Research Article| February 01 2000 Short Reviews: Plato's Sophist, by Martin Heidegger, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales, by J. Stephen Russell, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, by Lynne Magnusson, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women, by Shirley Wilson Logan and Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts, by Lynette Hunter Martin Heidegger,Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and AndréSchuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xxvii + 476 pp.J. Stephen Russell,Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), x + 266 pp.Lynne Magnusson,Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), x + 221 pp.Shirley Wilson Logan,“We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 255 pp.Lynette Hunter,Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), vi + 239 pp. Michael J. MacDonald, Michael J. MacDonald Department of English, The University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607-7120, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Anne Laskaya, Anne Laskaya Department of English, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Judith Rice Henderson, Judith Rice Henderson Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, 9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon SK S7N 5A5, Canada Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jacqueline Jones Royster, Jacqueline Jones Royster Department of English, The Ohio State University, 421 Denney Hall, 164 West 17th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43202, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar C. Jan Swearingen C. Jan Swearingen Texas A & M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2000) 18 (1): 103–117. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.1.103 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 Michael J. MacDonald, Anne Laskaya, Judith Rice Henderson, Jacqueline Jones Royster, C. Jan Swearingen; Short Reviews: Plato's Sophist, by Martin Heidegger, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales, by J. Stephen Russell, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, by Lynne Magnusson, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women, by Shirley Wilson Logan and Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts, by Lynette Hunter. Rhetorica 1 February 2000; 18 (1): 103–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.1.103 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. Copyright 2000, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Short Reviews1 Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xxvii + 476 pp. Reflecting on her early years as a student of philosophy at the University of Marburg, Hannah Arendt recalls how the name of a young assistant professor, Martin Heidegger, travelled across Germany like "rumours" of a "secret king". Now, with the publication of Plato's Sophist, readers of English may judge for themselves whether these lectures confirm or dispel the rumours of Heidegger as a "subterranean" king of the realms of thinking and teaching. Plato's Sophist is a faithful and readable translation of Platons Sophist, Ingeborg Schiisslers's superb reconstruction of a lecture course on the Sophist conducted by Heidegger at Marburg in the Winter semester of 1924/25 under the deceptively simple title, Interpretation Platonischer Dialog (Sophistes). Although Heidegger claims in his preliminary remarks that the phenomenological "way of seeing" follows the "pure" and "simple" way of thinking of the early Greeks, there is nothing simple about Heidegger's magisterial interpretation of the Sophist as the first radical inquiry into the question of the "meaning of Being", the guiding thread of Heidegger's own Being and Time (1927). In order to prepare the way for an understanding of the Sophist as a "scientific" dialogue, Heidegger devotes the introduction (pp. 15-155) to a detailed exposition of the doctrine of intellectual virtues set forth by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (VI, 2-6) and the Metaphysics (I, 1-2). Taking its point of departure in the Greek concept of truth (aletheia) as "unconcealedness" and "uncoveredness", chapter one argues that 1 The Editor and the Book Review Editor would like to apologize to Janet Atwill for the error in naming in the review of her book Rhetoric Reclaimed in Rhetorica, 17 (1999) p. 334. 103 RHETORICA 104 the intellectual virtues (episteme, techne, phronesis, sophia, and nous) represent different ways of "unconcealing" and uncovering the truth of Being. While chapter one exposes the "deficiency" of know-how (techne) and fabrication (poiesis) as ways of unveiling Being, the second and third chapters seek to establish the preeminence of sophia ("genuine insight") over phronesis ("circumspective insight") as the highest mode of "disclosive seeing". Here Heidegger argues that while phronesis concerns the "gravest" matters, the "shared world" (Mitwelt) of words and deeds in the city, sophia concerns the "highest" matters, the "ultimate principles" (archai) of Being, which reveal themselves only in the "silent speaking" of the solitary thinker. One of the most striking features of this remarkable "double preparation" for the Sophist—apart from the rigour, clarity, and sobriety of its argumentation—is the subtle process by which Heidegger purifies the concepts of practical and theoretical wisdom of any trace of sophistry. The translation of deliberation (bouleuesthai) as "circumspective self-debate", for example, seems to eliminate the plural dimension of deliberation for the Greeks: the deliberative assembly (boule), the forum of deliberative rhetoric (rhetorike symbouleutikos), becomes the "inner forum" of the call of conscience and the "silent dialogue" of the soul. Having surveyed the "thematic field" of the Sophist through an exposition of the modes of truth in the Nicomachean Ethics, Heidegger devotes the "main part" (pp. 157-422) of Plato's Sophist to a patient, almost line by line exegesis of the dialogue. Following the argument of the Eleatic Stranger "step by step", the first four chapters bring to light the inner coherence of the various apparitions of the sophist, arguing that all seven definitions converge on the art of disputation as the "unitary basic structure" of the techne sophistike. The excursus on Plato's "ambiguous" (zwiespaltige) attitude toward rhetoric in chapter three will doubtless hold the most interest for the historian of rhetoric. Here Heidegger argues that dialectics emerges from an "inner need" of Socratic philosophy to transcend the "idle chatter" of sophistry and its modes of "pretheoretical speech" (the rhetoric of the law courts, deliberative assemblies, and public festivals). Although Plato failed to achieve a "positive understanding" of rhetoric, Reviews 105 concludes Heidegger, his vision of a redeemed rhetoric as the leading of souls in the Phaedrus lays the foundation for the "concrete work" of Aristotle in the Rhetoric, the "first...