The rhetoric toAlexander is a curious text. The author? Controversial. The date of composition? Uncertain. Its purpose? Traditionally regarded as a handbook of rhetoric, the term rhētorikē does not appear except in an obviously forged prefatory letter. Although the text seems intended as a teaching aid to aspiring public advocates, the disciplinary status of pedagogical practices for the teaching of logos in the fourth century bce is a matter of some contention.

Kennedy (1999) argues that there are three strands of classical rhetorical theory that can be dated back to the fifth and fourth centuries bce: technical, sophistic, and philosophical rhetoric. Although Kennedy's schematization is problematic when applied to the fifth century (Schiappa 1999), it remains generally accepted (Mirhady 2007, 3). Most scholars would agree that, by the mid-fourth century, Aristotle's Rhetoric represented one approach to rhetoric and Isocrates' logōn technē another, and that historically these two approaches are often dubbed (fairly or not) philosophical versus sophistic. According to Aristotle's account, there was also a strong technical tradition at this time represented by assorted rhetorical technai, although none of these survive – with the possible exception of the Rhetoric to Alexander itself.

But where does the Rhetoric to Alexander fit in? We suggest that it is possible to classify the Rhetoric to Alexander in relevant respects as Aristotelian, sophistic, and technical, although a superior interpretive strategy might be to abandon such nomenclature altogether.

Terms of art can emerge within a given language community in one of three ways. First, a common term can be given a more specialized use, such as in the case of dialegesthai. Second, a familiar term can be stretched metaphorically to apply to an unfamiliar context, thus we find early attempts to describe what we now call “definition” with terms for dividing or taking apart (diaireō), separating, or setting a border or boundaries (diorizō, horizō). Third, of course, a new term can be introduced through a neologism. As observed previously, Plato introduced many terms by adding an -ikos or -ikē suffix to denote a person who possesses a particular skill (e.g., dialektikos) or to delineate a discrete art (e.g., hē dialektikē). As these examples demonstrate, the addition of a definite article and/or certain suffixes can change a verb to a noun or adjective, which is another route toward advancing the richness of a specialized vocabulary.

In this chapter, we are interested in the emergence of the Greek word philosophia – literally love of knowledge or wisdom – as a term of art in Isocrates. The verb philosopheō (“philosophize” or “pursue knowledge”) appears in Herodotus (1.30.2) to describe Solon as one who traveled to “cultivate knowledge” (philosophoumen), as well as in Thucydides' re-creation of Pericles' funeral oration, in which he claims that Athens “cultivates wisdom without effeminacy” (philosophoumen aneu malakias) (2.40.1).

The scholarly examination of the origins of rhetorical theory in ancient Greece continues to surge into the twenty-first century, as witnessed by the increasing presence of articles in academic journals, book-length manuscripts, and encyclopedias and dictionaries devoted to ancient rhetoric (Schiappa and Hamm, 2007). In addition to a series of modest historical interventions that will be of interest to classical rhetoric scholars, this book also makes what can be described as a methodological intervention by stressing and illustrating the importance of terms of art. Such a turn is “old school” in the sense that it marked a return to the methods of classical philology, and it is novel in the sense that old questions received fresh answers and are reframed, and, in some cases, we are led to ask entirely new questions. In each case, it is hoped that the focus on terms of art has been shown to have significant value. Although we find ourselves wanting to celebrate a variety of scholarly approaches to the study of ancient rhetoric, we believe that a focus on the evolving technical vocabulary in the texts themselves is an indispensable component of the scholarly project of understanding the origins of Greek rhetorical theory.

For example, one “old” question that we have answered in a new way concerns when the parts of a speech oration (e.g., introduction, conclusion, narration) became systematized.

We move now to a particular example of the disciplining of discourse through the refinement of a term of art. Specifically, we are interested in Plato, dialogue, and the term “dialectic.” Our intention is to describe Plato's adaptation of a term of art for his own purposes. Therefore, this chapter investigates the late fifth-century “sophistic” practice of holding dialogue and charts the subsequent disciplining of dialegesthai as a practice of philosophical dialogue in the works of Plato.

