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This chapter describes a study undertaken as part of the UCL Evidence programme to explore how policymakers talk about and reason with evidence. Specifically, researchers were interested in the micro-processes of deliberation and meaning-making practices of a group of people charged with prioritising health care in an NHS Primary Care Trust in the UK. The chapter describes how the research study brought together ideas from rhetorical theory and methods of discourse analysis to develop an innovative approach to exploring how evidence is constituted at the micro-level of social interaction and communication. It presents empirical data to illuminate the representation and meaning of evidence within one particular policymaking forum, and to highlight contrasting constructions of the policymaking process.

The book's concluding study presents the rhetorical education of the fourth century ad, not as the end but as only midway in the literary culture of Hellas, between Homer and the Byzantine emperor Manuel Palaeologus. The first section of this chapter examines the rhetoric from Homer to Byzantium, from the Iliad to Emperor Manuel II. The second section considers mid-antiquity's pivotal significance, when the Roman empire of Manuel — Greek, Christian and detached from Rome — began to take root. The third section examines a lengthy passage from the scholia to Demosthenes' speech On the False Embassy. The lecturer deploys, in what may seem obsessive detail, the formidably elaborate apparatus of contemporary rhetorical theory. The fourth section notes that his contemporaries and successors saw Menander primarily as a specialist in the kind of minute analysis of forensic and deliberative oratory.

This chapter considers the nature of the technical literature on rhetorical theory and its relationship to teaching. It begins by addressing problems about the composition and transmission of these texts. Evidence from Galen shows that technical literature was composed in a variety of ways and for many different purposes; its public circulation did not always involve formal publication. The diversity of the technical literature on rhetoric confirms this complicated picture. Its composition may have involved dictation, perhaps assisted by shorthand, or reconstruction of lectures from the notes or memories of students. Although the texts were not necessarily addressed to students, they were designed to inform rhetorical training, at least indirectly.

This chapter moves from the instances of self-consciously cultural oratorical practice to Cicero's first major work of rhetorical theory, De oratore, which Cicero frames as an archaeology of his self. It discusses that Cicero uses the aristocratic status of his interlocutors in this dialogue to lend authority to the aestheticizing form of oratory that has characterized his career. It examines Cicero's articulation of a theatrical aesthetic of controlled transgression in which he negotiates the problem of how to evoke feminine grace while maintaining a properly masculine self. It explains that this theatrical aesthetic crystallizes on the human body, both in Cicero's discussion of delivery and in his investigation of figures of speech, where the body and its adornment are the governing metaphors.

This chapter discusses and encourages familiarity with rhetorical theory, and even provides a familiar account of this theory. The chapter also serves as a point of reference for the rest of the book, as it illustrates many of the technical terms from French writers of different periods.

This chapter investigates how the Orator canonizes Cicero's own textual eloquence and seeks to control his reception, not as a political agent or speaker in performance, but as a textual entity. It discusses that this work, Cicero's final major contribution to rhetorical theory, is an analysis of oratorical style as such: pure eloquentia reduced to its essential properties, and dissected on the fundamental level of the rhythmical cadences that render a sentence's units intelligible parts of a coherent whole. It adds that the periodic style achieves this canonicity by providing a speech with the bodily integrity necessary for Cicero's texts to live part from their original performance: textual corpus replaces bodily corpus. It explains that the Orator presents his speeches as a particular variety of sublimity, one formed within a gingerly negotiation between the Demosthenic and Isocratean rhetorical exemplars.

This chapter reflects on the larger significance of the book’s arguments. Plato’s theory of language-as-statement and the split of seeming from being, which culminates in the Sophist, would come to dominate all theories of language and metaphysics in the West from the late classical to the contemporary era. But Plato’s innovation does not ensure that logos is in fact representational or signifying. By that same token, it also does not ensure that logos was ever detached from its archaic, natural powers in the first place. Rather, language-as-signification creates the mistaken impression that we can disarm lies and falseness by looking to the referent, to what the language represents in the world, and in so doing distinguish seeming from being. It is this mistaken notion that is signification’s greatest danger. Far from disarming the dangerous power of the sophists’ logos, Plato “weaponized” it by convincing us that it is “mere language,” imitative and removed from the world. The apparatus of rhetorical theories designed by Plato as prophylactic against the dangerous force of the sophists’ language, when mistaken for language as such, in its most basic and essential function, leaves the hearer unarmed against the overwhelming, archaic power of speech.

This chapter discusses the context of Talmud in philosophy and rhetorical theory. It shows the periphery that philosophy has allowed for both rhetoric and the Talmud on the map of Western metaphysics, on which philosophy itself was always at the center. Given the complex and unstable relationships between philosophy and rhetoric on this map, the chapter asks where, in the account of those relationships, the Talmud can stand.

This chapter summarizes the three major movements in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship that inform the methodology of the book: “orality and literacy” theory to explain the origins of the arts of rhetoric in ancient Greece; Martin Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics to underscore the birth of the distinction between seeming and being; and literary-dramatic interpretation to problematize doctrinal readings of the dialogues. Drawing on the work of Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Thomas Cole, and others, this chapter argues that orality and literacy theory is essential for understanding the early formation of rhetoric, the first discipline devoted to the self-conscious study of language. Furthermore, despite Martin Heidegger’s controversial reading of the Greeks, his examination of the split of seeming from being in the beginning of Western metaphysics is essential for understanding how Plato used rhetoric to create this distinction in order to defeat the sophists. Finally, literary-dramatic readings of the dialogues problematize the general assumption that Plato simply used Socrates as a mouthpiece for his views, including his unequivocally negative views on rhetoric. These three ways of reading Plato preview how the literate arts of rhetoric capacitated Plato’s split of seeming from being and the development of Western metaphysics.

