Wagemans, J.H.M. (2026). Breaking Plato’s spell: Reimagining rhetoric and dialectic as counterparts of hermeneutics. Topoi, 45, 835–846. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-025-10328-8
For more than two millennia, Plato’s critique has cast rhetoric as the lesser sibling of dialectic, as an art of persuasion rather than a path to truth. In this article, Jean Wagemans challenges that influential legacy by showing how the Platonic divide continues to shape modern argumentation theory and by offering a bold alternative inspired by Aristotle and Schleiermacher. Instead of treating rhetoric as subordinate to dialectic, it reconceives both as complementary, normative arts of discourse that together stand as counterparts of hermeneutics. In doing so, the article restores rhetoric to its rightful place as an independent discipline and provides a new conceptual foundation for understanding how arguments are produced, interpreted, and evaluated. The result is a fresh perspective with far-reaching implications for argumentation theory, rhetorical education, and the development of AI systems capable of assessing persuasive communication in context.
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