Abstract
The author examines Hegel's incorporation of the Sophists into the history of philosophy. The basic argument is that Hegel's history of the Sophists operates along tropological lines, the exact same lines that the truth claims of his philosophy oppose. Using the tropes of metaphor, metonymy and prolepsis, the author shows that when Hegel places the Sophists in the process of the teleological unfolding of reason he employs the very rhetorical mechanisms he denounces.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aristotle: 1954, The Rhetoric and The Poetics of Aristotle, Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater (trans.), The Modern Library, New York.
Cooper, Barry: 1984, The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
De Man, Paul: 1979, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn.
De Man, Paul: 1983, Blindness and Insight: Essaysin the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., rev., University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
De Man, Paul: 1984, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, Columbia University Press, New York.
De Man, Paul: 1986, The Resistance to Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Derrida, Jacques: 1982, Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass (trans.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Derrida, Jacques: 1986, Glas, John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (trans.), University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Gasche, Rodolphe: 1989, ‘In-Difference to Philosophy: De Man on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche’, in Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (eds.), Reading De Man Reading, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Hegel, Georg: 1956, The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree (trans.), Dover Publications, Inc., New York.
Hegel, Georg: 1975, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, H.B. Nisbet (trans.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Hegel, Georg: 1975, Aesthetics, T.M. Knox (trans.), Oxford University Press, London.
Hegel, Georg: 1984, Hegel's Lectures on The History of Philosophy, E.S. Haldane (trans.), The Humanities Press, New York.
Hegel, Georg: 1985, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, T.M. Knox and A.V. Miller (trans.), Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Jaeger, Werner: 1939, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Gilbert Highet (trans.), Oxford University Press, New York.
Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle: 1956, Fundamentals of Language, Mouton, The Hague.
Jakobson, Roman: 1973, ‘Two Aspects of Language: Metaphor and Metonymy’, in Vernon Gras (ed.), European Literary Theory and Practice, New York.
Kerferd, G.B.: 1981, The Sophistic Movement, Cambridge University Press, New York.
Lacan, Jacques: 1977, Ecrits: A Selection, Alan Sheridan (trans.), W.W. Norton and Company, New York.
O'Brien, George: 1975, Hegel on Reason and History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Perkins, Robert (ed.): 1984, History and System: Hegel's Philosophy of History, State University of New York Press, Albany.
Plato: 1964, Phaedrus, R. Hackforth (trans.), in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), The Collected Dialogues, Bollingen Foundation, New York.
Sidgwick, Henry: 1872, ‘The Sophists’, Journal of Philology 4, 288–306.
Siebert, Rudolf: 1978, Hegel's Philosophy of History, University Press of America, Washington, D.C.
Smith, John: 1988, The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of Bildung, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Whitson, S. On the misadventures of the sophists: Hegel's tropological appropriation of rhetoric. Argumentation 5, 187–200 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00054005
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00054005