New Rhetoric's Empire: Pragmatim, Dogmatism and Sphism

There are at least two reasons to devote some attention to sophism when dealing with the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric in the context of Franco-American intellectual exchanges. The first reason is that it lies at the very origin of classical philosophy which could be described as resulting directly from the way in which Plato and Aristotle succeeded in separating the realm of rhetoric from the realm of philosophy. The second reason arises out of the way in which Durkheim, the founder of French academic sociology, thought it necessary to establish a clear distinction between sociology and pragmatism. This was done in a course given at the Sorbonne during the academic year 1913-14. The course could be considered a direct answer to the lectures on pragmatism given by William James at the Lowell Institute in Boston in 1906-7 (Durkheim 1955). From the very beginning of his talk, Durkheim expresses an extremely ambivalent point of view. On the one hand, pragmatism, better than any other doctrine,...