Philosophy & Rhetoric

abstract:

Philosophy consists primarily in or of texts. The implications of this very basic fact for the subject—both as a writer and as a reader—and philosophy's conception of itself as a privileged form of argumentation and for establishing the truth have, however, been largely neglected. In order to address these issues, the article reconsiders Foucault's "double reading" of Descartes's Meditations as "demonstration" and "exercise" that both affects and transforms the meditating subject. I argue that such a double reading is not only proper to the Meditations but constitutive of all philosophical texts. This leads to a revised notion of truth that derives its argumentative consistency precisely from the entanglement of demonstration and exercise.