Philosophy is an art.--On right designation.--On the art of oratory.--The mystery of polarisation.--On concentration.--On polyphony.--Utopians and prophets.--Fruitful disorder.--The conflict between youth and age.--The individual and the spirit of the age.--The limited number of important cultural forms.--The significance of Chinese art.--Death and re-birth.--On the future of the Mediterranean civilisations.--Life is and art.--The culture of beauth.

While much has been written about relativism, multiculturalism and dialogue the case of education is special as in education the teacher aims to promote a set of values. This role of the teacher as bearing a worldview to be advanced is rarely addressed in the literature and is the focus of this paper. In the first section we explore the concept of polyphony and the vision it presents for education. We then turn to the idea of dialogue as developed (...) by Bakhtin and present a communicative model conducive to a polyphonic educational environment. In the third section we portray the dynamics of polyphony in the classroom suggesting an analysis of the parameters defining the participants in the educational setting and the relations between them. We conclude by drawing the implications of our position to the question set out above: the paradox the teacher is subject to in advancing a set of values in a dialogue with students. (shrink)

Bakhtin famously argued that language-as-used is essentially dialogic. One pragmatic implication concerns how dialogicity is established in various contexts. In political discourse, polemic polyphony emerges from the juxtaposition of adversarial voices of political actors: a dialogue in which different voices index different ideological orientations. Polyphonic ensembles establish discoursal scenes and make them recognizable, enabling distinctions such as those between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and between heroes and villains. Overall, they assist speakers in the semiotic mediation of political relations.

(1998). Harmony, polyphony, ornamentation: Musical rhetoric in jonson's hymenaei and crashaw's “musicks duell”. Angelaki: Vol. 3, The love of music, pp. 119-132.

Polyphony of Anxiety. The Interview with Stefano Micali about His Book Phenomenology of Anxiety.

This study employs quantitative and qualitative methodologies mainly to examine how UNFCCC Executive Secretaries use concessive but-constructions and linguistic polyphony to implicitly argue points of view and convey stance in speeches on climate change. Our findings indicate that, in order to achieve its goals for global climate governance while adhering to humanitarian and diplomatic principles, UNFCCC speeches delivered to the Parties to the Convention and the Stakeholders emphasize the urgent need for concerted action on climate change while implicitly expressing (...) discontent and mild criticism of various Parties and Stakeholders for failing to do their fair share in support of such action. This style of discourse aims to promote group unity, solidarity, and transparency while minimizing the possibility of offending any Parties or Stakeholders. Nevertheless, given the urgency of addressing climate change challenges, we advise that UNFCCC speakers utilize more explicit linguistic methods that exert more direct pressure on specific Parties or Stakeholders who fail to assume their share of responsibility. In addition, we suggest that the UNFCCC focus on enabling the implementation of practical actions to limit the effects of global warming, while continuing to urge affluent countries to provide developing countries with much-needed financial and technological help. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose reconceptualizing diversity management from a communication-centered perspective. We base our proposal on the observation that the literature on diversity management, both in the instrumental and critical traditions, is primarily concerned with fostering the diversity of organizational members in terms of individual-bound criteria. By drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony as well as the ‘communicative constitution of organizations’ perspective, we suggest reconsidering diversity as the plurality of ‘voices’ which can be understood as the range of (...) individual opinions and societal discourses that get expressed and can find resonance in organizational settings. We contribute to the literature on diversity management by moving away from a focus on individual-bound and inalterable criteria of diversity and toward a reconceptualization of diversity management as dynamic processes of voice articulation and mediation. (shrink)

Bermúdez's “rational framing effects” are consequences of a counterintuitive phenomenon that I call “normative polyphony”: the reality that a single action may, with logical consistency, sustain diverse positive and negative judgments. I show that normative polyphony emerges from “ontological polyphony” – that is, diverse possible framings of relevant details – and illustrate this “polyphony principle” through a reading of Dostoevsky's (1993) Crime and Punishment.