The definitions of key terms are straightforward, hē dialektikē is “the art of dialogue,” or simply “dialectic,” and dialegesthai is typically translated as “to converse,” “to dialogue,” or “holding dialogue.” Dialegesthai represents the present middle infinitive form of the verb dialegō; however, like the verb dialegomai, dialegesthai is a deponent of dialegō, thus dialegesthai is typically translated in the active voice.

We can find the verb dielexato, “hold converse,” as early as Homer's Iliad. In this work, the verb always appears as part of an identical formula, alla ti hē moi tauta philos dielexato thumos, translated by A. T. Murray (1924) as “But why doth my heart thus hold converse with me?” (11.407, 17.97, 21.562, 22.122, 22.385). Similarly, the earliest preserved use of dialegesthai in prose refers to informal conversation or discussion. Herodotus describes how Lycophron would not “converse with” (dialegomenôi) his mother's murderer (3.50.3).

We contend that the history of Greek rhetorical theory can be enhanced by paying attention to the emergence of terms of art in texts about persuasive speaking and argument. In this introduction, we describe what we mean by “terms of art” and provide a theoretical and historical rationale for our project. We conclude the chapter by explaining the way the subsequent chapters develop this rationale through the examination of specific terms of art.

By “terms of art,” we mean simply any words or phrases that take on reasonably specialized denotative functions within a particular language community. Such terms are typically known in linguistics and philosophy as “kind terms”; not “natural” kind terms denoting physical, chemical, or biological objects, but what Nelson Goodman (1978) calls “relevant” kinds that sort the things of our world into categories in order to meet particular needs and interests. Terms of art can categorize at various levels of scope. They may be as broad as Aristotle's notion of style or expression (lexis), subsets of composition style such as lexis eiromenē and lexis katestrammenē, or terms that describe specific stylistic qualities such as akribeia or precision (O'Sullivan 1992; Halliwell 1993).

As domains of human activity evolve and grow more sophisticated, the vocabulary used by practitioners of these domains becomes more specialized and technical. Regardless of whether explicitly defined by members of a language community, terms of art can be understood as performing a constitutive role within that community that can be formulated as a shared rule: X counts as Y in context C (Schiappa 2003a).

This chapter examines the characterization of public deliberation in Athens in fifth- and fourth-century texts. More specifically, we describe how such characterizations, which do not initially involve the use of a technical vocabulary, do so in the writings of Aristotle, particularly in the Rhetoric. That is, although various terms are employed broadly to refer to these activities in pre-Aristotelian authors in discussion of types of public discourse, the vocabulary becomes focused and fixed, and thus become terms of art, in Aristotle. In his use of these terms, in particular dēmēgoria and symboulē and their cognates, Aristotle gives shape to deliberative oratory, describing its characteristics, fashioning its boundaries, and laying out the purposes and values it is to pursue. To see these terms of art in operation most clearly, we begin with a description of democratic practice in Athens. And in describing this democratic practice, we seek a balanced description of Athenian democracy, as well as a map of the specific institutions associated with it.

Those who study the practice of political deliberation in classical Athens are often left with a feeling of ambivalence. On the one hand, there is much that seems worthy of praise, and much that we might want to promote, even today, in terms of democratic deliberation. For example, the meetings of the citizen body occurred regularly and the Assembly meetings, in particular, included a significant percentage of the Athenian citizenry.

The study of the ancient Greek sophists, rhetorical theory, and American pragmatism has enjoyed a renaissance in the twentieth century, especially in the past few decades. That all three areas of inquiry have become the “cutting edge” of various disciplines is no mere coincidence. A profound dissatisfaction with both the transcendental metaphysics of Plato and the brute empiricism of Positivism has rekindled interest in alternative perspectives. For reasons that this volume will make apparent, the ideas and interests associated with the sophists, rhetorical theory, and American pragmatism combine and interact in provocative ways. No doubt the charting of the precise points of intersection of these ideas and interests will vary from thinker to thinker, but for me the sentence that encapsulates all three contemporary “turns” is the following by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know.”

The earliest articulation of the sentiment reflected in Emerson's comment can be found in the works of Isocrates. My objective in this essay is to provide a reading of Isocrates that attempts to locate him as one of the first philosophers in Western history to address the central concerns that we now identify with pragmatism. The essay is divided into four parts: in the first, I argue that Isocrates ought to be viewed as a part of the history of philosophy as much as he has been viewed a part of the history of rhetoric.