Plato, Xenophon, and the Uneven Temporalities of Ethos in the Trial of Socrates
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Johns Hopkins University Press
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Authors of articles for all Pennsylvania State University Press journals except Pennsylvania History are permitted to post the peer-reviewed, pre-copyedited versions for “open access” on their own personal web sites or deposit them in the institutional repositories of the universities that employ them immediately on publication of the issue of the journal in which they appear, subject only to the condition that a link be provided to the final published electronic version at the web site of Project Muse
Abstract
Many rhetorical theories of ethos mark their relationship with time by focusing on two temporal poles: the timely ethos and the timeless ethos. But between these two temporal poles, ethos is also durative; it lingers, shifts, accumulates, and dissipates over time. Although scholarship often foregrounds the kairotic and static senses of ethos popularized in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, this article highlights how the chronic elements of ethos are no less important to rhetoric. By examining Xenophon’s and Plato’s representations of the trial of Socrates, this article contends that these com-peting views about the temporalities of ethos have a storied history that predates Aristotle’s writings. This analysis also expands received understandings of Plato’s contributions to rhetoric by illuminating how his view of ethos is deeply inter-twined with ongoing philosophical practice. The article concludes by arguing that rhetorical studies has much to gain by more closely attending to the cumulative aspects of ethos.
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Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2021, 54 (3), pp. 240 - 262 (23)