Hello everybody! I am new to the Rhetoric and Composition program here at Georgia State University, but I am from the upper-metro Atlanta area. I gained my bachelor's degree in English (with a minor in Creative Writing) from Brenau University in May of 2022, and I have been a Writing Center tutor with Brenau since the fall of 2020. I also tutored English at Lanier Technical College during my gap year, and I got the opportunity to teach English 1010: Fundamentals of English I this past summer. This only fueled my passion for teaching at the collegiate level. As indicated by my minor, I am also passionate about the creative word, and one of my other goals is to publish a novel or a collection of my poems (hopefully sooner rather than later).

Sophisticated Skepticism

Modern rhetoric can be traced to the Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides in his piece “On Nature”, even though it does not contain sophisticated skepticism, because of his attempt to inhabit an objective view on the existent and non-existent through his persuasive techniques and control of language, which both are displayed in the quotation, “Here I stop my trustworthy speech to you and thought about Objective Truth. From here on, learn the subjective beliefs of mortals; listen to the deceptive ordering of my words” (8d). Practical rhetoric began through one of the first historians, Thucydides, as exhibited in his work, “Pericles’ Funeral Oration”, but contrarily, sophist rhetoric was formulated in Athens, Greece by thinkers like Gorgias and Protagoras, and through their speeches/writings, these men practiced the agnostic, humanist, and argumentative style of pursuing and spreading knowledge and skepticism. However, this way of thinking challenged the current hierarchical order in society, the oligarchic structure of the government, and the polytheistic religion by bringing forth questions of reality, and even other thinkers like Plato contested the sophists because of their utilization on inference and indirective techniques, while Plato seemingly valued the pursuit of the truth through dialectics, as displayed in his work "Gorgias". Understanding the roots of these concepts can help current politicians create stronger arguments, and I believe "The Tetralogies" by (the) Antiphon(s) is the most useful in the modern day as it brings forth counter arguments and layers of rebuttal for both sides. Today, more than ever, public figures should be willing for open conversations where their stances may shift with engaged listening tactics and perceptiveness, but these politicians should also practice the control exhibited by sophists and the desire for objective truth in dialectical thought, so a balance should be desired if basing today’s world sphere on these primary routes of rhetoric.

*Note, some of these works should be italicized, but it seemed to remove the italics when I copy and pasted into this window, so I simply used quotation marks for clarity's sake.

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