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The Expressive Power of Language: On the Function of Rhetoric for Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Hans-Georg Gadamer  and
Bruce Krajewski
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Abstract

Recently, it seems, some of my colleagues have been trying to “save my soul” from such dishonest things as rhetoric! They think that hermeneutics is no noble pursuit and that we must be suspicious of rhetoric. I had to reply that rhetoric has been the basis of our social life since Plato rejected and contradicted the flattering abuse of rhetoric by the Sophists. He introduced dialectically founded rhetoric as in the Phaedrus, and rhetoric remained a noble art throughout antiquity. Yet one wonders why today everybody is not aware of it.(55)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 2 , March 1992 , pp. 345 - 352
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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References

Works Cited

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Dialectic and Sophism in Plato's Seventh Letter.” Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. 93–123.Google Scholar
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects. Ed. Shapiro, Gary and Sica, Alan. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1984. 54–65.Google Scholar
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Critique of Ideology: Metacritical Comments on Truth and Method.” The Hermeneutics Reader. Ed. Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt. New York: Continuum, 1985. 274–92.Google Scholar