Sophistical practice : toward a consistent relativism / / Barbara Cassin

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910789374203321
• Autore: Cassin Barbara
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: New York : , : Fordham University Press, , 2014; ©2014
• ISBN: 0-8232-5641-3; 0-8232-5639-1; 0-8232-5642-1; 0-8232-6135-2; 0-8232-5640-5
• Edizione: [First edition.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (384 p.)
• Disciplina: 183.1
• Soggetti: Sophists (Greek philosophy)
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Includes index.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction: Toward a new topology of philosophy -- I. Unusual presocratics -- Who's afraid of the sophists? Against ethical correctness -- Speak if you are a man, or the transcendental exclusion -- Seeing Helen in every woman: woman and word -- II. Sophistics, rhetorics, politics -- Rhetorical turns in ancient Greece -- Topos/Kairos: two modes of invention -- Time of deliberation and space of power: Athens and Rome, the first conflict -- III. Sophistical trends in political philosophy -- From organism to picnic: which consensus for which city? -- Aristotle with and against Kant on the idea of human nature -- Greeks and Romans: paradigms of the past in Arendt and Heidegger -- IV. Performance and performative -- How to really do things with words: performance before the performative -- The performative without condition: a university sans appel -- Genres and genders. Woman/philosopher: identity as strategy -- Philosophizing in tongues -- V. "Enough of the truth for ..." -- "Enough of the truth for ... ": on the truth and reconciliation commission -- Politics of memory: on the treatment of hate -- Google and cultural democracy -- The relativity of translation and relativism.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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 "e 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 desacralized 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 newparadigm for the human sciences.