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Michel Meyer's Philosophical Rhetoric

PARK, Tchi Wan 1

1한국외국어대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Whenever ideology deconstructs, rhetoric emerges. Many philosophers who have traditional backgrounds treat rhetoric as an art of speaking. They often discuss demonstration, persuasion, philosophical writing, etc., together with postmodernism and poststructuralism that challenge "reason", "universality", "certainty" as the ideology of modernity. This situation means for us to make a search for something else than the ideology of modernity. This is the reason why we look into Michel Meyer's theory in this article. Meyer calls his new rhetoric problematology. The core of this method is the interpretation of the history of philosophy by the process of questioning. In this process, Meyer requests a fundamental reflection about the langage of thought, and proposes a essential question about Logos that is not fixed by such and such answer and is proper to the language of thought. Following his suggestion, the essential question will be the idea that the self meets the other; the author meets the reader; and the speaker meets the hearer. All these could be essential to the matrix of rhetoric. And, the fact that the former exchanges questions with the latter is related with the concept that they can recognize and exchange the difference. In conclusion, the question and the difference are the key concepts of Meyer's problematology and rhetoric. It is remarkable that he puts the difference down the expression(exchange) of subjectivity of free individual despite the fact that the difference is undoubtedly a counter concept of identity and universality. According to him, when a difference as the universal right is respected, a true humanism is possible. So in this article, I try to analyse and show his problematological rhetoric with the point that his rhetoric substitutes an individual who freely expresses one's own subjectivity by language and the subject in relation to others for universal and absolute subjects in modern age.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.