Speakers address audiences in the earliest Greek literature, but oratory became a distinct genre in the late fifth century and reached its maturity in the fourth. This book traces the development of its techniques by examining the contribution made by each orator. Dr Usher makes the speeches come alive for the reader through an in-depth analysis of the problems of composition and the likely responses of contemporary audiences. His study differs from previous books in its recognition of the richness (...) of the early tradition which made innovation difficult, however, the orators are revealed as men of remarkable talent, versatility, and resource. Antiphon's pioneering role, Lysias' achievement of balance between the parts of the speech, the establishment of oratory as a medium of political thought by Demosthenes and Isocrates, and the individual characteristics of other orators - Andocides, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hyperides, Dinarchus and Apollodorus - together make a fascinating study in evolution; while the illustrative texts of the orators include some of the liveliest and most moving passages in Greek literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004) 191-211 [Access article in PDF] Oratory and Rhetoric in Renaissance Medicine Nancy G. Siraisi Hunter College In Renaissance medical practice rhetoric had an ambiguous reputation. Many authors warned physicians against use of persuasion or repeated some version of the truism that patients are cured not by eloquence but by medicines. On the other hand, physicians were also reminded that by (...) speaking well they helped patients to have confidence in their advice and to understand directions, which in turn facilitated cure.1 Yet some aspects of medical culture of the period between 1450 and 1600 seem profoundly attentive to rhetoric, at least as regards the use of language, performative elements, and the influence of these features in ancient models (most notably Galen himself).2 One area in which rhetoric had an unambiguous, acknowledged, and essential place was in the medical orations pronounced at university ceremonies. A sample follows: Pursuit of all these different things by study, investigation of obscurities with ingenuity, conquest of difficulties with industry, and—after penetrating into the very fibers of the earth and searching everywhere into the arcana of the whole of nature and from all herbs, fruits, trees, animals, gems, and even poisons—inquiry after remedies and the proper way to use them for all the ills of human life from so many authors, so many disciplines, and even from the very stars: these things, I say, [End Page 191] have uncovered so many hidden cures, been attained with such arduous powers of the mind, completed with so much effort of memory, offer so many things necessary for the health of the entire human race in common, that does not indeed [the entire enterprise of medicine] seem to have been superhuman and really in a certain way divine?3This nicely exuberant example of Renaissance medical rhetoric exemplifies the genre in several respects. The oration to which it belongs was originally delivered to an academic faculty of medicine by a physician; it shows the impact in medical settings of the revival of epideictic rhetoric, and its author drew on learned sources and commonplaces about medicine that belonged to a store of broadly humanistic erudition, shared both in and outside the medical profession. In fact the only truly distinctive feature of this passage is its author. It comes from Erasmus's Encomium medicinae, which he wrote in 1499 for a friend—a physician named Gysbertus—to deliver to the medical faculty of the University of Paris.4If Gysbertus was exceptionally fortunate in his ghost, many other surviving medical orations are internal products of medical faculties, the work of university masters or students of medicine. But whoever their authors, orations delivered in or written for an academic medical setting offer some telling illustrations both of the way in which certain kinds of humanistic interests and requirements came to penetrate medical learning and of the reaction of humanistic rhetoric to medicine. "Medical humanism" is usually understood to encompass both the core enterprise of intensive philological study, editing, and translation of Greek medical texts—never the occupation of more than a handful of hellenist scholars—and also the reception and scientific influence of the fruits of their labors among a wider medical audience. But Renaissance medicine was also a humanistic discipline in a much broader and more inclusive sense; that is, it both fostered and provided ample scope for the development among learned physicians of interests characteristic of humanistic culture in general: rhetoric, history, biography, fascination with remote peoples and places, and antiquarianism. At the same time, as the passage from Erasmus quoted [End Page 192] above demonstrates, humanists outside the medical profession interested themselves in medicine and controlled a stock of rhetorical commonplaces on the subject. To be sure, the penetration of terminology and concepts from medicine into the general culture long antedated the Renaissance.5 But the revival of rhetoric together with attention to ancient sources and commonplaces provided humanist observers with new tools for commenting, sometimes in quite specific and detailed terms, on the contemporary medical scene, a phenomenon... (shrink)

