ABSTRACT
The previous chapter explored how rhetoric as an area of intellectual inquiry becomes conceptualized in the dialogues of Plato. Emphasized was the importance of naming as a political/rhetorical strategy in accentuating an area of “knowledge.” With this discussion, this text explored the fundamental tensions that exist between what contemporary scholars recognize as a rhetorical epistemology, and what Plato was developing as a philosophical ontology. The tensions between ontological and epistemological perspectives of knowledge, and their relationship to communication and politics become, after Plato, generative of much cultural conflict and development. As a way to develop this point, the following two sections discuss some of these issues. The first section, “Foucault, Knowledge, and Language,” offers a contemporary view of these problems that Plato posed, and the second further emphasizes the political salience of these issues. This leads back to the question of incommensurability, and segues into our discussion of Aristotle.
