Knife Sales All the Way Down? Rhetoric, Philosophy, Branding

ABSTRACT

In the dialogue Gorgias, Plato invented “rhetoric”—the term, at least. This article interrogates what it means for rhetoric, and with it a very particular form of philosophy, to have come into language as solutions to a branding problem Plato faced. Alongside Edward Schiappa and Barbara Cassin, in their very different registers, the article examines how branding “rhetoric” functioned to drive Plato’s philosophy sales and what, today, it means for philosophers and rhetoricians to be each and alike Gorgias’s and Plato’s descendants. The article closes with a bet that such etymological investigations matter even, or especially, when our worlds are crumbling.