The ethics of rhetoric

The ethics of rhetoric

Acknowledgments with thanks are due the following: Charles Scribners Sons for the passage from Allen Tates The Subway, from Poems 1922-1947; Karl Shapiro and Random House, Inc., for the passage from Essay on Rime; and the Viking Press, Inc., for the passage from Sherwood Andersons A Story Tellers Story. Our subject begins with the threshold difficulty of defining the question which Platos Phaedrus was meant to answer. Students of this justly celebrated dialogue have felt uncertain of its unity of theme, and the tendency has been to designate it broadly as a discussion of the ethical and the beautiful. The explicit topics of the dialogue are, in order: love, the soul, speechmaking, and the spoken and written word, or what is generally termed by us composition. The development looks random, and some of the most interesting passages appear jeux desprit. The richness of the literary art diverts attention from the substance of the argument. But a work of art which touches on many profound problems justifies more than one kind of reading. Our difficulty with the Phaedrus may be that our interpretation has been too literal and too topical. If we will bring to the reading of it even a portion of that imagination which Plato habitually exercised, we should perceive surely enough that it is consistently, and from beginning to end, about one thing, which is the nature of rhetoric.[1] Again, that point may have been missed because most readers conceive rhetoric to be a system of artifice rather than an idea,[2] and the Phaedrus, for all its apparent divagation,[4] keeps very close to a single idea. A study of its rhetorical structure, especially, may give us the insight which has been withheld, while making us feel anew that Plato possessed the deepest divining rod among the ancients. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 68421
Author: Weaver, Richard M.
Release Date: Jun 28, 2022
Format: eBook
Language: English
Publisher: Henry Regnery
Publication Date: 1953
Publisher Country: United States