The Dangers of Dichotomy

My first reaction, on reading Peter Munz's review article, was one of surprise-surprise that a Platonism of such purity, unmarked by any reflection on the a priori judgments lying behind those brilliant dialogues, should still exist. Already in his second sentence we find the traditional Platonic tactics for devaluing this ars bene dicendi: . . rhetoric, to be the art of persuasion not by truth or reason or any other authority; but by a number of irrational, psychologically effective, devices, which an earlier, more rational age, might have dismissed as irrelevant tricks. That is a fine example of rhetorical insinuatio, properly placed in the exordium, as classical authors recommended. Yet it includes a whole sequence of begged questions and pre-formed judgments. Rhetoric has always been alleged to be a number of disreputable things. Always? By all writers on it. Obviously not! Only at some times and by some writers, those openly hostile to it. As for the word alleged, which seems to suspend judgment about the truth of such disreputabilia, we discover, as we read on, that this is just a feint, a pretence of objectivity or distance, since the rest of the essay endorses all the slurs, indeed offers a historical explanation for them

Art · Epistemology · Irrational number · Linguistics · Literature · Lying · Objectivity (philosophy) · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sentence · Sociology · Surprise · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Philosophy

• Romantic Philosophy and Natural Sciences

  Elias Palti•Contributions to the History of…•2005

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