Chapter 1 - The Drama of Logos

Summary

Like so many modern philosophers, literary critics and novelists – heirs to ancient questions – fifth-century b.c. writers show an ‘intense interest in the limits and possibilities of language’.¹ This interest connects numerous writers across numerous genres and disciplines. In the texts of philosophy, the concern with language not only gives rise to the development of linguistic study itself, but also is reflected in the prime place of logos, dialectic, rhetoric – the role of language itself – in the development of philosophical systems from Heraclitus to Aristotle. Modern occidental philosophy, for all its historical turns, is still working through Aristotelian linguistic categories and distinctions. It is the fifth century too that offers the first formal studies in rhetoric, the teaching and practice of which dominated education for two thousand years and more, and has recently been the focus of much of the most iconoclastic modern philosophical and literary criticism.²