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Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Turning to Aristotle

By yesterday, June 5th, more people had read this blog than read it last June in an entire month. "Unbearable Stasis" definitely struck a chord, although given what a re-tread of themes it was from earlier critical pieces of mine, also definitely its attentional magnetism has to have been something of a fortuitous accident. Blogging is weird. I'm in the middle of my teaching week and so such thoughts are backburnered in any case. We turn today to Aristotle's Rhetoric. We're devoted two days to this text, interspersed with readings from his Topics and Poetics. Plato is enormous fun to read as literature, and my own personal Socrates (selectively constructed from Plato) is an enormously sympathetic figure, but I must admit a temperamental preference for Aristotle, whom I read as something of a sarcastically misanthropic proto-pragmatist with an idealist streak.

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