Reason's Dark Champions: Constructive Strategies of Sophistic Argument

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Part 1 has explored the treatments of sophistic argument generally and seen the particular associations with eristics and false refutations. In part 2 I build a contrasting picture of sophistic argument by looking at strategies, chapter by chapter, that can be recovered from their works, reports concerning them, and the work of their contemporaries and students. RHETORIC AND ARGUMENTATION Rather than looking directly at the surviving work of specific Sophists, the program of part 2 is to explore strategies of argumentation as these are employed by different Sophists in a variety of texts. Thus while Gorgias, for example, will be the subject of a number of discussions because of the amount of his work available and the ways in which it illustrates much that interests us, we will approach him indirectly through the argumentative strategies employed . Using this work as a general example, we can anticipate what is to come: In chapter 5 we will see how it illustrates the popular (and at times necessary ) strategy of eikos argumentation,or argument based on likelihood.Here circumstances preclude the presence of witnesses or diminish the value of facts, and the arguer must impress upon an audience what seems likely to have been the case. In chapter 6 we will see the role that reversal arguments play in a text such as the Palamedes; and chapter 7 will include a discussion of antithetical reasoning in On Not-Being. Chapter 8 targets the Gorgianic use of commonplaces as well as the place of the Palamedes in a series of texts that use allusion as a central strategy, and chapter 9, on ethotic argument, will include discussions of the Funeral Speech as well as the Helen. Similar treatments will be afforded other figures for whom we have sufficient material, and still other authors are drawn into the analyses insofar as they adopt the strategies in question .We can further supplement some of the details of the argument strategies by making use of related anonymous texts such as the Dissoi Logoi and the Rhetoric to Alexander.Along with the authorship of the Dissoi Logoi, which is discussed in chapter 7, the date and provenance have also been disputed.The 62 Sophistic Strategies of Argumentation general consensus is that it could not have been written prior to 404, since there is a reference to the end of the PeloponnesianWar (Robinson 1984, 34). Robinson provides an extensive exploration of the key points in the debate and concludes that the text was written some time around 403–395 (41). A similar controversy surrounds the Rhetoric to Alexander.Allegedly written by Aristotle, its spuriousness has never been questioned, but it is a useful source for how some of the argument strategies that interest us were understood and employed. Conley (1990, 48n5) notes that it reflects the spirit of Gorgianic (rather thanAristotelian) rhetoric, and Chiron (2007, 98ff.) details the way that it reflects an “empirico-sophistic tradition.” Chiron also details the differences and similarities between this text and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and considers it an interesting source for links between the sophistic tradition and philosophy (104).A historical reference in the first part of the treatise (chapter 1–18) dates it to, or after, 341 b.c.e.While the Dissoi Logoi focuses on one particular argumentative strategy, the Rhetoric to Alexander addresses many of those that will concern us. Two categories of proof are identified by the author: one is derived from actual words, persons, and actions; the other is supplementary to these. Among those taken from words, persons, and actions are likelihoods (eikota), signs (tekmēria), and refutations (elenchoi) (7.1428a20–22). Chapters 5 and 8 will involve detailed considerations of the first two of these, and part 1’s interest in refutation will continue throughout the upcoming chapters. Beyond these the Rhetoric to Alexander contains remarks on chapter 6’s peritrope (9.1430a20–23); chapter 7’s antithesis (26.1435b25–35); and chapter 9’s testimony (15. 1431b20–1432a10). In each chapter we will be interested not just in examples of a particular strategy of sophistic argument,but also the details of its structure (how to recognize it) and the means that might have been employed to measure success (how to evaluate it). In this we are squarely engaged in an exercise in the history of rhetorical argumentation. Unlike its counterparts that draw from logic or dialectic, rhetorical argumentation is characterized by contextual features in which audience considerations are central.We...