COM 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Isocrates, Techne, Quintilian

• School: Cal Poly Pomona
• Department: Communication
• Course: COM 100
• Professor: Andrea Smith

Document Summary

Sophists are itinerant teachers who traveled from city -state to city state in classical greece, training people in public speaking. One of the more notable sophists was gorgias, who understood the relationship of speaker and audience as linear. He believed audiences were passive and could be moved by elaborate and (cid:862)(cid:373)agi(cid:272)al(cid:863) la(cid:374)guage that (cid:272)aptured their atte(cid:374)tio(cid:374). For gorgias, the power of persuasion lay in style and the construction of creative linguistic phrases. Protagoras, another sophist, taught a different understanding of rhetoric and public speaking to his students. For protagoras, anything and everything could be argued. Isocrates shared several of the views held by sophists; however, unlike the sophists, he was an. The one constraint to good speeches isocrates recognized was kairos, or timing and recognition of the needs of the occasion. Plato believed instead that education should focus on philosophy, or the search for truth, rather than persuasion, so that people could determine true knowledge.