Abstract
From time to time, we will dedicate our review section to the discussion of a new work in rhetoric studies. In these more lengthy review sections, which we are calling “Book Review Forums,” we will invite scholars to write short responses to the chosen book and invite the author to respond to the reviews. We hope this will offer a robust space for discussion, debate, and deliberation over important book-length works as we think about advances in the history of rhetoric.Forum: James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of PersuasionThis issue’s forum focuses on Professor James L. Kastely’s 2015 work, The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion (University of Chicago Press). Within rhetoric studies, Plato is often cast as rhetoric’s foremost critic, and, at least since Karl Popper included Plato as an enemy of the open society, as a foremost critic of democracy. In his book that is the subject of this forum, James L. Kastely offers a new reading of the Republic that challenges both of these characterizations. He argues that Plato’s goal in the Republic is to develop a rhetoric for philosophers that will persuade non-philosophers of the value of justice and the importance of living the moral life. On Kastely’s reading, Socrates presents this rhetorical approach to persuasion as an alternative to dialectic, which the interlocutors in the Republic judge to have failed to persuade the non-philosopher of much, except that philosophy is useless pettifoggery.The responses to Kastely’s book by Arabella Lyon, Bruce Krajewski, and Michael Svoboda, as well as Kastely’s response to their judgments that constitute this forum, were first presented at an ASHR session at the Rhetoric Society of American conference, May, 2016, Atlanta, Georgia. The panelists revised and shortened their original oral presentations for publication here
- Journal
- Advances in the History of Rhetoric
- Published
- 2016-09-01
- DOI
- 10.1080/15362426.2016.1234152
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