Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism

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.

• First full-length exploration of rhetoric, sophistry, pragmatism in contemporary humanities and social sciences • Interdisciplinary approach by leading scholars in philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory and criticism • Extensive bibliographies of the pragmatist tradition from Ancient Greece to present-day America

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, cultural pragmatics for a cybernetic revolution David B. Downing; 9. In excess: radical extensions of neopragmatism Susan Jarratt; Selected bibliographies: Rhetoric and recent critical theory; Re-interpretations of the Greek sophists; Developments in the pragmatist tradition.