On the misadventures of the sophists: Hegel's tropological appropriation of rhetoric

The author examines Hegel's incorporation of the Sophists into the history of philosophy. The basic argument is that Hegel's history of the Sophists operates along tropological lines, the exact same lines that the truth claims of his philosophy oppose. Using the tropes of metaphor, metonymy and prolepsis, the author shows that when Hegel places the Sophists in the process of the teleological unfolding of reason he employs the very rhetorical mechanisms he denounces.