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In Our Time
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PROGRAMME INFO |
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The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |
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PRESENTER |
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BIOGRAPHY
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| "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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RHETORIC
Read audience reactions to this edition of In Our Time.
Gorgias, the great sophist philosopher and master of rhetoric said, "Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplished most godlike works. It can banish fear and remove grief, and instil pleasure and enhance pity. Divine sweetness transmitted through words is inductive of pleasure and reductive of pain". But for Plato it was a vice, and those like Gorgias who taught rhetoric were teaching the skills of lying in return for money and were a great danger. He warned "this device - be it which it may, art or mere artless empirical knack - must not, if we can help it, strike root in our society".
But strike root it did, and there is a rich tradition of philosophers and theologians who have attempted to make sense of it.
How did the art of rhetoric develop? What part has it played in philosophy and literature? And does it still deserve the health warning applied so unambiguously by Plato?
Contributors
Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick
Thomas Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London
Ceri Sullivan, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Bangor
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