Introduction: sophistry and rhetorical pragmatism

Summary

The essays in this collection focus on two recent events in the human sciences – the revival of American pragmatism and the return of sophistic rhetoric – as these movements intersect with each other and especially as they are crosscut by contemporary issues in critical theory and cultural politics. Renewed interest in rhetoric has surfaced in a wide range of conferences and publications across several academic disciplines. It is evident in the establishment of university press series on rhetorical theory, the founding of organizations such as the Rhetoric Society of America and the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, and the development of new periodicals, including Rhetorica, Pre/Text, and Rhetoric Review. Besides the rapid growth of such rhetorically oriented fields as Composition Studies, several other disciplines have been significantly affected by the “rhetorical turn” in the humanities and social sciences, for example, philosophy, law, literary theory, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, speech communication, and even economics.

More recently in some of these disciplines, the general turn toward rhetoric has included a more specific re-evaluation of Greek sophistry. Since Plato, the Older Sophists have often been condemned as relativists and subjectivists, unscrupulous traders in opinion rather than knowledge, rhetorical mercenaries who taught their clients to disregard objective truth in making the weaker case appear to be the stronger. Especially during the last decade, revisionist interpreters have vigorously challenged this traditional negative view of the sophists.