Forum on Arthur Walzer's “Parrēsia, Foucault, and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition”

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Notes

¹Thanks to the Rhetoric Reading Group at UCI for many intense and lively discussions of these subjects. Ellen Quandahl and Alexia Risso have been especially helpful in conversations about Foucault, rhetoric, parrēsia, and ways of reading.

²Samuel IJsseling's chapter on Kant in his 1976 Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff) is still an excellent treatment of this material.

³According to Frederic Gros, the six Berkeley lectures “pick out quite succinctly what was developed more fully from January to March” (GSO, “Course Context” 386).

⁴Examples include Barbara Biesecker; Diane Davis; Joshua Gunn; Christian Lundberg; John Muckelbauer; Thomas Rickert; Bradford Vivian.

⁵Thanks to graduate students (Shelby Bell, Matt Boost, Heather Hayes, Dan Horvath, Kaitlyn Patia, Allison Prasch, Shannon Stevens) and faculty (Tim Behme, Annie Hill, Meg Kunde, and Mark Pedelty) in Communication Studies who attended two discussions sessions on my essay and this response.

⁶Scholars estimate the date of the Phaedrus as between 375–365 BCE, that is, some eleven to twenty-one years after the Gorgias (ca. 386 BCE) and some twelve to twenty-two years before Epistle 7, which was composed shortly after Dion's death in 353.

⁷I do not mean to imply that this was the whole of Kant's judgment of rhetoric, only that Foucault likely had this sentence in mind.

⁸This suggestion is my colleague's, Tim Behme's. Behme has collected all the passages in the extant works of Greek orators in which the rhetor reproaches members of the assembly. He presented a paper drawing on this research at National Communication Association conference in 2010.