Currently, I am dancing with a definition of rhetoric that looks something like this:
Expression of thought that intends to provoke critical thinking about nomos and solutions to ways in which it (nomos) fails or is problematic for all or some in a community.
I like this discussion of nomos taken from Encyclopædia Britannica Online (Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 25 Aug. 2011. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/417438/nomos):
“The problems of political authority and the rights and obligations of citizens were a major concern in the thought of the leading Greek Sophists of the late 5th and early 4th centuries bc. They distinguished between nature (physis) and convention (nomos), putting laws in the latter category. Law generally was thought to be a human invention arrived at by consensus for the purpose of restricting natural freedoms for the sake of expediency and self-interest.”
Pertinent to our study, the entry goes on to say: “This view of law as arbitrary and coercive was not conducive to social stability, however, and thus was amended by Plato and other philosophers, who asserted that nomos was, or at least could be, based upon a process of reasoning whereby immutable standards of moral conduct could be discovered, which could then be expressed in specific laws. The dichotomy between the negative and positive views of law (my emphasis) was never actually resolved.”
What might Jarratt have to say about this comment? To me it seems an acute example of the kind of “Platari” thinking that Rereading the Sophists intends to challenge. More on Jarrett to follow . . .
P.S. I have also engaged with my mental committee on the question whether the term “rhetoric” is too elastic. That is, maybe naming certain sub-aspects of the multifaceted thing we call rhetoric would be useful. For example, could we (should we) call the argumentative operation of rhetoric advorhet or rhetadvo; or, its critical thinking prompt anarhet or rhetysis?
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