英语论文网

eat rhetoric. Think for example of some of the speeches in Shakespeare, one of the greatest being from Richard the Third (“Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer … “); the speech in which the usurper, the future Richard III, explains his plan to seize the throne, a speech which is wholly malign in intent, yet logically tight and rhetorically seductive.

Unfortunately, we (wrongly) tend to equate rhetoric with mere rhetoric, as if its presence signalled the weakness of the logic of the persuasive effort. The result is a regrettable tendency to favour blandness in academic writing, with some writers making conscious efforts to strip any rhetorical gestures from their endeavours, often because they anticipate (sad to say, often correctly) that such contributions will not be welcomed by the examiners or referees. In my experience the best academic literature in any of the disciplines with which I am familiar is also the best writing – but you are wise to be prudent and take a cautious approach to rhetoric when writing for examiners (unless I am one of them!)

The use of rhetoric is often condemned as sophistry. But the two are in no way to be equated. The word ‘sophistry’ derives ultimately from the Sophists, itinerant self-employed professors of higher education who emerged in the fifth century BC (and therefore among the thinkers classified as Pre-Socratics) and flourished in the wealthy Athens of the third century BC. They were not a school or a movement, but competing free market individuals you could hire to instruct you in the finer disciplines of life and learning. That is how they earned their living, many being exceptionally successful. Later they acquired a less savoury reputation, as ‘hired guns’ you could engage to argue anything you wanted argued – for a fee. (Today we call them lobbyists or barristers.) Their reputation (in many ways quite undeserved) was as people who cared not whether what they were engaged to argue was true or right, and cared not whether the logic they used was sound or unsound, provided that, so far as their intended audience was concerned, it looked sound. (This unsavoury reputation was inflated by the philosophers of the two great schools, the Academy founded by Plato and the Lyceum founded by his former pupil Aristotle. The motive appeared to have been commercial – to sully the reputation of the Sophists so that people would instead enrol in their respective schools.)

Whatever the real history, the English word “sophistry” came to mean the device of deliberately using an argument which you knew to be bad, and cloaking it in fine rhetoric so that the audience would not spot the hole in it. Are we ever justified in using an argument we know to be bad in order to persuade people of a conclusion we want them to accept? When Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was first released one eminent scientist was reported as saying, “A lot of the science in it is pretty bad but at least it will have the right effect.” Even God is supposed to occasionally use bad arguments to persuade people. In the 13th century the theologian and philosopher St Thomas Aquinas produced his celebrated Five Ways – five arguments he believed to be logically impeccable to demonstrate the existence of God. But he also noted some arguments which were in circulation but which he considered unsatisfactory. One was the Argument from Miracles. Now Aquinas contended that if you already had a compelling 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。