Rhetoric of Science

This contribution examines the status of the rhetoric of science in two contexts. The first one is the effect that the changing interpretation of logic (the changing 'image of logic') has had on the status of the rhetoric of science. The second is the role that imagery has in scientific discourse. It is argued that the very possibility of a rhetorical interpretation of science depends on how the logic of science is understood. Informal logic, which acts here as a variant of argumentation theory or a logic of argumentation, is proposed as such a logic. This leads to a revision of the nature of justification in science in general, the substitution of apodictic logic for a logic of argumentation as a principal tool, and the consideration of strict formal ways of material implication-based justification as mere individual cases of a logic of argumentation. The role of imagery in scientific discourse is analysed. It is demonstrated that the situation of rhetoric and perception of imagery is paradoxical: although using rhetorical mechanisms in scientific communication is unavoidable, rhetoric has been criticised for many centuries. It is shown that the negative attitude to using rhetorical elements in scientific texts has long historical roots going back to ancient philosophical thought, namely, Socrates's criticism of eloquence and sophistic rhetoric. Analysis of the functions of imagery in scientific discourse suggests that imagery is an inalienable mechanism of both professional communication and the creation of theoretical models of knowledge.

American Sophistication

Like cosmopolitan, sophistication is a fighting word in American culture, a phrase that discomfits, raises eyebrows. It is not who we are, as President Obama used to say, for it smacks of elitism. Whereas the first word has had a stormy modern history—Stalin, for instance, used cosmopolitan as a code word for Jew—sophistication has always kept bad company, starting with its etymology. Its first six letters saddle it with sophistry, both tarred with the same brush of suspicion. Sophistry was a form of rhetoric that attracted the enmity of Socrates and Plato, with repercussions deep into the 17th century. In 1689, when John Locke said rhetoric trafficked in error and deceit, he was echoing the Greeks who tended to dismiss the art of persuasion and eloquence in general as sophistry, morally debased discourse. In the West, rhetoric, sophistry, and sophistication are arraigned as a shared locus of antinature: empty style, deceptive artifice, effeminate preening. They all testify to the deforming demands of social life, the worldliness disdained by Christian moralists, starting with Augustine, as concupiscence. This is the fall into sin from the prelapsarian transparency of Adam and Eve’s spiritual union of pure intellection with God, the perfection of reason that permits transcendence of the bodily senses. The corporeal senses and imagination dominate when man gives himself over to the world’s noise and confusion and is distracted from self-communion in company with God. Given that sophistication’s keynote is effortless ease, from the point of view of Augustinian Christianity such behavior in a basic sense violates Christian humility after the fall: with man’s loss of repose in God comes permanent uneasiness, inquiétude as Blaise Pascal and Michel de Montaigne put it, a chronic dissatisfaction and ennui that seeks relief in trivial divertissement (distraction), convictions that Montesquieu, Locke, and Tocqueville drew on for their root assumptions about how secular political institutions shape their citizens’ psyches. American Puritanism is in part an “Augustinian strain of piety,” as Perry Miller showed in his classic study, The New England Mind, hence suspicious of any distraction from worship of God. Puritans banned theaters two years after the nation was founded. Keeping vigilant watch over stirrings of New World worldliness, they permanently placed sophistication in the shadow of a double burden: Christian interdiction on top of the pre-Christian opprobrium heaped on sophistic rhetoric. Only by the mid-19th century does sophistication finally shed, though never definitively, sophistry’s fraudulence and deception and acquire positive qualities—worldly wisdom, refinement, subtlety, expertise. The year 1850 is the earliest positive use the Oxford English Dictionary lists, instanced by a sentence from Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography: “A people who . . . preserve in the very midst of their sophistication a frankness distinct from it.”

The Date and Authenticity of the Ignatian Letters: An Outline of Recent Discussions

This article examines recent studies of the date and authenticity of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch. Although the debate has a long history, this article focuses on the most recent period of this debate—from roughly 1997 through 2018. While not wanting to diminish the differences between contributors to this debate, three general views can be adduced. This article begins by highlighting the major players and formative contributors to each view. Of particular note in this most recent phase of debate is the separation of the date of the letters from the question of their authenticity. The article next turns to consider the primary pieces of evidence that are utilized when considering Ignatius’s date: the historical value of the Eusebian evidence, the possibility of interpolations within Polycarp’s Philippians, and Ignatius’s interactions with Second Sophistic rhetoric. The conclusion inquires about whether there is other evidence that might be utilized to aid scholars in dating and evaluating the Ignatian letters more securely.

Conclusion

The conclusion rounds out this study, summing up the importance of the approaches taken in relation to previous more historicizing models of Pindaric scholarship. Particular emphasis is placed on aesthetics and the importance of contextualizability: how Pindar’s poetry consistently draws attention to its own aesthetic status and makes an issue of its relation to contexts, through gesturing towards material culture and visual experience; how the interstices between lyric voices and contexts matter for a considered appreciation of epinician lyric’s cultural value. Potential future avenues for research are considered, both within the Pindaric corpus and beyond it, including further work on fifth-century prose (Herodotus and sophistic rhetoric in particular).

Praising Discord

This paper aims to explore the variety of sophistic argumentations that the Paduan philosopher and writer Sperone Speroni (1500–1588) applies in the so-called paradoxical work Dialogo della Discordia (1542), in which style as well as content factor into the author’s interest in ancient sophistic rhetoric. In analyzing the subject, the paper focuses on the influence of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1511) in Speroni’s dialogue. In so doing, the paper also intends to contribute to a deeper understanding of the impact of Erasmus’ work in the Venetian area—in particular, the rebirth of ancient sophistic literature in the Italian Renaissance.