The Birth of Renaissance Paradox from the Spirit of Dialectics

• In Event: The Varieties of Rhetorical Experience: Ancient and Early Modern

Abstract

Students of rhetoric have, for a long time, sought to determine the precise place of paradoxes, whose popularity in the Renaissance and beyond was felicitously termed "paradoxia epidemica" by Rosalie Colie, in the in the rhetorical system. Since a certain self-contradictory and thus a-logical quality has been held to be at the core of the notion (and by extension, the genre), it used to be conceived of as a being related to figures of speech such as oxymoron, antithesis, or ambiguity. In this paper I will show how the phenomenal rise of the early modern paradox goes hand in hand with a reconfiguration of dialectics, and in particular with a terminological renewal in the wake of the retranslation of the Aristotelian Organon. The discussion will focus on both scholastic and humanist dialectical textbooks, including texts by Petrus Hispanus, Agostino Nifo, and Johannes Eck.

Author

• Anita Traninger, Freie Universität Berlin