates presents an argument on the pursuit of eudaimonia, the Euthydemus seems to have been largely ignored. The reason for this is that much of the work’s philosophical import lies hidden underneath a veil of riotous comedy. This book shows how a reading of the dialogue as a whole, rather than a limited focus on the Socratic scenes, sheds light on the work’s central philosophical questions. It argues the Euthydemus points not only to the differences between Socrates and the sophists, but also to actual and alleged similarities between them. The framing scenes comment precisely on this aspect of the internal dialogue, with Crito still lumping together philosophy and eristic shortly before his discussion with Socrates comes to an end. Hence the question that permeates the Euthydemus is raised afresh at the end of the dialogue: what is properly to be termed philosophy?

Download or read book Soul destroying sophistry is fake wisdom a hot bed of doubts and conjectures written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and published by Philaletheians UK. This book was released on 2022-02-23 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insights to the wisdom-peddlers of Greece. Protagoras, followed by Gorgias and others, found Pythagoras’ title philosopher too narrow, and so they assumed the title of Sophist, signifying one who professes the power of making others wise, a wholesale and retail dealer in wisdom — a wisdom-monger, in the same sense as an iron-monger or fish-monger. Many Sophists, e.g., Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus, were empty disputants, sleight-of-word jugglers, but this was far from being their common character. Both Plato and Aristotle repeatedly admit the brilliancy of their talents and the extent of their acquirements. Gorgias will ever be cited as an example of prostituted genius from the immoral nature of his objects, and the baseness of his motives. These, and not his sophisms, constituted him a Sophist whose eloquence and logical skill rendered him only the more pernicious. The causes of the corruption that came about, first in private and next in public life, which displayed itself in all the free states and communities of Greece, but most of all in Athens, are themselves the effects of that passion for military glory and political preponderance, which may well be called the bastard and the parricide of liberty. Being hireling hunters of the young and rich, the Sophists offered to the vanity of youth and the ambition of wealth a substitute for that authority, which by the institutions of Solon had been attached to high birth and property, as the regular and ordinary results of comparative opulence and renowned ancestry. The minds of men were to be sensualized; and even if the arguments themselves failed, yet the principles so attacked were to be brought into doubt by the mere frequency of hearing all things doubted, and the most sacred of all now openly denied, and then insulted by sneer and ridicule. Religion, in its widest and purest sense, is the act of reverencing the Invisible, as the highest in nature and man. By celestial observations alone can even terrestrial charts be constructed scientifically. The first attempt of the Sophists was to separate ethics from the faith in the Invisible, and to stab morality through the side of religion — an attempt to which the idolatrous polytheism of Greece had furnished too many facilities. Polybius attributes the ruin of the Greek states to the frequency of perjury, which they had learnt from the Sophists, to laugh at as a trifle that broke no bones, nay, as in some cases, an expedient and justifiable exertion of the power given to us by nature over our own words, without which no man could have a secret that might not be extorted from him by the will of others. In the same spirit, the sage and observant historian attributes the growth and strength of the Roman republic to the general reverence of the invisible powers, and the consequent horror in which the breaking of an oath was held. Those who first made the laws were feeble creatures which, in fact, the greater numbers of men are. Laws, honour, and ignominy were all calculated for the advantage of the law-makers. But in order to frighten away the stronger, whom they could not coerce by fair contest, and to secure greater advantages for themselves than their feebleness could otherwise have procured, they preached up the doctrine that it was base and contrary to right to wish to have anything beyond others; and that in this wish consisted the essence of injustice. Another code of right was that the nobler and stronger should possess more than the weaker and more pusillanimous and, therefore, the stronger has a right to control the weaker for his own advantage. The language of sophistry is the power of barefaced selfishness that excludes partnership, a power which all men should have an interest in repelling. And if for power we substitute pleasure, and the means of pleasure, it is easy to construct a system well fitted to corrupt natures, and the more mischievous in proportion as it is less alarming. Music may be divided from poetry, and both may continue to exist, though with diminished influence. But religion and morals cannot be disjoined without the destruction of both; and that this does not take place to the full extent, we owe to the frequency with which both take shelter in the heart, and that men are always better or worse than the maxims which they adopt or concede. As sciences are systems based on principles, so is morality a principle without a system. Systems of morality are nothing more than the old books of casuistry generalized, even of that casuistry which the genius of Protestantism gradually worked off from itself like a heterogeneous bodily fluid, together with the practice of auricular confession. Selfishness it the origin and cause of all evil. It is the thorn in the soul which, unless a man shall have it removed, he can never soar above and be free as air. The word constitution has been altered to mean capitulation, a treaty imposed by the people on their own government (as on a conquered enemy), thus giving sanction to falsehood, and universality to anomaly. Popularise and philosophy and you will soon end in perverting every noble truth.

Download or read book Metaphysics Sophistry and Illusion written by Mark Balaguer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion introduces a novel kind of non-factualist view, and argues that we should endorse views of this kind in connection with a wide class of metaphysical questions. It also explains how these non-factualist views fit into a general anti-metaphysical view called neo-positivism.

Download or read book Playful Philosophy and Serious Sophistry written by Georgia Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-08-29 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an interpretation of Plato’s Euthydemus as a unified piece of literature, taking into account both its dramatic and its philosophical aspects. It aims to do justice to a major Platonic work which has so far received comparatively little treatment. Except for the sections of the dialogue in which Socrates presents an argument on the pursuit of eudaimonia, the Euthydemus seems to have been largely ignored. The reason for this is that much of the work’s philosophical import lies hidden underneath a veil of riotous comedy. This book shows how a reading of the dialogue as a whole, rather than a limited focus on the Socratic scenes, sheds light on the work’s central philosophical questions. It argues the Euthydemus points not only to the differences between Socrates and the sophists, but also to actual and alleged similarities between them. The framing scenes comment precisely on this aspect of the internal dialogue, with Crito still lumping together philosophy and eristic shortly before his discussion with Socrates comes to an end. Hence the question that permeates the Euthydemus is raised afresh at the end of the dialogue: what is properly to be termed philosophy?

Download or read book Plato s Protagoras written by Olof Pettersson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a thorough study and an up to date anthology of Plato’s Protagoras. International authors' papers contribute to the task of understanding how Plato introduced and negotiated a new type of intellectual practice – called philosophy – and the strategies that this involved. They explore Plato’s dialogue, looking at questions of how philosophy and sophistry relate, both on a methodological and on a thematic level. While many of the contributing authors argue for a sharp distinction between sophistry and philosophy, this is contested by others. Readers may consider the distinctions between philosophy and traditional forms of poetry and sophistry through these papers. Questions for readers' attention include: To what extent is Socrates’ preferred mode of discourse, and his short questions and answers, superior to Protagoras’ method of sophistic teaching? And why does Plato make Socrates and Protagoras reverse positions as it comes to virtue and its teachability? This book will appeal to graduates and researchers with an interest in the origins of philosophy, classical philosophy and historical philosophy.