Epistemology

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Epistemology
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Sophists

• Pragmatic rhetoric--focus on effects on the
  audience
• Isocrates, Cicero, Quintillian integration of
  rhetoric inquiry
• Language gt power
• Plato ban lyric epic poets Republic

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Plato Ideals

• Every circle that is drawn or turned on a lathe
  in actual operations abounds in the opposite of
  the fifth entity, for it everywhere touches the
  straight, while the real circle, I maintain,
  contains in itself neither much nor little of the
  opposite character . . . The important thing is
  that, as I said a little earlier, there are two
  things, the essential reality and the particular
  quality . . . Plato, Letters, 7.343a-c, tr. L.
  A. Post

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A Platonic View of the Realization Process
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Aristotle

• It is clear then, that rhetorical study, in its
  strict sense, is concerned with the modes of
  persuasion. Rhetoric, I
• Homer, admirable as he is in every other respect
  is especially so in this, that he alone among
  epic poets is not unaware of the part to be
  played by the poet himself in the poem. The poet
  should say very little in propria persona, as he
  is no imitator when doing that. Whereas the
  other poets are perpetually coming forward in
  person, and say but little, and that only here
  and there, as imitators, Homer, after a brief
  preface, brings forthwith a man, a woman, or some
  other character--no one of them characterless,
  but each with distinctive characteristics.
  Poetics

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Early History of Rhetoric

• Longinus address the reader (Tompkins, p. 202)
• Renaissance
• audience gt aristocracy
• Ben Jonson's verses (Tompkins, p. 208)

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Aristotle

• Empirical methods lauded
• we are all empiricisits
• Russell ask Ms. Aristotle to open her mouth

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Systematic Philosophy

• Aquinas
• Skeptics Hume, Berkeley

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Kant The New Synthesis

• How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?
• Unitary version of knowing based on natural
  sciences
• Subject/object -gt ahistorical
• "Rising sun"
• 19th century science edifice

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Wittgenstein

• Glorification and doubt
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus gt
  Positivism
• Philosophical Investigations gt Pragmatism,
  hermeneutics

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Wittgenstein History

• B. April 26, 1889, eighth child of wealthy family
  in Hapsburg, Vienna
• Hermann W to F. Mendelssohn Just let him
  breathe the air you breathe!
• Time of nervous splendour (Monk, p. 9)
• Interdependence of the arts (Janik, p, 18)
• Poetry science (Janik, p. 113)

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Ethics Truth

• Why should one tell the truth if its to ones
  advantage to tell a lie? (age 8)
• The ethical task (Janik, p. 167-169)
• The dilemma (Janik, p. 189-191)
• Tractatus (Janik, p. 20-24)
• Teaching intellectual (Monk, p. 192)
• Answer to the riddle of life

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Wittgenstein Language Games

• . . . in philosophy we often compare the use of
  words with games and calculi which have fixed
  rules, but cannot say that someone who is using
  language must be playing such a game.--But if
  you say that our languages only approximate to
  such calculi you are standing on the brink of a
  misunderstanding. For then it may look as if
  what we were talking about were an ideal
  language.
• Wittgenstein, 1974/1953, 81

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A Wittgensteinian View of the Realization Process
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Songs Without Words

• The thoughts I find expressed in music that I
  love are not too indefinite, but on the contrary,
  too definite to put into words
• Felix Mendelssohn, 1841

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Logical Positivism

• operational definitions of terms
• test by experiment
• contexts
• covering law
• monomethodology
• Neurath cup of coffee hermeneutics (Howard, p.
  29)

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Anti-Rhetoric

• fact/value
• truth/opinion
• rigorous/intuitive
• precise/vague
• things/words
• cognition/feeling
• object/subject
• observation/interpretation
• report/argument
• findings/inferences