CFP: Special Issue of Humanities: Ancient Greek Sophistry and Its Legacy
Guest Editor: Michael J. MacDonald
For all their veneration of logos and persuasive speech, the ancient Greeks also experienced a fear of discourse and its power to produce effects in the soul and the world. This logophobie, as Michel Foucault calls it, was associated above all with the figure of the sophist, thanks in part to the polemical efforts of Plato and Aristotle to expel the sophists from the order of reasonable, ethical discourse. Plato initiates the war between philosophy and sophistry with an attack on sophistic thought that has repercussions even today: the art of sophistike is flattery, deception, cosmetology, captious reasoning, phantom wisdom, empty verbiage, cookery in the soul, and demagoguery. In a sense, Plato and Aristotle create the discipline of philosophy by negating sophistry, conjuring up the figure of the sophist as its fictionalized Other or “counter-essence” (Martin Heidegger).
In light of this diatribe, one of the most remarkable trends in the humanities in recent years has been the resurgence of scholarly interest in the ancient Greek sophists and their Nachleben in Western philosophy. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was one of the first to recognize the uncanny presence of ancient Greek sophistics in modern continental philosophy: “Sophistry does not lie so far from us as we think” (Lectures on the History of Philosophy). Friedrich Nietzsche also notes the affinities between modernity and antiquity (“epoch of the sophists, our epoch”) and contends that “every advance in moral and epistemological knowledge has reinstated the sophists” (Nachlass). More recently, Jacques Derrida argues that sophistic thought plays a decisive role in the history of philosophy and devotes several essays to excavating the “conceptual monuments . . . marking out the battle lines between sophistics and philosophy” (Dissemination).
Given this resurgence of interest in sophistics in modern and contemporary European philosophy, this Special Issue of Humanities seeks to reassess the phenomenon of ancient Greek sophistry and its legacy, both as a historical reality (sophistic doctrine and practice) and as a literary and philosophical fiction. For submission information, please go to https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/AGSL. Submission Deadline: March 31, 2022.