Thomas Conley

The enthymeme in perspective

A close examination of the meanings of “enthymeme” in Ancient and Byzantine rhetoric shows that the term was far from unambiguous. A survey of its various meanings provides some clues as to how rhetorical theory, as it was and as it is today, might be cast in a different light.

The classical tradition in rhetoric: Three views of George A. Kennedy's synthesis

CLASSICAL RHETORIC AND ITS CHRISTIAN AND SECULAR TRADITION FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN TIMES. By George A. Kennedy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980; pp. xii+291.

Greek Rhetorics After the Fall of Constantinople: An Introduction

18.00

The virtues of controversy: In memoriam R. P. Mckeon

Abstract: This short paper will sketch the twilight years of Greek rhetorics, roughly from 1500 until just after the Greek War of Independence. This is an area that, like much else in neo-Greek intellectual history, has been sadly ignored in “Western” scholarship. Greek scholars played an important part in the reception of the works of Hermogenes, Longinus, and pseudo-Demetrius in the mid- and late-sixteenth century. But other Greek teachers and scholars at the College of St. Athanasius in Rome, at the University of Padua, at the Flanginian Academy in Venice, and at schools in Bucharest, Jannina, and Constantinople itself continued to add to those traditions with numerous school texts, homiletic handbooks, and some interesting philosophical treatments of rhetoric. Their names (Korydaleus, Skoufos, Mavrokordates, Damodos, and many others) are unknown to most students of the history of rhetoric—a situation this paper will try in its small way to change.

Aristotle's Rhetoric in Byzantium

If the late Richard McKeon should be remembered for anything, it is his persistent argument urging the assimilation of philosophical inquiry to Ciceronian controversia and his celebration of the virtues of controversy.