Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: sophistry and rhetorical pragmatism
- 1 Isocrates' philosophia and contemporary pragmatism
- 2 The degradation of rhetoric; or, dressing like a gentleman, speaking like a scholar
- 3 Antilogies, dialogics, and sophistic social psychology: Michael Billig's reinvention of Bakhtin from Protagorean rhetoric
- 4 The “genealogies” of pragmatism
- 5 Philosophy in the “new” rhetoric, rhetoric in the “new” philosophy
- 6 Individual feeling and universal validity
- 7 Pragmatism, rhetoric, and The American Scene
- 8 The political consequences of pragmatism; or, cultural pragmatics for a cybernetic revolution
- 9 In excess: radical extensions of neopragmatism
- Selected bibliographies
- Index
3 - Antilogies, dialogics, and sophistic social psychology: Michael Billig's reinvention of Bakhtin from Protagorean rhetoric
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: sophistry and rhetorical pragmatism
- 1 Isocrates' philosophia and contemporary pragmatism
- 2 The degradation of rhetoric; or, dressing like a gentleman, speaking like a scholar
- 3 Antilogies, dialogics, and sophistic social psychology: Michael Billig's reinvention of Bakhtin from Protagorean rhetoric
- 4 The “genealogies” of pragmatism
- 5 Philosophy in the “new” rhetoric, rhetoric in the “new” philosophy
- 6 Individual feeling and universal validity
- 7 Pragmatism, rhetoric, and The American Scene
- 8 The political consequences of pragmatism; or, cultural pragmatics for a cybernetic revolution
- 9 In excess: radical extensions of neopragmatism
- Selected bibliographies
- Index
Summary
My attempt in this essay to revive two antiquated and discredited cultural enterprises takes heart from Bakhtin's concluding remarks from his last article, “The Methodology of the Human Sciences.' He writes,
There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context… Even past meanings, … those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be … finalized, ended once and for all… [T]hey will always change … in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment … there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue's subsequent development … they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival.
In these terms my project may be imagined as an effort to bring off a double homecoming festival – the first for the now nearly forgotten but once dominant educational institution of the trivium, the second for the not just forgotten but actively repressed ideas of the early Greek sophists. The past existence of this institution and of these thinkers is marked in contemporary English by the words trivial and sophistry, neither of them very auspicious for a happy homecoming, but I would like to call attention to new contexts in which these old, tarnished meanings are being shined up and put to new uses. And I would also like to suggest that Bakhtin's words come to productive life in these new contexts as well.
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- Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism , pp. 82 - 93Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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