Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism [Hardcover]

The contribution of rhetoric, sophistry, and pragmatism to postmodernist cultural politics.Exploring the ways in which rhetoric, sophistry, and pragmatism overlap in their current theoretical and political implications, this survey demonstrates how they contribute to a rethinking of academic human sciences as well as to larger debates over cultural politics.Exploring the ways in which rhetoric, sophistry, and pragmatism overlap in their current theoretical and political implications, this survey demonstrates how they contribute to a rethinking of academic human sciences as well as to larger debates over cultural politics.The skeptical relativism and self-conscious rhetoric of the pragmatist tradition, which began with the pre-Socratic Sophists and developed through an American tradition including William James and John Dewey, have attracted new attention in the context of postmodernist thought. At the same time there has been a more general renewal of interest in rhetoric itself. This book 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,lS‹