THE RHETORICAL TRADITION AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE

It may seem strange – it would certainly have seemed strange twenty years ago – to include a chapter on rhetoric in a history of philosophy. Is not rhetoric, the art of fine speaking and unscrupulous persuasion, essentially at odds with philosophy, the pursuit of truth and wisdom? This opinion is as old as Plato’s attacks on the Sophists; it attained new prominence in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and has dominated thinking about the subject ever since. I shall argue here, in the light of the recent revival of rhetorical studies (including the rehabilitation of the Sophists), that relations between the two disciplines in the eighteenth century were less antagonistic and more complementary than has often been asserted.

Rhetoric and philosophy were ‘disciplines’ in the literal sense of the word: subjects taught in schools and colleges. As a rule, philosophy – which included science – was studied after the supposedly more elementary classes in rhetoric; in the collèges of eighteenth-century France, it was normal for pupils to leave school once their rhetoric was completed, leaving philosophy to specialists. On the other hand, the Renaissance, with its Ciceronian ideal of the orator as universal man, had encouraged a reversal of this order in some establishments, and certain educationalists continued to argue for this on the grounds that good communication presupposes knowledge of the matter to be communicated.