This chapter applies some reflections on rhetoric and argumentation in law with a view to mapping the road to a possible conciliation. Topics discussed include the arguable character of law, the rule of law, rhetorical theories, and proceduralist theories.

This chapter illuminates how, in the Sophist dialogue, Plato finally completes his theory of logos by developing his rhetorical theories of onoma and rhêma. Plato’s novel use of these terms defines them not as they typically but erroneously translated, as noun and verb, but as single word and longer phrase, the combination of which forms a complete logos. Plato formulates his theory of the statement by emphasizing the archaic meaning of the term onoma, which originally referred exclusively to the proper names of persons. By shifting the meaning of onoma from proper names to individual words, and then redefining rhêma as a longer combination of words and logos as a complete combination of phrases, Plato transfers the denominative properties of onoma to all logos. Thus logos denominates things in the material world in the same way that proper names do. By combining this theory of logos with the theory of mimêsis, explicitly referenced in the Sophist, Plato defines false speech as speech that provides a false representation of the things as they seem but not as they are. This birth of logos-as-statement would lay the template for the distinction between seeming and being in Western metaphysics.

This chapter maintains that the two Idylls under examination (11 and 17) suggest the ubiquitousness of rhetorical culture and Theocritus' mastery of rhetorical art. They presuppose knowledge of rhetorical theory. Nevertheless, the rhetorical strategies employed suggest that the poet goes beyond the ‘dictates’ of contemporary theory. These two Idylls toy with the expectations of the audience by exposing the failures of mere adherence to rhetorical precepts. According to Theocritus, therefore, a formalistic oratorical approach is ultimately bound to fail: it will not persuade.

This book addresses the conflict between philosophy and rhetoric, but is not a direct attempt to resolve the controversies as they have traditionally been formulated. The aim, rather, is to engage in a reconceptualizing of rhetoric in a way that develops its deeper philosophical dimensions. The chapters in this book inevitably go back and forth across deep rhetoric, a philosophical theory of rhetoric, and rhetorical theory. One movement of the work is to pursue rhetorical theory in order to discover, explore, and activate its neglected philosophical background. Another movement is to pursue deep rhetoric for the purpose of preparing for more philosophically informed rhetorical theory. Rather than attempting to construct a new rhetorical theory, the book attempts to paint a new rhetorical imaginary—a background against which we can do our thinking about rhetoric and rhetorical theory.

This chapter reconsiders Plato’s monolithic concept of mimêsis. To develop this concept mimêsis, Plato invents two altogether novel senses of the term, which had previously meant simply “imitation.” In Book 3 of the Republic Plato defines mimêsis as a specific kind of poetic speech and in Book 10 he defines it as a kind of falseness. In this way, he has created the two concepts—mimetic language and mimetic falseness—that lay the groundwork for designating false speech for itself. Accordingly, mimêsis is a partial but incomplete theory of logos, a partial but incomplete definition of falsehood, but not yet a complete structure of thought that delineates between true and false, or reality and appearance. This reading detaches Plato’s mimêsis from the metaphysical concepts that are traditionally used to interpret it: Plato’s famous analogies of the sun, the line, and the cave. Rather than interpreting mimêsis through the lenses supplied by these analogies, the chapter proposes that Plato’s theory of mimêsis is only complete once he explicitly links it to his concepts of onoma and rhêma in the Sophist dialogue. Only then does he have a concept of true and false discourse, based on a distinction between seeming and being.

Chapter 1 introduces the interpretive stases as a neglected rhetorical method that could be productively employed by scholars to analyze debates over the meaning of texts in virtually any sphere. The chapter begins with a debate over one of the leaked 2009 “climategate” emails, which seriously damaged the credibility of climatologists, to illustrate the far-reaching consequences of interpretive arguments. A brief sketch is provided of the interpretive stases’ history, from their origins in ancient Greco-Roman legal theory to when they were dropped from rhetorical manuals in the seventeenth century. The chapter explores the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics—philosophical, literary, legal, and religious—and argues that no school of hermeneutics offers a general method for analyzing the argumentative push and pull involved in the interpretation of any text. The final part of the chapter outlines the six interpretive stases and discusses how they frame textual interpretation in terms of argument and persuasion.

Irenaeus has been characterized as incapable of sound reasoning, not a good thinker, naïve, and unable to construct a sophisticated theology. He was said to have little to no interest in philosophical reasoning and to strictly oppose theological speculation. Each of these narratives opposes the study of Irenaeus’ understanding of God and its bearing on the divine economy. This chapter consists of three essays that challenge these narratives, thereby establishing an understanding of Irenaeus and his theological method that sustains the chapters that follow. The first essay challenges the narrative that Irenaeus was unintelligent or incompetent by demonstrating his knowledge of literary and rhetorical theory and, thus, arguing he enjoyed a thorough rhetorical education. The second argues that he is not strictly opposed to theological speculation. The third shows that he recognizes a natural knowledge of God which, in turn, establishes a basis for the theological appropriation of philosophical insights.