Rhetoric as Philosophy

I really liked Grassi’s article “Rhetoric as Philosophy” because it reminded me of a philosophy logic course which I took in my undergrad years of exploration. I think to summarize the article in a few words (especially that I will be presenting the article and I don’t want to say too much already) I would say that this article is a response to the idea that “Theoretical thinking, as a rational process, excludes every rhetorical element because pathetic influences-the influences of feeling-disturb the clarity of rational thought” (p. 18). Grasso clearly questions this idea by bringing proofs from literary and philosophical texts, as Plato, and at the end he suggests that there is a unity between the rhetoric and philosophy and that the two go hand in hand.

Here are some thoughts that I have about some passages of the article. In the section “Cassandra’s Tragic Movement from Rhetoric to Rationality”, although the argument was clear enough, I thought that the demonstration of the article was not strong enough because it needed previous knowledge of the story and the text, if one does not have any idea about the first section in which Cassandra is in the “semantic language” it would be really hard to understand what the author means by that. For example in the 3rd paragraph of page 22 it is said that “Cassandra does not hear the words of the Chorus; she repeats her invocation (v. 1076), and again the Chorus reacts in a rational manner (v. 1078)”. Maybe if the author had included these passages briefly it would have given a clearer idea of the argument to a reader who has not read this text.

Basically the reader has to take the author’s word for the arguments made in this section, and is unable to do her/his own analysis of the literary passage. However, I have to admit that despite this, the argument was clear enough and I knew what Grassi was trying to prove.

In the other sections, in the other hand we have the ability to do our own thinking about the passages that are used as support for the main argument, as is the case in the section “Plato’s Union of Knowledge and Passion”.
All in all it was a good article, interesting topic (I love philosophy so anything related to it fascinates me), and clear arguments.

We’ll see if my presentation tomorrow will demonstrate my appreciation of this reading :)