Like artists, important writers defy unequivocal interpretations. Gao Xingjian, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, is a cosmopolitan writer, deeply rooted in the Chinese past while influenced by paragons of Western Modernity. The present volume is less interested in a general discussion on the multitude of aspects in Gao's works and even less in controversies concerning their aesthetic value than in obtaining a response to the crucial issues of freedom and fate from a clearly defined angle. The very nature (...) of the answer to the question of freedom and fate within Gao Xingjian's works can be called a polyphonic one: thereare affirmative as well as skeptical voices. But polyphony, as embodied by Gao, is an even more multifaceted phenomenon. Most important for our contention is the fact that Gao Xingjian's aesthetic experience embodies prose, theater, painting, and film. Taken together, they form a Gesamtkunstwerk whose diversity of voices characterizes every single one of them. (shrink)

This collection of fourteen essays explores the pervasive influence and dynamic character of oratory during the Hellenistic period and survey its different manifestations in diverse literary genres and socio-political contexts, especially the dialogue between the Greek oratorical tradition and the developing oratorical practices at Rome.

La communication se rapporte à la richesse des interprétations temporelles par l’intermédiaire de Vintila Horia, l’une des personnalités du XX‐e siècle, qui l’applique à l’histoire du monde par ses personnages, leurs époques et les conceptions de vie correspondantes, phénomène exprimé à l’aide de l’art littéraire d’une complexité particulière, invitant à la méditation et aux réactions nécessaires. Le but de sa création est d’éclaircir la personnalité humaine dans sa variété expressive, modulée par le contexte philosophique dans lequel chacun réagit conformément à (...) sa raison et aux procès à caractère social, politique et culturel caractéristiques à la société décrite. (shrink)

Contemporary public discourses are, despite the growing array of technologies and spaces for participation, becoming increasingly characterized by polarization – the formation of two distinct and r...

This article is based on a series of conversations with the social psychologist Miguel D. Norambuena regarding Félix Guattari's visit to Chile in 1991. The conversation deals with different events, ranging from the process of dictatorial repression in Chile with the political exile of Miguel D., experiences of intersection between Chilean revolutionary processes and the experiences of May 1968, as well as forms of production of subjectivity in the neoliberal scenario of the 1980s. Different tools for practical reflection take place (...) in this dialogue, from the collective listening that David Cooper developed on the outskirts of Paris, Guattari's seminars at his home or the visits to the La Borde clinic, Guattari's trip to Chile and the publication of the books Cartografías del deseo and El devenir de la subjetividad in Chile. Finally, the experience of the Daily Life Clinic currently being developed by Miguel D. in Geneva is addressed as part of a process of subjective ecosophic creation. (shrink)

It may not occur to a modern reader of the Poetics to think that Aristotle is drawing contrasts between poetry and oratory. But there is one aspect of tragedy which must have forced him to think of a contrast with oratory, especially forensic oratory, even though he seems to make no special effort to draw it to the reader's attention. This is the matter of characterization. He does not believe that it is the purpose of tragedy to (...) illustrate character; he says that action, not ethical quality, is the of tragedy, that action and plot are what matter most and that action is not subordinate to character-representation. (shrink)

This study discusses the paradigm shift that has occurred in public speaking practice in the first two decades of the 21st century, conceptualised under the term ‘the New Oratory’. The New Oratory is a product of the digital revolution in that it brings together formats that are typically relayed via videos uploaded to the Internet, and serves as a vector of the new, digital economy. Drawing on previous critical work linking language and discourse to what is referred to (...) as the new economy, late or new capitalism or neoliberalism, the study focuses on two aspects of discourse practice that can be explained due to developments within the current economic climate: the entrepreneurial speaker ethos that is embodied by the start-up generation of entrepreneurs, finds a resonance in Anglo communication culture and is closely linked to the neoliberal emphasis on branding; the model of horizontal knowledge or information-sharing, whereby a move from specialist to non-specialist target audiences is shifting the frontiers of discourse communities and leading to their reorganisation. These two phenomena are illustrated via examples taken from two formats: the investor pitch and the three-minute-thesis presentation. The first belongs to the corporate sector, the second to academia. The study highlights the neoliberal forces at work outside the corporate sector per se which have come to influence most spheres of professional, social and personal lives, as well as the way these forces are ultimately being promoted by the emergence of a new, fairly homogeneous discursive setup. (shrink)

