Michael Leff, professor of communication at the University of Memphis, will give a lecture at Hamilton College, "Out of the Cave: Isocrates, Tradition, and Humanistic Rhetoric," on Tuesday, Oct. 21, from 4:15-5:15 p.m. in the Physics Auditorium of the Science building. His talk is sponsored by the department of rhetoric and communication and is free and open to the public.
Ancient Athens had competing schools. We've all heard of Plato's Academy. One of Plato's more popular rivals was Isocrates—a teacher who grounded his philosophy in the world of human affairs and aligned it with his "art of discourse." Isocrates offered a Pan-Hellenic program of education driven by an interest in habituating its students to models of cultural and oratorical excellence—models rich in substance exemplifying their authors' practical wisdom and artfulness as speakers. Isocrates' celebration of Pan-Hellenism and his down-to-earth approach to life and learning contrasted with Plato's program of deriving educational ideals and ideas of art from the soul's memories of its prior disembodied apprehension of unmediated Truth. Plato, in his famous dialogues, uses Socrates to model the educational process of the soul's recollection as it is prompted by the critical-dialectical engagement of his contemporaries' common-sense opinions.
Leff's presentation will focus on Isocrates' philosophy and teaching—how Isocrates makes clear (1) the inventive power of tradition and (2) the centrality of that power within humanistic conceptions of rhetoric.
Before his appointment to the University of Memphis, Leff held positions at Northwestern University, Indiana University, the University of California at Davis, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Iowa, where he was A. Craig Baird Distinguished Visiting Professor. He is the former editor of Rhetorica, The Journal of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (1988-1993), and he is currently on the editorial board of Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, POROI, An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetoric, and The Western Journal of Communication.
Leff's main areas of research are the history of rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, and argumentation. He has published more than fifty articles and book chapters, and his papers have appeared in such journals as Argumentation, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Monographs, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and Rhetorica. His most recent book, co-authored with Robert Terrill and James Andrews, is Reading Rhetorical Texts: An Introduction to Criticism. He is currently working on a book-length study of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.
