My fascination with the Sophists--these self-authorizing gypsy intellectuals, these opportunists, these protean demystifiers of institutional power--began with my first Classical Rhetoric seminar in graduate school in 1993. I attitribute, in part, the gnarly and wonderful mess that has always been my professional life to this underlying passion for the sophistic tradition.
Hence my admonition to every graduate student who walks through my door, "Dont wait for a PhD to begin doing useful work. Don't wait for permission to change the world." My scholarship, service, and teaching are always saturated with some level of "tragic-comic hope." A vortex of generativity situated in the Bermuda Triangle of mythos, nomos, and logos where serendipity and grace trump power. It has always been this way for me.
The sophists were the tricksters, the mythical coyote of the Greek rhetorical tradition. They remind us that we need to dance in the magic of rhetoric. Aristotelian codification is a handy system of convenience. Socratic rhetoric is a cautionary tale about the troubling contradictions of our humanity. Sophistic is how we go about the business of day to day living inventing the world around us.
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