Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- PROLEGOMENON
- PART I ORIGINS
- 2 ‘Many Sketches & scraps of Sentiments’: what is a commonplace book?
- 3 A very short history of commonplacing
- 4 Commonplacing modernity: Enlightenment and the necessity of note-taking
- PART II FORM AND MATTER
- PART III READERS AND READING
- PART IV ANCIENT AND MODERN
- PART V TEXTS AND TASTES
- PART VI ANATOMISING THE SELF
- ENVOI
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - A very short history of commonplacing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- PROLEGOMENON
- PART I ORIGINS
- 2 ‘Many Sketches & scraps of Sentiments’: what is a commonplace book?
- 3 A very short history of commonplacing
- 4 Commonplacing modernity: Enlightenment and the necessity of note-taking
- PART II FORM AND MATTER
- PART III READERS AND READING
- PART IV ANCIENT AND MODERN
- PART V TEXTS AND TASTES
- PART VI ANATOMISING THE SELF
- ENVOI
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Do not commonplaces belong at the very heart of lawsuits?
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria (c. ad 95)Despite the inconsistencies and ambiguities that would eventually characterise so much of Georgian practice, it remains beyond dispute that the intellectual origins of commonplacing can be identified with a high degree of precision in Aristotle's groundbreaking works, the source of so much else of lasting significance in Western thought and culture. It was, after all, in his Topics, evidently written down around 350 bc, that something called the ‘commonplaces’ first received serious and sustained consideration. Yet the Greek words that Aristotle chose to employ – κοινοι τοποι, the plural form here being crucial – did not in fact connote a series of copied-out quotations or pieces of one's own favourite reading. Instead they signified a set of logical arguments that the philosopher believed to be vital in the philosophical enterprise of distinguishing truth from falsehood. This basic account of the nature and purpose of ‘commonplaces’, half-echoed even today in the pejorative English term for the needless repetition of a hackneyed observation, was further refined in the Rhetoric, where Aristotle laid out the various forms of discourse potentially available to those seeking to move an audience.
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- Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England , pp. 35 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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