"Gagarin demonstrates persuasively that Antiphon the logographer is identical with the Antiphon who made intellectual contributions on more abstract topics." —Mervin R. Dilts, Professor of Classics, New York University Antiphon was a fifth-century Athenian intellectual (ca. 480-411 BCE) who created the profession of speechwriting while serving as an influential and highly sought-out adviser to litigants in the Athenian courts. Three of his speeches are preserved, together with three sets of Tetralogies (four hypothetical paired speeches), whose authenticity is sometimes doubted. Fragments (...) also survive of intellectual treatises on subjects including justice, law, and nature (physis), which are often attributed to a separate Antiphon the Sophist. Were these two Antiphons really one and the same individual, endowed with a wide-ranging mind ready to tackle most of the diverse intellectual interests of his day? Through an analysis of all these writings, this book convincingly argues that they were composed by a single individual, Antiphon the Athenian. Michael Gagarin sets close readings of individual works within a wider discussion of the fifth-century Athenian intellectual climate and the philosophical ferment known as the sophistic movement. This enables him to demonstrate the overall coherence of Antiphon's interests and writings and to show how he was a pivotal figure between the sophists and the Attic orators of the fourth century. In addition, Gagarin's argument allows us to reassess the work of the sophists as a whole, so that they can now be seen as primarily interested in logos (speech, argument) and as precursors of fourth-century rhetoric, rather than in their usual role as foils for Plato. (shrink)

The playful manipulation of ritual, literary, and legal elements marks the Festival of Laughter in Book 3 of the Metamorphoses (1–11) as one of the most innovative episodes of Apuleius’ novel. This article examines the rhetorical and judicial strategy adopted by the prosecutor and the defendant in the mock-trial. It also argues that Lucius’ defense speech is modeled on Cicero’s Pro Milone. By revitalizing the portrait of Cicero acting in defense of Milo, the learned novelist devises a new, amusing form (...) of entertainment, increasing the fictionality of the oratorical-theatrical performance and making Lucius-Cicero producer, performer, and victim of the collective hoax. (shrink)

We contest two claims: (1) that language, understood as the processing of abstract symbolic forms, is an instrument of cognition and rational thought, and (2) that conventional notions of turn-taking, exchange structure, and move analysis, are satisfactory as a basis for theorizing communication between living, feeling agents. We offer an enkinaesthetic theory describing the reciprocal affective neuro-muscular dynamical flows and tensions of co- agential dialogical sense-making relations. This “enkinaesthetic dialogue” is characterised by a preconceptual experientially recursive temporal dynamics forming the (...) deep extended melodies of relationships in time. An understanding of how those relationships work, when we understand and are ourselves understood, when communication falters and conflict arises, will depend on a grasp of our enkinaesthetic intersubjectivity. (shrink)

This paper develops a media theoretical extension of the communicative view on corporate social responsibility by elaborating on the characteristics of network societies, arguing that new media increase the speed and connectivity, and lead to higher plurality and the potential polarization of reality constructions. We discuss the implications for corporate social responsibility of becoming more polyphonic and sketch the contours of “communicative legitimacy.” Finally, we present this special issue and develop some questions for future research.

Dans cet article, nous présentons une étude de faisabilité sur l’annotation des passages entre guillemets, phénomènes linguistiques polyphoniques qui résistent souvent à une lecture univoque et à un schéma d’annotation simplificateur. La faisabilité de l’annotation a été testée à travers une étude inter-annotateurs qui a montré, avec un accord pour 80% des annotations effectuées, que des valeurs stables (dénomination, citation, autonymie, commentaires modalisants) pouvaient être postulées. Les cas de désaccord, en partie inévitables face à la complexité du phénomène, peuvent être (...) en partie réduits par un repérage systématique des marques formelles (marques typo-dispositionnelles, éléments du lexique et formules syntaxiques) et un inventaire détaillé des contextes d’emploi pour chaque valeur. Certaines valeurs demeurant ambiguës, il convient toutefois de prévoir dans l’annotation des cas de cumul de valeurs (le passage entre guillemets cumule plusieurs valeurs compatibles) ou d’ambiguïtés (plusieurs interprétations différentes sont possibles) en cas de désaccord des annotateurs. (shrink)

In this book, Andreas Serafim sets out to investigate the use of religious discourse, by which he means any reference to religious ideas, beliefs, and attitudes in public speaking contexts in classical Athens. Like Gunther Martin (Divine Talk: Religious Argumentation in Demosthenes, 2009), Serafim examines religion primarily as a tool for persuasion, but he differentiates himself from Martin’s book by offering a more comprehensive study: he aims to take into account all extant speeches from t...

Proposing his conception of narrative identity in Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur holds that human life is comprehensible, once the story of a man’s life has actually been told, and it is the narrative of one’s life which constructs one’s identity. Developing his theory of heteroglossia and the polyphony of human speech, explicated chiefly in Speech Genres and The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin recognizes the intrinsically intertwining character of utterance and response. According to him, utterance is always addressed to (...) someone and antedates an answer. Bakhtin’s “addressivity,” as well as his view of discourse as fundamentally dialogic, are convergent with Ricoeur’s elucidation both of man’s answerability to the Other and of narrative identity. The dynamic character of narrative identity, as construed by Ricoeur, converges with the dynamic nature of language as viewed by Bakhtin. The aim of this article is to study the intersections of Ricoeur’s narrative theory and Bakhtin’s recognition of the polyphonic nature of speech. I view these as inherently interrelated, and as testifying, respectively, to the philosophical and linguistic aspects of one and the same phenomenological vision. That vision accounts for selfhood, understood as vulnerable and contextualized, while also recognizing that it is conveyed by means of language with its essentially dialogic openness. (shrink)

This paper affords a critical and historical reappraisal of Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony. It addresses the issue of the subjectivity of interpretation in the reception and formulation of this highly influential theory in literary semiotics. Following a revaluation of three major patterns of interpretation of polyphony that have emerged in the global field of literary theory since 1929, as well as Bakhtin’s shift in emphasis in 1963, we find that Bakhtin’s theorizing of polyphony, based on his seemingly (...) inconsistent interpretation of Dostoevsky’s novels, was defined by his own subjectivity as well. An obvious consequence of such subjective predispositions in both the reception of Bakhtin’s theory and his own treatment of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novels is that they have instigated a type of perpetuating availability bias in approaching the theory of polyphony. This revelation is key to understanding the wholeness of the theory of polyphony from a diachronic perspective. By tracing the cultural and intellectual sources of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic creation, this paper attempts to reframe and restore the Bakhtinian idea of polyphony to its fullness, which we believe can be encapsulated in one phrase: harmony without uniformity. (shrink)

Oratory is an art based on words. Therefore, it can be said that rhetoric exists along with the history of humanity. The art of oratory is one of the most important tools used by genius personalities who influence people with their ideas in the world, while conveying their messages. Oratory develops more in nations where freedom of opinion exists. In places where there is freedom of thought, people convey their messages directly to their addressees without any worries. (...) When the Prophet Muhammad was appointed as a prophet, he aimed to explain the orders he received from Allah to people in a simple and understandable way. Although the environment he lived in was not composed of people who tolerated freedom of thought, In order to achieve his goal, the Prophet went to the direction of conveying the divine message to people by using the means at hand and the art of oratory with great skill. Hz. Each speech that the Prophet made while explaining the religion of Islam to people is called a sermon, and each of these sermons is like a text with high literary value. One of the sermons he delivered in a place where large groups of people were present is his speech, which is known as the Farewell Sermon and has a high literary value. In this study, the said sermon was analyzed in the context of oratory technique. The study consists of an introduction and two parts. In the introduction, the history of oratory was briefly mentioned, in the first part, the oratory technique was discussed in terms of theory, and in the second part, After briefly mentioning the prophet's oratorical aspect, an analysis of how he performed this feature in the Farewell Sermon was made. While doing our work in this field, ancient sources written in the field of Arabic literature and works written on the subject in the modern period were used. (shrink)

Newman’s explicit presentation of the ideal type, “the gentleman,” appears first and foremost in his Oratory papers of 1847 and 1848, and appears only secondarily, and then but partially, four and five years later in his Dublin Discourses of 1852. This essay traces lines of similarity and of difference between these successive portraits and distinguishes both from the attractive, better-known sketch Newman presents as Lord Shaftesbury’s, the “beau ideal” of the man of the world.