| Popis: |
This chapter examines Hobbes’s understanding of the problem with rhetoric in philosophical and political reasoning. Although the problem is generally treated as stylistic or elocutionary (rhetoric allows a speaker to persuade someone of something that may not be strictly true), Hobbes saw it as more fundamentally a problem of inventio or discovery: the relaxed procedures of rhetorical proof compromise the reasoning process. The chapter examines Hobbes’s analysis of the undermining, by rhetorical reasoning, of the foundations of Western philosophy and political authority, and the exploitation by interested parties—especially the church—of inadequately defined and ambiguous terms such as ‘people’, ‘liberty’, ‘tyranny’, ‘conscience’, ‘hell’, ‘bishop’, and ‘excommunication’. Hobbes’s partial admission, in Leviathan, of certain elocutionary techniques to the communication of philosophical thought is shown to be limited in scope, falling well short of a full rapprochement between philosophy and rhetoric, and (as in his treatment of counsel) inconsistently maintained. |
