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Plato: gorgias and aristotle: rhetoric | |||
Plato: Gorgias and Aristotle: Rhetoric 2009 • 978-1-58510-299-0 • paper • 300 pages • 6 x 9 • $18.95
By pairing translations of Gorgias and Rhetoric, along with an outstanding introductory essay, Joe Sachs demonstrates Aristotle’s response to Plato. If in the Gorgias Plato probes the question of what is problematic in rhetoric, in Rhetoric, Aristotle continues the thread by looking at what makes rhetoric useful. By juxtaposing the two texts, an interesting “conversation” is illuminated—one which students of philosophy and rhetoric will find key in their analytical pursuits. | About the Authors | Table of Contents | Preface | Review | |||
Description A complete translation of both the Gorgias and the Rhetoric with notes, glosses, and introductory essay.
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Joe Sachs taught for thirty years at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. He has translated Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics and On the Soul and, for the Focus Philosophical Library, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics as well as Plato's Theaetetus.
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Table of Contents Introduction
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There is a widespread belief that the teachings of Plato and Aristotle on most if not all subjects are opposites. A famous image at the center of a famous painting depicts the two philosophers locking eyes with stern expressions as the one points up and the other spreads his hand in a level gesture over the earth. The supposition that anything written by one of these authors will be arguing for an opinion at the opposite extreme from whatever the other has said on the same subject can become a principle of interpretation, invariably confirming the judgment the interpreter has made in advance about the relation between Platonic and Aristotelian teachings. This approach to interpretation rests, of course, on the further presupposition that one comes to one author already understanding the other. All in all, it is an interpretive strategy that never arrives anywhere except at the spot on which the interpreter is already standing, facing Raphael’s highly perspectival painting of the School of Athens from the apex of an isosceles triangle, just far enough away to see its symmetrical balance without being able to put it into any larger framework. This book has been brought into being in the conviction that more can be learned from Plato and Aristotle when one wanders off that conventional standpoint and tries out other points of view. The writings of the two philosophers on rhetoric offer a useful example of the way the thinking of Aristotle is related to that of Plato. The Gorgias is a famous attack on rhetoric, and the Rhetoric contains a classic defense of it. The situation is similar to that involving poetry, and tragic poetry in particular, which Socrates attacks in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle defends in the Poetics. But the Republic is large and complex, and one must come to terms with the way the criticisms of poetry fit into its whole intention. The Gorgias, though, is focused on rhetoric just as much as is the work of Aristotle that bears that name, and the pair of works is clearly a conversation. The fourth word of the Rhetoric, following those that mean "Rhetoric is a," is taken from the Gorgias, and the sentence ends with a direct denial of the corresponding claim made there by Socrates. As the Gorgias begins by setting up a confrontation of Gorgias by Socrates, the Rhetoric begins by setting up a confrontation of Plato by Aristotle. But some confrontations are quarrels and some are not. We need to look beneath the surfaces of the two writings before we can understand exactly what the one is attacking and the other defending. When we do, I suggest we will find more continuity than contention between the two authors. The discussion in the Gorgias of what is wrong with rhetoric is always pointing to the question of what makes it right, and that is the question Aristotle takes up.
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Joe Sachs has emerged as one of the great translators of Plato and Aristotle. Like his other translations such as the Poetics and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle and the Republic and Theaetetus of Plato, also available through Focus Publishing, these translations are remarkably accurate, while at the same time attaining a high degree of fluency in English. Scholars of ancient Greek philosophy and lay readers alike will discover with these translation of Plato’s Gorgias and Aristotle’s Rhetoric that this translator is trustworthy in conveying the author’s style, syntax and meaning, while unfailingly ingenious in finding the most elegant renditions to enhance the clarity, consistency and precision with which an English speaking reader can now approach these important and seminal philosophical texts. I use Sachs’s translations in the classroom with superb results. Sachs’s Introduction is by far the best essay I have seen in showing the close conversation with the Gorgias that occurs throughout Aristotle’s Rhetoric, even while at the same time showing how Aristotle tries in his own work to advance an understanding of the importance of rhetoric to philosophy that reaches beneath the division of dialectic and persuasive rhetorical argument in the Gorgias. Presenting these two texts together is an opportunity for scholars and students to grasp more deeply the philosophical struggle in classical philosophy over the relationship between language and truth, a struggle that has been at the heart of philosophy ever since. Sachs’s footnotes and annotations, including a glossary and outline, are judicious and in no way distract from the original text, while at the same time proving time and again to be very helpful. –Walter Brogan, Villanova University | |||
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