KAIROS

A Journal
For Teachers of Writing
in Webbed Environments


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ISSN: 1521-2300

Sponsored by
The Alliance for Computers and Writing


EDITOR
Greg Siering

MANAGING EDITOR
Claudine Keenan

PRODUCTION MANAGER
Sandye Thompson

INTERFACE EDITOR
Jason Cranford Teague

COVERWEB EDITOR
Douglas Eyman

NEWS EDITOR
James Inman

REVIEWS EDITOR
Nick Carbone

RESPONSE EDITOR
Jennifer Bowie

ARCHIVIST
Jeff White

COPY STAFF:
Noah Bates
Linda DeVore
Traci Kelly
David Mark
Kelly Truitt

Kairos was one of two Greek terms often used to mean "time"; the other, chronos, had a distinctly quantitative meaning. Kairos was a more qualitative term, as per culturally-based analogies to archery and/or weaving--however, it maintained an element of ethical balance. As Carl Glover points out, Kinneavy's "conclusions and classroom applications of kairos ignore . . . the chronos/kairos distinction" (91). Nonetheless, for definitional purposes it is easy to see how Kinneavy arrived at "situational context." In some scholarly translations of both Plato and Aristotle, karoi is roughly equivalent to entautha + pote irois which has been translated as "circumstances." Kinneavy and Eskin note that "kairos" mediates the theoria/praxis distinction outlined in Plato's Phaedrus.

Aristotle more commonly used the term poia , meaning "occasions" or (sometimes) "reasons," which is less forceful than the meaning implied in "kairos." However, Aristotle did see great value in the concept of kairos - particularly in the Athenian courtroom, where the great rhetoricians of the day battled over epieikeia , the legal concept of equity which best translates to "kairic law."


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