has misunderstood me, I shall maintain, and the misunderstanding matters for our collective understanding of antifoundationalism and the genre of writing known as history. In this reply I begin with claims that are intended to challenge SC's reading of my work: First, I am an antifoundationalist. Second, I do not oppose neosophistic scholarship. Third, SC's reading of my work is overly reductionist. Then, in conclusion, I want to suggest that SC's account of antifoundationalism is problematic and that a more pragmatic version of antifoundationalism would be more consistent with SC's presuppositions and politically more useful.1 I do not understand why SC believes I am a foundationalist, since I have identified repeatedly my theoretical preferences for antifoundationalist social constructionism. SC simply proclaims, ex cathedra, that Poulakos, Crowley, Vitanza, Welch, and Jarratt are antifoundationalists, and Havelock, Kerferd, de Romilly, Cole, and I are foundationalists. Though I would be honored to be counted as part of either group, I do not understand why I am in the group that is supposed to move to the back of the bus. Why are these scholars (all of whom have published in classics journals) to be branded foundationalist? Just because they do history and work with original Greek texts? And, even if these scholars are (gasp!) foundationalists, precisely how does that make their work any less valuable?

New research into the pre-Socratic arts of discourse (technai log6n) has not only enriched our understanding but also increased our respect for the work that the great pre-Socratic thinkers did.1 In this paper I want to encourage a rereading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle with the results of this research in mind. If scholars would accept that Plato and Aristotle, at least some of the time, reflected an understanding and respect for the work of the sophists and rhetors similar to the one now emerging, the result might well be a new, fruitful, and richer reading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle. I believe that as a result, both Plato and Aristotle would emerge as more rhetorical and nuanced than they have been previously thought to be. This seems a strange expectation. First, it is well known that Aristotle, for example, seldom seems to allude to particular individuals who were sophists with anything but scorn. Certainly, when he uses the word sophist as a general term, it is used in a pejorative sense for the besetting vices of philosophy and philosophers: self-promotion through speech and victory at any cost in speech. Such usage is itself a reflection on those who claim the name as a serious description of their work.

Until recently, scholars have tended to credit two nineteenth-century thinkers, G. F. Hegel and George Grote, for initiating the modem rehabilitation of the sophists.2 But in the past several years, an increasing number of scholars have begun to draw inspiration from the writings of another nineteenth-century figure, Friedrich Nietzsche. Among those taking this Nietzschean turn, Mario Untersteiner utilizes Nietzsche's conception of the tragic in his account of Gorgias's epistemology (101-205), a reading Eric White supplements with Nietzsche's notion of the (38). Victor Vitanza, characterizing Nietzsche as a dionysian Sophist, draws from Nietzsche's tropological model of language to illuminate the sophists' own rhetoric (Sub/Versions 112; Notes 131); and David Roochnik contends that Nietzsche's critique of reason illuminates the sophists' own misology (Tragedy 50, 155, 162). In the sphere of ethics, E. R. Dodds maintains that Nietzsche's immoralism is similar to the egoism of Gorgias's student Callicles (387-91), and Daniel Shaw contends that Nietzsche's critique of morality iterates the sophists' notion that moral valuations remain matters of opinion (339). Concerning methodology, John Poulakos argues that Nietzsche's genealogical approach is most suited for interpreting the sophists (Interpreting 219-21); and Susan Jarratt credits Nietzsche's method as authorizing her own re-reading of the sophists (xix). But whereas they have drawn on a variety of Nietzsche's ideas and interpretive strategies to advance what Jacqueline dc Romilly characterizes as a Nietzschean interpretation of the sophists (Sophists xi), none of these scholars has systematically examined Nietzsche's own quite specific and extensive writings about the sophists. The untoward result is that we possess a variety of Nietzschean readings of the sophists that tend to silence Nietzsche's own distinctive voice. This tendency to overlook Nietzsche's own specific remarks about the sophists is quite understandable, for Nietzsche never wrote a systematic treatise on the sophists and instead discussed them in a rather fragmentary manner in a variety of texts over a period of almost two decades. Further, with the exception of three quite brief passages-in Human, All-Too-Human 221, Dawn 168, and the Ancients, Twilight of the Idols 2-Nietzsche did not publish any of his remarks about the sophists, confining his discussions to his 1872-1873 lecture notes in the history of Greek rhetoric (Description of Ancient Rhetoric and

