Book Review| May 01 2019 Reviews: Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language before Plato, edited by Robin Reames Robin Reames, ed., Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language before Plato, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017. 191 pp. ISBN 9781611177688 Christopher Moore Christopher Moore Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Classics Director of Undergraduate Studies for Philosophy Director of the Hellenic Studies Group 240E Sparks Building University Park , PA 16802 c.moore@psu.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (2): 209–212. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.209 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christopher Moore; Reviews: Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language before Plato, edited by Robin Reames. Rhetorica 1 May 2019; 37 (2): 209–212. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.209 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 209 Howe uses suggestive dialogue to persuade her male readers to admit her to their literary canon. Like Howe, Johnson seeks to legitimate sentimental poetry; however, Johnson does so by reading this verse through a rhetorical lens. Johnson's anal­ yses are rich and incisive. Sometimes, her larger argument gets lost in the details of her close reading. Moreover, while Johnson promises to offer readers a heuristic for reading sentimental verse, her analyses are often too local and deep to be generalizable to other texts. Regardless, Antebellum American Women s Poetry makes a valuable contribution to both rhetorical and literary scholarship, particularly feminist scholarship on nineteenth-century American women's writing. Demonstrating the importance of sentimental verse in nine­ teenth-century America, Johnson recovers a site of women's rhetorical activity that has otherwise been lost to the divide between literature and rhetoric. Paige V. Banaji Barry University Robin Reames, ed., Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language before Plato, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017. 191 pp. ISBN 9781611177688 The contributors to Logos without Rhetoric confront Edward Schiappa's so-called "nominalist" view of rhetorike techne - that it makes little sense to speak of a discipline of rhetoric before the coinage and circulation of the term rhetorike, which Schiappa famously attributes to Plato in the Gorgias. Rather than examine Schiappa's view directly, the contributors try to give substance to an "evolutionary" or "developmental" view. On this account, important ingredients of rhetoric appear in the fifth century and even before. These views do not, of course, conflict; they rather shift the question from (i) "when did the thing called rhetorike begin, and what is that thing so named?" to (ii) "what stuff if any within that thing predates its/their being called rhetorike?" The first question gets at a specific concept, its work, and its effects within Greek self-understanding, with the goal of reconstructing specific debates and conscious practices that deployed or were governed by that concept. The second question searches for any treatment of language as a "manipulation of persuasive means" (p. 8), an inquiry bound only by our own presumptions of relevance. Now, from an Aristotelian perspective, rhetorike (techne) is at once a sys­ tematic theory7 and an ongoing inquiry into the various kinds of persuasive manipulation. From that perspective, what one wants to find in an account of the origins of rhetorike is not particularly clever, routimzed, or flexible deployments of persuasive manipulation but rather evidence for the rise of a discipline, an increasingly concerted, increasingly self-conscious effort through time to understand the extent and nature of it. 210 RHETORICA Be that as it may, questions (i) and (ii) could differ markedly. The contri­ butors to Logos without Rhetoric draw the two questions together by trying to attribute a quasi- (or proto-) systematic quasi- (or proto-) consciousness to their various authors' use of persuasive manipulation, such that they could be seen not only as speaking well but also as coming to think about the task of speaking well. (The authors generally do not address the extent to which these efforts were concerted or dialectical - that is, a matter of public discus­ sion.) Success in the contributors' enterprise depends, then, on their actually identifying theoretical or disciplinary rudiments in texts. This is in principle possible since, whatever the coinage situation for the term, rhetorike must have been formed and accepted in response to some prior if rudimentary the­ oretical or disciplinary activity. As it turns out, the chapters themselves are of rather mixed success. Terry Papillon ("Unity, Dissociation, and Schismogenesis in Isocrates") contributes a short, jargon-heavy, and free-floating chapter about the rheto­ ric of divisiveness. It wavers between two theses, the rather grand and lessevidenced one that "Isocrates. . . redefined the notion of politics" (p. 17) and the rather mundane and quite plausible one that "Isocrates shows us a prac­ tical example of an early Greek rhetorical practice" (p. 18). Robert Gaines ("Theodorus Byzantius on the Parts of a Speech") argues that a pre-Platonic figure, Theodorus, distinguished oratorical speeches into twelve parts and that we see the adoption of this normative distinction in the (fragmentary) ps.-Lysianic Against Andocides for Impiety...

ABSTRACTThis article argues that in his second speech of the Phaedrus (the “palinode”), Socrates gives an intentionally fallacious argument. He gives this argument, starting “all/every soul is immortal” (245c6–246a2), to show his speech-loving friend Phaedrus how—rather than simply to tell him that—analytic as much as imagistic speech can persuade without deserving conviction. This argument joins four others that recent Phaedrus scholarship has shown to be deliberately misconstructed. The entire dialogue has Socrates demonstrating to Phaedrus that the proper attitude to speech is active and critical scrutiny. “Philosophy”—toward which Socrates wants to turn Phaedrus—is not the rhetorical mode “speaking in sequential inferences” but is instead a kind of shared listening and conversation, an association committed to “making a person most thoughtful.” Yet inducting someone into philosophy still depends on some rhetorical mode: the kind that reveals a person's need for a commitment to investigation.