Sophistical Practice

Title	:	Sophistical Practice
Author	:	Barbara Cassin
Release	:	2014-04-03
Kind	:	ebook
Genre	:	Philosophy, Books, Nonfiction
Size	:	1756092

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Sophistics is the paradigm of a discourse that does things with words. It is not pure rhetoric, as Plato wants us to believe, but it provides an alternative to the philosophical mainstream. A sophistic history of philosophy questions the orthodox philosophical history of philosophy: that of ontology and truth in itself. In this book, we discover unusual Presocratics, wreaking havoc with the fetish of true and false. Their logoi perform politics and perform reality. Their sophistic practice can shed crucial light on contemporary events, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where, to quote Desmond Tutu, words, language, and rhetoric do things, creating things like the new rainbow people. Transitional justice requires a consistent and sustainable relativism: not Truth, but truth for, and enough of the truth for there to be a community. Philosophy itself is about words before it is about concepts. Language manifests itself in reality only as multiplicity; different languages perform different types of worlds; and difficulties of translation are but symptoms of these differences. This desacralised untranslatability undermines and deconstructs the Heideggerian statement that there is a historical language of philosophy that is Greek by essence (being the only language able to say what is) and today is German. Sophistical Practice constitutes a major contribution to the debate among philosophical pluralism, unitarism, and pragmatism. It will change how we discuss such words as city, truth, and politics. Philologically and philosophically rethinking the sophistical gesture, relying on performance and translation, it proposes a new paradigm for the human sciences.

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Intersections

Collège international de philosophie (CIPh), Various Authors, Dorothée Smith, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, Gisèle Berkman, Natalia Smolianskaïa, Frédéric Vengeon, Françoise Balibar, Patrice Maniglier, Pascal Sévérac, Natalia Avtonomova, Étienne Balibar, Evgen Bavcar, Ali Benmakhlouf, Pierre Bergounioux, Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp, Barbara Cassin, Gilles Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Cometti, Maria-Letizia Cravetto, Alain David, Monique David-Ménard, Dominique de Courcelles, Thierry de Duve, Michel Deguy, Jacques Derrida, Christian Doumet, Dany-Robert Dufour, Corinne Enaudeau, Marc Fellous, Michèle Gendreau-Massaloux, Éric Guichard, Marcel Hénaff, Annie Ibrahim, Rada Ivekovic, Patricia Janody, Patrick Juignet, Nicole Loraux, Patrice Loraux, Joëlle Marelli, Jean-Clet Martin, Éric Méchoulan, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, Chantal Mouffe, Francisco Naishtat, Jean-François Nordmann, Bernard Piettre, Paolo Quintili, Jacques Rancière, Élisabeth Rigal, Hadi Rizk, Jean-Michel Salanskis, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Diogo Sardinha, Antonia Soulez, Bernard Stevens, Étienne Tassin, Christian Trottmann, Bruno Verrecchia & Pierre Zaoui