Re: The humility topos

[Graham White <graham@eecs.qmul.ac.uk>]

[Note, with humility, from moderator: this discussion has been allowed to
continue off-topic too long already... let's end it, thanks.]

Well, topos may not be a common English word until then, but 
"common place" is, and that is an English translation of topos,
used for the same meaning, and derived from the rhetorical tradition. 
Melanchton's late sixteenth century textbook of theology, for example,
was called Loci Communes (= common places in Latin). I think that 
the non-occurrence of topos in English probably says more about the
relative infrequency of Greek terms and the greater frequency of
their Latin equivalents (I haven't got an OED to hand, but it would
be interesting to see if locus was ever used in that sense, and how
early). 

Not only does the word topos occur in Aristotle's rhetoric, 
but he wrote a book on topoi, which is one of his logical works. 
One of the most interesting things about the term, at any rate in Greek,
is that it thus has both logical and geometrical meanings, and that from
very early. I can't help wondering whether Grothendieck had that in
mind: he seems to have read widely enough for that to occur to him. 

Graham

On Mon, 2010-07-05 at 13:20 -0700, Vaughan Pratt wrote:
> One would suppose that the notions of literary topos and humility topos 
> were of ancient origin.  Certainly "topos" appears in Aristotle's 
> Rhetoric in the original Greek.  However its entry into the academic 
> lexicon as an English word relevant to rhetoric and other literary forms 
> would seem, as far as I've been able to tell, to have occurred at some 
> point in the 20th century.
> 
> 1.  Volume Ti-Tz of the OED does not contain the word "topos," nor does 
> it appear under the entries for "humility" or "literary."  (Ordinarily 
> the OED can relied on to record just about every English word that has 
> appeared in print prior to the 20th century.)
> 
> 2.  Adams Sherman Hill, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in 
> Harvard University from 1876 to 1904, wrote "The Foundations of 
> Rhetoric" in 1892 with no mention of the concept of topos as a notion in 
> rhetoric.
> 
> The Wikipedia article on Ernst Robert Curtius at
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Robert_Curtius
> 
> says "He is best known for his 1948 work Europäische Literatur und 
> Lateinisches Mittelalter. It was a major study of the Medieval Latin 
> literature and its effect on subsequent writing in modern European 
> languages. The book was largely responsible for introducing the literary 
> topos concept as a scholarly and critical discussion of literary 
> commonplaces."
> 
> So unless someone comes up with an earlier use, it looks like 1948 may 
> be the date, and German the language, of the first appearance of "topos" 
> outside the original Greek of Aristotle.
> 
> Vaughan Pratt



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