Abstract

As part of current scholarly efforts to re-evaluate Greek Sophistics, this study proposes to re-examine the Sophists from the structural and linguistic perspectives afforded by the ancient and modern critical discourses of rhetoric and semiotics. The purpose of such a rhetorico-semiotic method of investigation is to identify and examine the basic assumptions and structures in language that made possible and formed a Sophistic conceptuality fundamentally different from the philosophical conceptuality, also shaped by basic assumptions and structures in language. Without considering such fundamental questions of language, one risks misrepresenting, if not undermining, the very object of investigation. This study is developed primarily by contrasting significant parts of Aristotle's and Gorgias' reconstructed conceptions of language. Following an overview of theoretical perspectives, this study examines: the rhetorico-semiotic contest of ancient Greek discourse by investigating the development of literacy and its rhetorical and semiotic influence upon the concept of the sign in Homer, Plato, and Gorgias; Aristotle's logico-representational theory of language as exhibited in his concepts of signification and predication and their relation to his categorial ontology and metaphysics of substance; Gorgias' rhetorico-semiotic concept of language in relation to his anti-metaphysics, agnosticism, and discourses on logos. The first sub-study argues that Plato's projection of metaphor into the conceptual structure of the sign displaces an opposed metonymic prediction by Gorgias. Plato's philosophic discourse thus supersedes the oral discourse of Homer as its literate, legitimate replacement. The second sub-study deconstructs Aristotle's metaphysics of substance by suggesting that Aristotle's concept of substance is an effect or the hypostatization of the linguistic structure of predication, the result of the tacit influence his concept of signification exerts upon his concept of predication. The third sub-study argues that the Gorgianic conception of language set forth in the Helen and On Not-Being or On Nature is informed by a rhetorico-semiotic conception of language--revealed primarily in the work's oppositional structuring and logic and in the tacit, but evident conceptual projection of metonymy into a theory of language in Gorgias' discourses on logos. The final chapter considers implications for modern rhetorical and critical theory