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September 28, 2007

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I was delighted to see the reference to Socrates and Plato with regard to rhetoric, especially in light of the fact that Platonic philosophy itself took the rhetorical form of the dialogue, a fact often forgotten in discussions of Platonic/Socratic hostility to rhetoric. As Guyora Binder and Robert Weisburg make clear, with Plato, rhetoric "strives to achieve ethos, the inner harmony of language, character, and truth made incarnate in the person. Under this model, the speaker must actually *have* good character to impress his audience; the quality of one's discourse is an index and instrument of one's moral health, so that as one lives so one speaks." Moreover, "the choice of [rhetorical] style or form was also a moral choice, and it was therefore significant that he [i.e., Plato] rejected the available model of the tragic poem in favor of the discursive and relatively dispassionate dialogue. [....] Though Plato obviously opposed the crass trickery of the sophistic rhetoricians, and though he opposed tragic theater because it distracted the mind with emotion, the dialogue nevertheless engages in a form of seduction [cf. Platonic eros]. Whereas a treatise by, say, Parmenides announces its purpose and asserts its authority, the Platonic dialogue draws the perhaps resistant reader into philosophizing by exploiting the context of ordinary conversation between ordinary people. Indeed, it relies on the sense of honor of any person capable of articulating a self-image, and experiencing humiliation on being forced to admit that he cannot live up to it. The dialogue also 'models' ethical behavior by demonstrating the moral development of the characters in process. This ethical 'role-modeling' is the heart of rhetoric." (From Binder and Weisburg's Literary Criticisms of Law, 2000). On just how this modeling of ethical behavior takes place in the Socratic dialogues and how it exemplifies key elements of Platonic philosophy, please see Francisco J. Gonzalez's Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato's Practice of Philosophical Inquiry, 1998.

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