Sophistical practice : toward a consistent relativism / Barbara Cassin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cassin, Barbara, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sophists (Greek philosophy).

Philosophy--History.

Philosophy.

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 370 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2014.

Summary:

Sophistics is the paradigm of a discourse that does things with words. It is not pure rhetoric, as Plato wants us to believe, but it provides an alternative to the philosophical mainstream. A sophistic history of philosophy questions the orthodox philosophical history of philosophy: that of ontology and truth in itself. In this book, we discover unusual Presocratics, wreaking havoc with the fetish of true and false. Their logoi perform politics and perform reality. Their sophistic practice can shed crucial light on contemporary events, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where, to quote Desmond Tutu, "words, language, and rhetoric do things," creating things like the new "rainbow people." Transitional justice requires a consistent and sustainable relativism: not Truth, but truth for, and enough of the truth for there to be a community. Philosophy itself is about words before it is about concepts. Language manifests itself in reality only as multiplicity; different languages perform different types of worlds; and difficulties of translation are but symptoms of these differences. Tills desacralized untranslatability undermines and deconstructs the Heideggerian statement that there is a historical language of philosophy which is Greek by essence (being the only language able to say what "is") and today is German. Sophistical Practice constitutes a major contribution to the debate among philosophical pluralism, unitarism, and pragmatism. It will change how we discuss such words as city, truth, and politics. Philologically and philosophically rethinking the sophistical gesture, relying on performance and translation, it proposes a new paradigm for the human sciences. Book jacket.

Contents:

I Unusual Presocraties

1 Who's Afraid of the Sophists? Against Ethical Correctness 25

2 Speak If You Are a Man, or the Transcendental Exclusion 44

3 Seeing Helen in Every Woman: Woman and Word 57

II Sophistics, Rhetorics, Politics

4 Rhetorical Turns in Ancient Greece 75

5 Topos/Kairos: Two Modes of Invention 87

6 Time of Deliberation and Space of Power: Athens and Rome, the First Conflict 102

III Sophistical Trends in Political Philosophy

7 From Organism to Picnic: Which Consensus for Which City? 111

8 Aristotle with and Against Kant on the Idea of Human Nature 136

9 Greeks and Romans: Paradigms of the Past in Arendt and Heidegger 164

IV Performance and Performative

10 How to Really Do Things with Words: Performance Before the Performative 191

11 The Performative Without Condition: A University sans appel 221

12 Genres and Genders. Woman/Philosopher: Identity as Strategy 234

13 Philosophizing in Tongues 246

V "Enough of the Truth Fos..."

14 "Enough of the Truth For ...": On the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 261

15 Politics of Memory: On the Treatment of Hate 274

16 Google and Cultural Democracy 291

17 The Relativity of Translation and Relativism 297.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780823256389

0823256383

9780823256396

0823256391

OCLC:

860944105