Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The question posed is this: In the wake of the "deconstruction" of Continental Philosophy and the "pragmatization" of Anglo-American Philosophy , what sort of genre of writing is Philosophy? A selective history is narrated to illustrate the alliances between sophism and traditional rhetoric ; between rhetoric and classical American pragmatism ; between contemporary pragmatism and contemporary continental philosophy ; and between contemporary literary criticism and "post-modern" aesthetics. It is proposed that these alliances form a coherent narrative which exemplifies a form of rapprochement in the aestheticization of philosophy's own discourses and texts. It is argued that the consequence of this shift, from reading philosophy as foundational for the other inquiries culture institutes to reading it as rhetoric, is to see the genre of philosophy as an art, as a set of texts which contributes to the plurality of relativistic discourses which we construct for particular critical purposes: constructed not as mirrors of Truth, but as useful and persuasive social dramas