한국   대만   중국   일본 
Polemic - Wikipedia Jump to content

Polemic

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the word. For the magazine, see Polemic (magazine) .

Part of a series on
Rhetoric
History
Concepts
Genres
Criticism
Rhetoricians
Works
Subfields
Related

Polemic ( / p ? ? l ? m ? k / ) is contentious rhetoric intended to support a specific position by forthright claims and to undermine the opposing position. The practice of such argumentation is called polemics , which are seen in arguments on controversial topics. A person who writes polemics, or speaks polemically, is called a polemicist . [1] The word derives from Ancient Greek πολεμικ?? ( polemikos )  'warlike, hostile', [1] [2] from π?λεμο? ( polemos )  'war'. [3]

Polemics often concern questions in religion or politics. A polemical style of writing was common in Ancient Greece , as in the writings of the historian Polybius . Polemic again became common in medieval and early modern times. Since then, famous polemicists have included satirist Jonathan Swift , Italian physicist and mathematician Galileo , French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire , Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy , socialist philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , novelist George Orwell , playwright George Bernard Shaw , communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin , psycholinguist Noam Chomsky , social critics Christopher Hitchens and Peter Hitchens , and existential philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche .

Polemical journalism was common in continental Europe when libel laws were not as stringent as they are now. [4] To support study of 17th to 19th century controversies, a British research project has placed online thousands of polemical pamphlets from that period. [5] Discussions of atheism , humanism , and Christianity have remained open to polemic into the 21st century.

History [ edit ]

In Ancient Greece , writing was characterised by what Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin called "strident adversariality" and "rationalistic aggressiveness", summed up by McClinton as polemic. [6] [7] For example, the ancient historian Polybius practiced "quite bitter self-righteous polemic" against some twenty philosophers, orators, and historians. [8]

Polemical writings were common in medieval and early modern times. [9] During the Middle Ages, polemic had a religious dimension, as in Jewish texts written to protect and dissuade Jewish communities from converting to other religions . [10] Medieval Christian writings were also often polemical; for example in their disagreements on Islam [11] or in the vast corpus aimed at converting the Jews. [12] Martin Luther 's 95 Theses , nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg , was a polemic launched against the Catholic Church. [6] [note 1] Robert Carliell 's 1619 defence of the new Church of England and diatribe against the Roman Catholic Church ? Britaine's glorie, or An allegoricall dreame with the exposition thereof: containing The Heathens infidelitie in religion... ? took the form of a 250-line poem. [13]

Major political polemicists of the 18th century include Jonathan Swift , with pamphlets such as his A Modest Proposal , Alexander Hamilton , with pieces such as A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress and A Farmer Refuted , and Edmund Burke , with his attack on the Duke of Bedford . [14]

In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 's 1848 Communist Manifesto was extremely polemical. [6] Both Marx and Engels would publish further polemical works, with Engels's work Anti-Duhring serving as a polemic against Eugen Duhring , and Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme against Ferdinand Lasalle .

Vladimir Lenin would also publish polemics against political opponents. The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky was notably directed against Karl Kautsky , and other works such as The State and Revolution attacked figures including Eduard Bernstein .

In the 20th century, George Orwell 's Animal Farm was a polemic against totalitarianism , in particular of Stalinism in the Soviet Union . According to McClinton, other prominent polemicists of the same century include such diverse figures as Herbert Marcuse , Noam Chomsky , John Pilger , and Michael Moore . [6]

In 2007 Brian McClinton argued in Humani that anti-religious books such as Richard Dawkins 's The God Delusion are part of the polemic tradition. [6] In 2008 the humanist philosopher A. C. Grayling published a book, Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness . [15]

See also [ edit ]

Notes [ edit ]

  1. ^ The story of Luther nailing his Theses to the church door has been doubted. See references in Martin Luther#Start of the Reformation ? "the story of the posting on the door...has little foundation in truth."

References [ edit ]

  1. ^ a b "polemic" (s.v.) . Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary . Springfield, MA : Merriam-Webster. 2005.
  2. ^ American College Dictionary . New York: Random House.
  3. ^ Henry George Liddell ; Robert Scott . "π?λεμο?" . A Greek-English Lexicon . on Perseus.
  4. ^ polemic, or polemical literature, or polemics (rhetoric) . britannica.com. Archived from the original on 11 April 2008 . Retrieved 21 February 2008 .
  5. ^ "Rare books collections: Hay Fleming Collection" . St Andrews University Library . Retrieved 16 March 2022 .
  6. ^ a b c d e McClinton, Brian (July 2007). "A Defence of Polemics" (PDF) . Humani (105): 12?13. Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 March 2016.
  7. ^ Lloyd, Geoffrey; Sivin, Nathan (2002). The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece . Yale University Press. ISBN   978-0-300-10160-7 .
  8. ^ Walbank, F. W. (1962). "Polemic in Polybius". The Journal of Roman Studies . 52 (Parts 1 and 2): 1?12. doi : 10.2307/297872 . JSTOR   297872 . S2CID   153936734 .
  9. ^ Suerbaum, Almut; Southcombe, George (2016). Polemic: Language as Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Discourse . Taylor & Francis. ISBN   978-1-317-07929-3 .
  10. ^ Chazan, Robert (2004). Fashioning Jewish identity in medieval western Christendom . Cambridge University Press. p. 7.
  11. ^ Tolan, John Victor (2000). Medieval Christian perceptions of Islam . Routledge. p. 420.
  12. ^ Philippe Bobichon, "Litterature de controverse entre judaisme et christianisme: Description du corpus et reflexions methodologiques (IIe-XVIe siecle ≫) (textes grecs, latins et hebreux) , Revue d’Histoire ecclesiastique 107/1, 2012, pp. 5?48; Philippe Bobichon, "Is Violence intrinsic to religious confrontation? The case of Judeo-Christian controversy, second to seventeenth century" in S. Chandra (dir.), Violence and Non-violence across Times. History, Religion and Culture , Routledge, 2018, pp. 33?52.
  13. ^ Sidney Lee, "Carleill, Robert (fl. 1619)", rev. Reavley Gair (Oxford, UK: OUP, 2004) Retrieved 27 May 2017. Pay-walled.
  14. ^ Paulin, Tom (26 March 1995). "The Art of Criticism: 12 Polemic" . The Independent . Retrieved 6 November 2016 .
  15. ^ Grayling, A. C. (2008). Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness . Oberon Books. ISBN   978-1-840-02728-0 .

Bibliography [ edit ]

  • Gallop, Jane (2004). Polemic: Critical or Uncritical (1 ed.). New York: Routledge. ISBN   0-415-97228-0 .
  • Hawthorn, Jeremy (1987). Propaganda, Persuasion and Polemic . Hodder Arnold. ISBN   0-7131-6497-2 .
  • Lander, Jesse M. (2006). Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England . Cambridge University Press. ISBN   0-521-83854-1 .

External links [ edit ]

Look up polemic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
  • Quotations related to Polemic at Wikiquote
Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polemic&oldid=1223303279 "