:Necessity by Design
the Mathematics of Rhetoric
in Middle Byzantine Culture
Research project funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung
A Rhetoric for the Empire: Education, Politics, and Speech-Making in the Byzantine Millennium
Research project funded by
The Carlsberg Foundation
Necessity By Design
The project explores the conceptual and visual links between mathematical/geometrical reasoning and rhetoric in the middle Byzantine period (843-1204). It looks at how graphic and discursive practices associated to mathematics and geometry contributed to reinforce the epistemic status of rhetoric among the elites of the empire. It contributes to pre-modern intellectual history and complements recent developments in ancient and early modern history of mathematics by providing access to new manuscript material (texts, diagrams, graphs) from a historical period and a geographical area usually disregarded in these fields of enquiry.
A Rhetoric for the Empire
Rhetoric and politics, rhetoric and ethics, rhetoric, and truth: since ancient Greece the difficult relationship between these concepts has kept many a thinker busy. Including the Byzantine. “A rhetoric for the empire” explores how the Greek Middle Ages (527-1453) creatively navigated these notions by engaging with a corpus of rhetorical treatises bequeathed under the name of Hermogenes (2nd-3rd c. CE).
“Further, because the rhetor is not alone in having what is persuasive (to pithanon), but also both medicine and geometry have it, for even the demonstrations (apodeixeis) ought not to be presented in a non persuasive way but must be persuasive.”
Rhetorica anonyma, 11th c. (?), vol. 14, p. 31 Rabe
Contacts
University of Southern Denmark
Campusvej 55, 5230
Odense M DK
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NeccessitybyDesign