Abstract
337 Reviews exhaustivité, tant les domaines qu'elles cherchent à circonscrire sont innom brables (lexique, stylistique, histoire, civilisation, épigraphie, métrique etc.). Le revers de la médaille de ce choix, c'est que certaines notes sembleront par fois trop longues, se perdant parfois dans des sortes de digressions, toujours passionnantes, mais peu en rapport avec l'objet initial (par ex. la note du§ 23, pp. 243-47). L'ensemble de l'ouvrage se révèle une source précieuse pour la connais sance d Aristide, et plus spécifiquement, de deux discours injustement tom bés dans 1 oubli durant plusieurs siècles. On ne peut qu'être reconnaissant à B. de nous livrer une étude aussi fournie: un livre, assurément, qui est un jalon important dans les études aristidiennes qui se multiplient depuis quelques temps. Jean-Luc Vix Université de Strasbourg Philip Vogt, John Locke and the Rhetoric of Modernity, Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2008. 197 pp. ISBN: 0739123564 Locke's attack on rhetoric in Book III of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding has become notorious. Indeed, his accusation that "all the Art of Rhetorick" together with "all the artificial and figurative application of Words" are a "perfect cheat" has become in many ways indicative of an apparent marginalization of rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Locke's point was that any tropological comparison of a thing to something that it is not is, in effect, a lie consciously chosen by the orator to maximize the possibility that the matter under discussion will be perceived by the auditor in the way that the orator wishes. In this way, auditors are cheated—the interests of others substituted for their own—and, thus, in any discursive pursuit that has truth (as opposed to interest) as its goal, rhetoric must be regarded as a threat. Historians of rhetoric have heard such accusations so often that they are liable to ignore Locke's complaint. But there have been some sophisti cated treatments of Locke's pessimism about language not least Hannah Dawson's recent work on Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). In that work, Dawson argues that Locke's wariness of language is informed by the most significant insights of his epistemology. Words equivocate because all individuals connote words differently and in accordance with sequences of their own private experi ences that are publically unavailable. Moreover, different people will clas sify the same phenomenon in different ways what is courageous to some is foolhardy to others—because phenomena are often genuinely difficult to distinguish and because each distinction is itself a finely balanced choice be tween similarity and difference, fancy and judgment. Dawson claims rightly 338 RHETORICA that for Locke such equivocation—both terminological and paradiastolic—is endemic and cognitively foundational. But despite the plausibility of the argument that Locke's pessimism about language entails a thorough-going repudiation of rhetoric, there is another scholarly tradition—running through (for example) Leibniz, de Man, and Walker—that interprets Lockean epistemology through the lens of rhetoric's theorization of the tropes (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais sur EEntendement Humain (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962); Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 13-30; William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1994)). Philip Vogt's John Locke and the Rhetoric ofModernity is, in large part, to be situated in this tradition. In particular, Vogt emphasizes Locke's investment in the theory and practice of analogy. Citing a text that in his opinion has been unjustifiably marginalized in Locke scholarship (the text in question is "An Examination of Malebranche's Opinion of Seeing All Things in God"), Vogt argues that there is a "rule of Analogy" that regulates Lockean thought. According to this rule, the human mind uses that with which it is familiar in order to judge that with which it is unfamiliar (pp. 18, 21). Vogt's claim that the trope of analogy plays a significant role in Locke's epistemology is significant and worthy of attention. It is essential to his argument that—pace the litany of scholars who have repeated the myth— Locke does not ultimately conceive...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
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- 2010-06-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2010.0010
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