Contact with the Outside: Alienation, Masks and the Exteriority of Rhetoric A definition of the word rhetoric suggested by Walter Ong’s book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, though never explicitly named, could be argued to read contact with the outside. Indeed, for Ong and … Continue reading Some Thoughts on Ong and Havelock
Attic Hellebores: Aristotle, Excess and the Reticent Sedation of Kairos Aristotle has been expounded time and time again as a forebear of western thinking. Indeed, western rhetoric and philosophy owe an unpayable debt to the primordial systematizer, the inventor of disciplinarity, the constructor of the most developed epistemologies of ancient Hellenic … Continue reading Attic Hellebores: Aristotle, Excess and the Reticent Sedation of Kairos
Into the Gray: Resurrecting Plato in the (Long) History of Rhetoric “The history of rhetoric” is and always has been a history(ies) composed of inadequate simplifications, of gross and destructive substitutions and easy answers, of early forecasts in uncertain clouds. Indeed, re-writing “the history” has become a favorite pastime of rhetoric … Continue reading Into the Gray: Resurrecting Plato in the (Long) Histories of Rhetoric
Despite a frustrating lack of any palpable challenge to Socrates' naive, limited essentialism, Plato's Gorgias is of undeniable interest to any rhetorician even beyond the explicit discussion of oratory and sophistry contained in its opening discussion. The dialogue is well known in composition and rhetoric for its inaugural debate in which Socrates utilizes his famed method … Continue reading Probing Democracy: Gorgias, Public Rhetoric and the Electrate Polus
Jacob Richter 