Sophistical Practice - by Barbara Cassin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Sophistics is the paradigm of a discourse that does things with words. It is not pure rhetoric, as Plato wants us to believe, but it provides an alternative to the philosophical mainstream. A sophistic history of philosophy questions the orthodox philosophical history of philosophy: that of ontology and truth in itself.

In this book, we discover unusual Presocratics, wreaking havoc with the fetish of true and false. Their logoi perform politics and perform reality. Their sophistic practice can shed crucial light on contemporary events, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where, to quote Desmond Tutu, "words,
language, and rhetoric do things," creating things like the new "rainbow people." Transitional justice requires a consistent and sustainable relativism: not Truth, but truth for, and enough of the truth for there to be a community.

Philosophy itself is about words before it is about concepts. Language manifests itself in reality only as multiplicity; different languages perform different types of worlds; and difficulties of translation are but symptoms of these differences. This desacralized untranslatability undermines and deconstructs the Heideggerian statement that there is a historical language of philosophy that is Greek by essence (being the only language able to say what "is") and today is German.

Sophistical Practice constitutes a major contribution to the debate among philosophical pluralism, unitarism, and pragmatism. It will change how we discuss such words as city, truth, and politics. Philologically and philosophically rethinking the sophistical gesture, relying on performance and translation, it proposes a new
paradigm for the human sciences.

Review Quotes

. . . the publication of this anthology represents a major event in continental thought: a summa of Cassin's multifaceted philosophical project to date.---Paul Earlie, --Radical Philosophy

To think with Barbara Cassin is a pleasure and a privilege. English
readers will be grateful to Fordham University Press for making
Cassin's work in classics and philosophy available to them finally.
Her unique readings, combining ancient texts and contemporary theory,
breathe new life into everything they touch.

-----Bonnie Honig, Brown University

Nietzsche considered that Socrates mischaracterized the Sophists and exiled them out of the Logos, making their art the other of philosophy, of what became the Platonic-Aristotelian orthodoxy in the history of western thought. Barbara Cassin's Sophistical Practice undertakes the Nietzschean task of reappraising the Sophists' enterprise and the lessons that their "other" conception of the Logos has for us, today: about the long suppressed feminine buried under the orthodox history of philosophy, about language and translation, about the meaning of a transitional justice (of the kind illustrated by post-apartheid South Africa) that demands not the absolute Platonic truth-in-itself but the sophistical "enough-truth-for" restoring communities fractured by hate and strife and giving them the sense of a future. This is a superb work of classical erudition at the service of the reflection on contemporary issues.-----Soulemane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University

About the Author

Barbara Cassin is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She is the editor of Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (forthcoming).