Can Bad Men be Good Rhetoricians? | The Four, Ep. 20
Do words merely express our thoughts, or do they shape them?
Drawing connections between rhetoric, poetry, and modern public discourse, Devin, Heather, and Kajsa are joined by Joe Carlson to discuss how words are not simply containers for ideas — they help to form the ideas themselves. If this is true, what happens when a culture loses its sensitivity to language?
Four questions covered in this episode:
Is it more important to teach students philosophy or poetry?
How important is the invention step of rhetoric to be free from the tools of AI?
Was Hitler a good rhetorician?
Did Christianity adopt and modify classical rhetoric or did classical rhetoric distort “Christian rhetoric” (as Cassiodorus claims)?
Let us know your thoughts!