From Metaphysics to Rhetoric by Michel Meyer

From Metaphysics to Rhetoric by Michel Meyer

by the question in its being an answer, if only in a circumstantial (i. e. inessential) manner. One indeed must question oneself in order to remember, says Plato, but the dialectic, which would be scientific, must be something else even if it remains a play of question and answer. This contradiction did not escape Aristotle: he split the scientific from the dialectic and logic from argumentation whose respective theories he was led to conceive in order to clearly define their boundaries and specificities. As for Plato, he found in the famous theory of Ideas what he sought in order to justify knowledge as that which is supposed to hold its truth only from itself. What do Ideas mean within the framework of our approach? In what consists the passage from rhetoric to ontology which leads to the denaturation of argumentation? When Socrates asked, for example, What is virtue?, he thought one could not answer such a question because the answer refers to a single proposition, a single truth, whereas the formulation of the question itself does not indicate this unicity. For any answer, another can be given and thus continuously, if necessary, until eventually one will come across an incompatibility. Now, to a question as to what X, Y, or Z is, one can answer in many ways and nothing in the question itself prohibits multiplicity. Virtue is courage, is justice, and so on.

Michel Meyer, Perelman Professor of Rhetoric and Argumentation, Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Michel Meyer is Perelman Professor of Rhetoric and Argumentation at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, having previously taught at Berkeley, McGill University, the Sorbonne, and the College de France. He is the chief editor of the Revue Internationale de Philosophie and editor of the book series
L'Interrogation Philosophique at the Presses Universitaires de France. His publications in English include Of Problematology (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Philosophy and the Passions (Penn State University Press, 1999). He is the co-editor, with Jaś Elsner, of Art and Rhetoric in Roman
Culture (CUP, 2014). He is the founder of a philosophy called problematology, based on the priority of questioning in thought. The main works of this radical new foundation of thought have been translated into a dozen languages.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9789401076722
ISBN 10	9401076723
Title	From Metaphysics to Rhetoric
Author	Michel Meyer
Series	Synthese Library
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Springer
Year published	2013-11-13
Number of pages	198
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.