Reason's Dark Champions : Constructive Strategies of Sophistic Argument.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (193 pages)
- Studies in Rhetoric and Communication Series .
- Studies in Rhetoric and Communication Series .
Cover -- Contents -- Series Editor's Preface -- Acknowledgments -- PART 1 SOPHISTIC ARGUMENT AND THE EARLY TRADITION -- Introduction -- The Category Sophist: Who Counts? -- The Figure of Socrates -- 1 Sophistic Argument: Contrasting Views -- Against the Sophists -- Figures of Influence -- Positive Views of Sophistic Argument -- Resistance to Revision -- 2 Making the Weak Argument the Stronger -- A Problem of Translation -- Eristics and the Euthydemus -- Antiphon the Sophist -- Protagorean Rhetoric -- 3 Plato's Sophists -- Platonic and Sophistic Argument and the "Sophist Dialogues" -- Public and Private Argument -- Plato's View of Argument -- A Question of Method -- Imitation and Method: Eristic and the Peritrope -- The Veracity of Plato's Testimony -- 4 The Sophists and Fallacious Argument: Aristotle's Legacy -- The Sophists and Fallacy -- The Sophistical Refutations -- Fallacy in the Euthydemus -- Lessons from the Euthydemus -- Contrasting Refutations -- PART 2 SOPHISTIC STRATEGIES OF ARGUMENTATION -- Introduction -- Rhetoric and Argumentation -- Rhetoric and Sophistry -- Extending Sophistic Argument: Alcidamas and Isocrates -- 5 What Is Eikos? The Argument from Likelihood -- The Meaning of Likelihood -- Examples from Antiphon -- The Range of Eikos Arguments -- Evaluating Eikos Arguments -- Contemporary Appearances: Walton and the Plausibility Argument -- 6 Turning Tables: Roots and Varieties of the Peritrope -- What Trope Is the Peritrope? -- Defining the Peritrope -- Reversal Arguments in Gorgias and Antiphon -- Socratic and Sophistic Refutations Again -- Contemporary Reversals -- Evaluation -- 7 Contrasting Arguments: Antilogoi or Antithesis -- The Concepts of Antilogoi and Antithesis -- History of the Antilogoi -- The Dissoi Logoi -- Antithesis and the Counterfactual. Examples of Antilogoi: Gorgias, Antiphon, Prodicus, Thucydides, and Antisthenes -- Purpose and Evaluation -- Contemporary Echoes -- 8 Signs, Commonplaces, and Allusions -- Modes of Proof -- Arguing from Signs -- Commonplaces -- Allusions -- More Recent Echoes -- 9 Ethotic Argument: Witness Testimony and the Appeal to Character -- Ethos -- The Appeal to One's Own Character -- Witnesses -- Funeral Speeches -- Promotion of Character -- Attacking Character -- The Use of Ethotic Argument and the Modern Ad Hominem -- 10 Justice and the Value of Sophistic Argument -- Truth and Morality: Reasoning in the Dark -- A Human Justice -- Sophistic Argument and Justice -- Two Kinds of Sophist -- Sophistic Argument in the Present -- Notes -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Z.
What emerges is a complex reappraisal of Sophism that reorients criticism of this mode of argumentation, expands understanding of Sophistic contributions to classical rhetoric, and opens avenues for further scholarship.