The latest rehabilitation of the sophists, begun by Hegel and carried out with increasing dedication during this century (see Crowley, Enos, Guthrie, Hunt, Jarratt, Kerferd, Poulakos, De Romilly, Schiappa, Untersteiner), has improved our understanding of rhetorical theory and history. Despite, and in some ways because of, the nebulous quality of what they have left us, the sophists have become important primarily because they predate Plato and Aristotle and thus would seem to offer at least a fragmentary glimpse of rhetoric prior to its hypostatization in the classical period. The traditional thinking is that Platonic and Aristotelian rhetorical theory disciplined the sophists' extravagant practices, substantiated their unsubstantiated claims, and transformed their dithyrambic, mythic, magical, poetic discourse into a logical, rational theory of argumentation. In other words, Plato and Aristotle transformed mythos into logos; thus they were the fathers of rhetoric insofar as rhetoric was a respectable techno for the production of reasonable discourse. The philosophers rejected sophistic rhetoric on the grounds that it had no philosophical foundations from which its principles could be logically derived and safely taught. Thus they set about constructing a sound, philosophically based rhetoric by linking it carefully to, while dividing it just as carefully from, absolute knowledge (episteme). In both the Platonic and the Aristotelian rhetorical schemes, episteme provides the limits of rhetoric. In the Platonic case, absolute knowledge is a prerequisite for the application of rhetorical lore-one must employ dialectic in the service of absolute truth before one may use rhetoric to disseminate the truth (Phaedrus 265-66). In the Aristotelian case, rhetorical lore must be based on the first principles of persuasion, but must be employed when knowable matters are discussed-the closer one gets to fundamental principles, the further one gets from enthymemes, and thus the further one gets from rhetoric in the direction of scientific knowledge (Freese 1359b). If knowledge provides the limits for rhetorical theory and practice, then, in Platonic and Aristotelian terms, without both knowledge and a theory of knowledge, systematic rhetoric is impossible. This is why they dismissed sophistic rhetoric on the grounds that it ha(d) no rational account to give of the nature of the various things which it offer(ed) (Gorgias 465) and that it presented not an but the results of an art (Forster 183b). Because

These notes are my recollections of a trip to see Kenneth Burke on February 19, 1993, in Andover, New Jersey, where Burke has lived for more than 70 years. The visitors were Jack Selzer, who is studying Burke's early work; Charles Mann, a longtime friend of Burke and curator of the Rare Books Room at Penn State's Pattee Library, where a substantial collection of Burke papers is housed; and Rosa Eberly, a graduate student in rhetoric at Penn State. The visitees: Burke and his friend and housekeeper, Ginnie.

(1993). The epideictic character of rhetorical criticism. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 339-349.

In a recent Festschrift for Edward P. J. Corbett, Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa S. Ede look dispassionately at the issues we now concern ourselves with in historical rhetoric, evaluate them, and conclude forcefully that much of Aristotle's work has been reduced to the unrecognizable.I They assert that much of the secondary work in Aristotle depends on misunderstandings that can occur when commentators ignore the fundamental connections among Aristotle's writings (41). Later in the same essay, in citing William Grimaldi's complex interconnections among Aristotle's works, Lunsford and Ede say, rational man of Aristotle's rhetoric is not a automaton, but a languageusing animal who unites reason and emotion in discourse with others. Aristotle (and indeed, Plato and Isocrates as well) studied the power of the mind to gain meaning from the world and to share that meaning with others (43). The Aristotle as logic-chopping that Lunsford and Ede have named for us represents the inadequate and sometimes even wrong interpretation that a significant number of rhetorical scholars rely on in their presentations of classical rhetoric. The explication of Aristotle as automaton also provides us with a critique of the state of some scholarly work on classical rhetoric in American rhetoric and composition during the last twenty years. This formulaic view of rhetoric, which emerges eventually as a pattern, relies on reducing the intertwining theories that make up classical rhetoric and replacing them with simple categories. This kind of reductivism, a version of classical rhetoric that writers of the Heritage School (Welch 120) often use, hinders complex interpretation, such as the work of Walter Ong and James Kinneavy, and deprives classical rhetoric of its strength and its attractiveness. The Heritage School presentation of classical rhetoric primarily as a series of rules, dicta, and

(1987). The first sophists and the uses of history. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 67-78.

In The New York Times Book Review of March 15, 1981, Richard Kostelanetz described Kenneth Burke as implacably American, citing in evidence Harold Bloom's earlier assertion that Burke was strongest living representative of the American Critical tradition, and perhaps the largest single source of that tradition since its founder, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1 1). Others too have seen Burke as vintage American: Merle Brown, for example, who wrote sixteen years ago that Burke, like John Dewey and Van Wyck Brooks, was clearly the man of the American 20s who sought to close the gap he saw widening then between the specialists and the masses (8-9);' and, more recently, Bloom's Yale colleague Angus Fletcher, who, in his English Institute essay, sees Burke as the American individualist and romantic hero: