The settler-colonial and republican principles of early U.S. politics tend to be studied as paradoxical ambitions of American nation-building. This article argues that early republican thought in the United States developed through what I call ‘ideological code-switching’, a vernacular practice that allowed popular actors to strategically vacillate between anti-colonial and neo-colonial discourses as complementary principles of revolutionary change. I illustrate these claims by tracing a genealogy of anti- and neo-colonial thought from the founding of the United States to its (...) transnational emergence in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I demonstrate that ideological code-switching first appeared as a rhetorical strategy among the Federalist debates, where Publius argued for the feasibility of expansionist republics via a hemispheric account of American exceptionalism. These appeals to hemispheric unity remained salient into the nineteenth century among groups like the ‘Republicans of ‘Nacogdoches’, a militia comprised of Indigenous, Mestizo, and White actors that mobilized an attack on Spain and founded the Republic of Texas in April of 1813. Drawing on archival research, I turn to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as an example of the way marginalized groups instrumentalized links between anti- and neo-colonial politics to envision their position in the rapidly evolving landscapes of transnational revolution. (shrink)

(1996). Rhetorical problems of emergent democracy: Political change and political discourse in Poland. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 568-574.

Like other sciences, biosemiotics also has its time-honoured archive, consisting, among other things, of writings by those who have been invented and revered as ancestors of the discipline. One such example is Jakob von Uexküll who has been hailed as a precursor of semiotics, developing his theory of “sign” and “meaning” independently of Saussure and Peirce. The juxtaposition of “sign” and “meaning” is revelatory because one can equally legitimately claim Uexküll as a hermeneutician in the same way as others having (...) claimed him as a semiotician. Such a novel temptation can be justified by Uexküll’s prolonged obsession with Sinn and Bedeutung since his first book in 1909. This paper attempts to reconstruct the immediate intellectual horizon of Uexküll’s historicity, a discursive space traversed by his contemporaries Frege and Husserl, in order to see how Uexküll’s discussions of Zeichen and Gegenstand, Sinn and Bedeutung, were informedby other philosophers of language, and to establish Uexküll as a phenomenological hermeneutician in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer. To forestall and counter possible criticism that hermeneutics is primarily concerned with textual interpretation, while Uexküll is at most an interpreter of animal life, the paper will discuss his unfinished parody of the Platonic dialogue Meno, which is entitled Die ewige Frage: Biologische Variationen über einen platonischen Dialog (1943). It is through such textual practice that one witnesses the emergence of an Uexküll who embodies at once the addressee exercising his understanding of ancient texts as well as the second addresser recoding his explanation to another group of targeted addressees. This textual practice already goes beyond the confines of biology and in fact involves the linguistic pragmatics of rhetoric and speech act. (shrink)

This is a review of Debra Hawhee's book, A Sense of Urgency. The uncertainty and magnitude of climate change make it difficult to talk about its impact in ways that can help us understand and confront what we face. Hawhee's example-driven book aims to show how the rhetoric of climate change is changing rhetoric itself for the better. While there is much to learn from Hawhee's discussion, the book carries a misplaced optimism about how climate (...) class='Hi'>change rhetoric is being used--and abused. The review illustrates this with examples from, for instance, Sen. Ted Cruz's weaponizing of the words of climate change activists and boutique tour company's efforts to capitalize on the first memorial to a dead glacier. (shrink)

The study aims to analyze the changes in the status of rationality in the field of the New Rhetoric – the most influential direction in the modern theory of argumentation, which appeared in the 1960s with the scientific works of C. Perelman – L. Olbrechts – Titeka and S. Toulmin. The thesis presented is that the practices of contemporary public discourse find their most logical and comprehensive theoretical explanation in the teachings of the New Rhetoric, which change (...) the traditional status of rationality and transform it into a logic of practical philosophy. The novelties are ascertained by tracking the dynamics in the understanding of the main categories of argumentation – evidence, argumentation, deductive validity, evaluation criteria, arguments, facts, assumptions, values, consent. Perelman’s model of rational argumentation outlines the transition from logical to communicative rationality, which introduces the factors of contextuality and functionality; affirms the validity of a communicative reasonableness in which the mechanisms of thought are synchronized with the processes of language; introduces practical reasoning, which functions as a strategic interaction between logical thinking, imagination, and language. (shrink)

This article shows how the ethical framing of the contemporary issue of modern slavery has evolved in UK construction, a sector in which there is a high risk of labor exploitation. It also examines how these framing dynamics have inhibited the emergence of a common framework of action to deal with the issue. We draw on both framing theory and the literature on the discursive construction of moral legitimacy. Our longitudinal analysis reveals that actors seeking to shape the debate bring (...) their own moral schemes to justify and construct the legitimacy of their frames. Actors cluster their views around five evolving frames: human rights issue (later shifting to hidden crime), moral issue, management issue (later shifting to human moral obligation), social justice issue, and decent work issue—which promote particular normative evaluations of what the issue is, who is responsible, and recommendations for action. Our study contributes to a dynamic and political understanding of the meaning making of modern slavery. We identify the antecedents and conditions that have forestalled the emergence of new patterns of action to tackle modern slavery in the UK construction sector thereby evidencing the effects of the interplay of morally competing frames on field-level change. (shrink)

En 1997, Hong Kong volvió a China en el marco de la gobernanza conocida como «Un país, dos sistemas», que fue ideado para permitir a la China continental seguir siendo «socialista», mientras Hong Kong podía mantener su sistema capitalista. Sin embargo, la estrategia retórica y legal de mantener metafórica y constitucionalmente la distancia entre los dos lugares y seguir afirmando su soberanía y unidad, es ambigua y contradictoria. Este artículo explora estas ambiguas contradicciones (estratégicas, ideológicas y retóricas) y tras ello (...) su impacto en el debate sobre la democracia y el sufragio en Hong Kong, que su constitución, la Ley básica, promete para el futuro. (shrink)

ArgumentDr. James Hansen's 1988 testimony before the U.S. Senate was an important turning point in the history of global climate change. However, no studies have explained why Hansen's scientific communication in this deliberative setting was more successful than his testimonies of 1986 and 1987. This article turns to Hansen as an important case study in the rhetoric of accommodated science, illustrating how Hansen successfully accommodated his rhetoric to his non-scientist audience given his historical conditions and rhetorical constraints. (...) This article provides a richer explanation for the rhetorical/political emergence of global warming as an important public policy issue in the United States during the late 1980s and contributes to scholarly understanding of the rhetoric of accommodated science in deliberative settings, an often overlooked area of science communication research. (shrink)

Although it is well known in other fields, the concept of “resilience” has not been addressed explicitly by feminist rhetoricians. This collection develops it in readings of rhetorical situations across a range of social contexts and national cultures. Contributors demonstrate that resilience offers an important new conceptual frame for feminist rhetoric, with emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals disempowered by social or material forces. Collectively, these chapters create a (...) robust conception of resilience as a complex rhetorical process, redeeming it from its popular association with individual heroism through an important focus on relationality, community, and an ethics of connection. Resilience, in this volume, is a specifically rhetorical response to complicated forces in individual lives. Through it, Feminist Rhetorical Resilience widens the interpretive space within which rhetoricians can work. (shrink)

Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change. By Celeste Michelle Condit.

Contemporary or postmodern thought is based on the lack of foundation. The impossibility of having a principle for philosophy has become a position of principle. As a result, rhetoric has taken over. Content has given way to the priority of form. Michel Meyer's book aims at showing that philosophy as foundational is possible and necessary, and that rhetoric can flourish alongside, but the conception of reason must be changed. Questioning rather than answering must be considered as the guiding (...) principle. What the author calls "problematology" is not only the study of questioning but also the analysis of the reasons why it has been repressed throughout the history of philosophy. Since Socrates, philosophers and scientists have reasoned by asking questions and by trying to solve them. Questioning has been the unthematized foundation of philosophy and thought at large. Philosophers, however, have preferred another norm, granting privilege to the answers and thereby repressing the questions into the realm of the preliminary and unessential. They have not considered their discursive practice as being based upon some question-answer complex, but exclusively on the results they call propositions. Meyer argues that propositions ensue from corresponding questions, and not the other way around. Anthropology, ontology, reasoning, and language thus receive a new interpretation in the problematological conception of philosophy, a conception in which questions and problems are thematized afresh. The theory of language in everyday use, in argumentation, or in literary analysis receives a full and decisive treatment here, making Meyer's question-view one of the leading theories in contemporary thought, alongside his rhetoric for which he is already well known. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 294-298 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford. Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Pp. xiv + 354. $22.95 (...) paperback; $59.95 cloth. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Ed. Molly Meijer Wertheimer. University of South Carolina Series in Rhetoric/Communication. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1997. Pp. xii + 408. NP. The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric. Ed. Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe. Calgary, Alberta: U of Calgary P, 1999. Pp. 279. NP. These three books, all published within the last five years, are both reflections of and important contributions to the growing scholarship on women's roles in rhetorical history as theorists and as practitioners. Indeed, the titles listed in chronological order--Reclaiming Rhetorica, Listening to Their Voices, and The Changing Tradition--suggest the process of transformation that the study of rhetorical history has undergone in recent years. Both individually and together, these works are a healthful antidote to the rhetorical history most of us learned at our (male) professors' knees.The books share certain features. As edited volumes, they span rhetorical history, from its classical roots to modern feminist theories. Although some figures appear more than once in different volumes (e.g., Aspasia and Mary Astell), the constraints of brief chapters permit us only tantalizing glimpses of each woman and her activities. Like all edited collections, these books include a variety of viewpoints and voices. Despite the disparity that is inevitable in a collection of essays, the quality of the work in these volumes is uniformly high. The editors of all three collections have done a nice job of assuring that the contributors stay to the point and write well without sacrificing scholarly precision. For those seeking a simple history or detailed analysis of any particular figure or time, these books will not suffice. But for most readers who are unfamiliar with the full range [End Page 294] of women in rhetorical history, this reader among them, these volumes provide a delightful introduction to the resilience, creativity, and significance of women in our formerly unacknowledged rhetorical past.In her introduction to Reclaiming Rhetorica, Andrea Lunsford shares the intriguing history of the volume, which explains its eclecticism and its goals. Approached by students who wanted to explore the role of women in rhetorical history, Annette Kolodny offered a two-semester graduate seminar titled "Women Rhetoricians." For the class, the students did extensive archival recovery research, much of which is included in the published volume. Interestingly, the students were the ones who persisted in trying to bring their works, plus the other contributors' efforts, to publication. The resultant book is, then, as James J. Murphy says in his foreword, "not a history of women rhetoricians, or women orators, or women writers. It is, instead, a glimmer of possibilities, an array of glances,--an enthymeme."The essays range widely in time covered and in focus. For example, the first chapter is a consideration of Aspasia, who left no written record of her own. Her accomplishments and influence must, then, be constructed from references to her in the works of others. The authors, Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong, contend that both her gender and her non-Athenian roots played a role in the suppression of her memory. Returning to the theme of "dangerous femininity," the concluding chapter explores the work of a modern theorist, Julia Kristeva. In that chapter, Suzanne Clark demonstrates how Kristeva has challenged traditional notions of rhetoric and provides dialogism as an antidote to the constraints of earlier approaches to human interaction. The chapters between these two take a variety of directions. Mary Wollstonecraft's feminist dialogics stands alongside of the autobiographical The... (shrink)

Diligent citizens must critically analyze arguments for science policy recommendations, such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions or growing genetically modified food crops. Science policy articles present arguments for and against such recommendations using scientific evidence and rhetorical devices. In this paper we present an in-depth analysis of argumentation and rhetorical devices in two journal articles on climate change issues. One objective was to gain a better understanding of use of rhetorical devices in this genre, as a prerequisite for designing (...) and building a rhetorically-annotated digital corpus of full-text science policy articles. The near term objective was to inform the design of pedagogical tools to help students analyze science policy arguments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetorical Circulation in Late CapitalismNeoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective EnergyCatherine ChaputIn the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic agents, and more (...) generally, according to the rationality of the governed themselves. And it is all these different arts of government, all these different types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which, overlapping with each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate.Michel Foucault, The Birth of BiopoliticsCritical rhetoricians interested in the power dynamics between rhetoric and capitalism have established for themselves the ambitious task of explaining how multiple, intertwined rationalities govern individual and collective [End Page 1] behavior in relationship to the ever-shifting logics of capitalism. Approaches to this complicated directive frequently envision rhetoric as a mediating force among agentive subjects who act within well-defined political economic landscapes. Wedded to a political-communicative model wherein appropriate rhetorical choices persuade those with authority to distribute disputed political and economic rights, rhetorical theory becomes a sophisticated handbook for discovering topoi and executing decorous statements. This focus, according to Ronald Walter Greene, results in a "permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency" that positions rhetoricians as "moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic" (2004, 188, 189). Committing themselves to endless debates about correct responses in situated spaces, rhetorical theories that underscore agency lose site of the world in flux and of our participation in that world's unpredictable unfoldings. Alternatively, Greene suggests rethinking rhetorical theory through a materialist-communicative model wherein the immaterial labor of communication produces value. Conceptualizing discursive practices as a form of labor rather than a form of political signification sidesteps anxiety about well-chosen language and emphasizes the life-affirming activity involved in deciphering issues, inventing paths through those issues, and communicating new ideas to others. In short, Greene's materialist model challenges critical rhetoricians to end their perennial search for a discursive key to the storehouse of political economic goods (a practice propelled by liberal democratic hopes) so that they can begin to invent analyses and modes of production better suited to the contours of contemporary neoliberalism.Unlike liberalism's clearly assigned spaces for public life and private life or work time and leisure time, neoliberal spaces bear few obvious markers. The neoliberal landscape consists of blurred boundaries that fold into one another: information flows almost instantaneously, commodities and people transgress national boundaries, time accelerates, space collapses, and distinctions between such classic demarcations as agent and subject or politics and economics erode. Facilitated by dramatic changes in our sociopolitical boundaries, economic neoliberalism, what James Arnt Aune calls "economic correctness" (2001), reigns throughout vast uneven terrains opened up from the imploded borders of our liberal world. While economics does indeed rule the neoliberal landscape, it does not do so according to uncompromising rationalism. Political and cultural practices flowing into the previously segregated spaces of economics enable market rule through logics that operate entirely outside the rational-irrational divide. Economic neoliberalism moves from situation to situation, disregarding spatial boundaries between the political, economic, [End Page 2] and cultural realms as well as their attendant modes of persuasion, wearing away at the rhetorical linkages between appropriate discursive choices and agentive power.Regardless of the particularities of neoliberalism's spaces, structures, and governing practices, many rhetoricians continue to mediate among different worldviews based on outmoded liberal gauges. Some rhetorical theorists, for instance, maintain that the problematics of neoliberalism result from an imbalance between reason and passion. Even though the most ardent supporters of neoliberal practices hold firmly to a belief in its scientific rationality, rhetorical theorists often argue that passion overpowers reason in neoliberal discourse. The rhetorical form that sustains this disequilibrium is, according to Bradford Vivian, neoliberal epideictic. Based on an impassioned identification, epideictic texts "unite an otherwise fractured citizenry in a dynamic affective experience" (Vivian 2006, 15). Epideictic rhetoric functions didactically to unite the public... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Capitalism:Rhetorical Agency as Communicative LaborRonald Walter GreeneIt is a commonplace to describe rhetorical agency as political action. From such a starting point, rhetorical agency describes a communicative process of inquiry and advocacy on issues of public importance. As political action, rhetorical agency often takes on the characteristics of a normative theory of citizenship; a good citizen persuades and is persuaded by the gentle force of the (...) better argument. More radical visions of argument might include strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts in the rhetorical arsenal of good citizenship, and some might even flirt with violence as rhetorical action. This model of rhetorical agency requires a translation of the conceptual apparatus of rhetoric and its alignment with the problematics of democratic theory and actually existing democratic regimes. Classical models that hoped to harness rhetorical agency to the making of the "orator-statesman" (sic) must reimagine political participation in terms of publics and counterpublics, social movements, electoral campaigns, communication media and technologies, as well as supra- and sub-national institutional settings. As the classical norms of citizenship rub against (post) modern realities, a permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency seems destined to be lodged in the critical imagination of rhetorical studies. If politics today is, in Jodi Dean's words, "a domain of financially mediated and professionalized practices centered on advertising, public relations, and the means of mass communication," then actually existing rhetorical agency manifests itself in efforts to "raise the money, buy the television time, register the domain names, build the website, and craft the accessible, user-friendly, spectacular message" (2003, 96).If we recognize Dean's description of the political as an accurate description of the rhetorical situation today, rhetorical studies is left with three strategies: It can refashion a deliberative vision of rhetorical agency into a normative ideal for critiquing the structural conditions (capital, media [End Page 188] concentration) of political participation. Second, it can enlarge the field of normatively acceptable ways and means of political participation, for example, by embracing the more spectacular politics associated with visual and body rhetorics. Finally, rhetorical studies can work on the "demand" side and design new strategies and tactics for activating the rhetorical participation of citizens, for example, by encouraging the creation of communicative norms necessary for reinvigorating voluntary and civic organizations. However, while each of these approaches provides a research agenda, none of them gets at the root cause of the anxiety over agency: the attachment of rhetorical agency to a vision of political change. The anxiety over agency pushes rhetorical critics and theorists into becoming moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic to improve the quality and quantity of political participation.The purpose of this paper is to offer an escape route from theorizing rhetorical agency as a model of political communication.1 In opposition to a political-communicative vision of rhetorical agency, this paper suggests a different materialist ontology, one that imagines rhetorical agency as a form of living labor. I will argue that rhetorical agency belongs to the domain of communicative labor, a form of labor increasingly necessary to the workings of contemporary capitalist production. In other words, I want to replace a political-communicative model of rhetorical agency with a materialist-communicative model. To highlight the similarities and differences between the two models, I will focus on how the interface between politics, communication, and economics plays out in the Marxist tradition of rhetorical studies. I will organize this tradition into two sections: the first, represented by James Aune, advocates a hermeneutic approach to rhetorical agency, and the second, represented by Dana Cloud, argues for imagining rhetorical agency as a class-based social movement. By focusing on the work of my comrades, the paper risks being received as a "left sectarian" polemic.2 As I will demonstrate in each section, the problem with these two approaches has less to do with Marxism and more to do with how they turn to hermeneutics and social movements to imagine rhetorical agency in the idiom of communication theory. In the third section of the paper I will resituate rhetorical agency into a materialist ontology of labor and capitalist production. In so... (shrink)

This article considers the normative and critical value of popular comedy. I begin by assembling and evaluating a range of political theory literature on comedy. I argue that popular comedy can be conducive to both critical and transformative democratic effects, but that these effects are contingent on the way comedic performances are received by audiences. I illustrate this by means of a case study of a comedic climate change ‘debate’ from the television show, Last Week Tonight. Drawing from recent (...) scholarship on deliberation, judgment and rhetoric, I highlight both critical and transformative dimensions of the performance. I attribute these to the vignette’s likely reception, which I describe as ‘dissonant’ – unresolved, affectively turbulent and aesthetically attuned. I argue that comedy is uniquely positioned to spur such ‘dissonant’ modes of engagement and, in so doing, to promote acknowledgement and reflective judgment. (shrink)

Bodily rhetoric is a burgeoning field, with scholars investing attention to the ways in which non-verbal communication mediates change between individuals and groups in complex scenarios, including political settings. Scenarios in which individuals move together – whether in completely extemporaneous situations or in existing forms such as Contact Improvisation, Argentinian Tango, or Classical Pas de Deux – pose a similarly complex communicative problem. Drawing on the work of Lloyd Bitzer, I demonstrate how rhetorical theory provides methodological insight by (...) which we can better understand the dynamic practice that is always already happening in situations where individuals move together. (shrink)

Do the effects of anthropogenic climate change amount to the ill-treatment of children and young adults? This is what the European Court of Human Rights asked the responding states in one of the most recent climate litigation cases. Some legal scholars give an affirmative answer concerning inhuman and degrading treatment as, in their view, the applicants’ suffering passes the necessary threshold of severity. In the paper, I differentiate between inhuman and degrading treatment, and I argue that inhuman treatment cannot (...) be defined by the severity of suffering, but by the kind of wrong it constitutes. Inhuman treatment is about a substantial diminishment of autonomy through the undermining of planning agency as well as significantly limiting the range of options to choose from by either making the existing types of options unsafe or by taking them away altogether. I show that anthropogenic climate change can indeed have such effects not only on adults but on children too. In the case of children, it is the capacity to develop such an ability that is undermined, as well as the options that they otherwise would have. Taken together, the two amount to closing the future for children and young adults. Those whose interests are set back in this way are subjected to inhuman treatment by virtue of states not complying with their share of mitigation measures as well as not adopting more ambitious policies. (shrink)

This paper examines the hypothesis that all public policies are based, at least in part, on rhetorical strategies. By analysing public policies implemented in the context of sustainable development, this article emphasises the need for and the challenges of providing legitimate foundations for the rhetorical means used to encourage change; it is these foundations that determine a given policy's efficacy. To do so, historical analyses are used, as well as socio-economic perspectives examined through textual analysis. The text concludes by (...) showing the importance of a common framework for action based on shared values at the regional level for legitimising the political use of rhetoric to change behaviours and attitudes. (shrink)

As the international genomic research community moves from the tool-making efforts of the Human Genome Project into biomedical applications of those tools, new metaphors are being suggested as useful to understanding how our genes work - and for understanding who we are as biological organisms. In this essay we focus on the Human Microbiome Project as one such translational initiative. The HMP is a new 'metagenomic' research effort to sequence the genomes of human microbiological flora, in order to pursue the (...) interesting hypothesis that our 'microbiome' plays a vital and interactive role with our human genome in normal human physiology. Rather than describing the human genome as the 'blueprint' for human nature, the promoters of the HMP stress the ways in which our primate lineage DNA is interdependent with the genomes of our microbiological flora. They argue that the human body should be understood as an ecosystem with multiple ecological niches and habitats in which a variety of cellular species collaborate and compete, and that human beings should be understood as 'superorganisms' that incorporate multiple symbiotic cell species into a single individual with very blurry boundaries. These metaphors carry interesting philosophical messages, but their inspiration is not entirely ideological. Instead, part of their cachet within genome science stems from the ways in which they are rooted in genomic research techniques, in what philosophers of science have called a 'tools-to-theory' heuristic. Their emergence within genome science illustrates the complexity of conceptual change in translational research, by showing how it reflects both aspirational and methodological influences. (shrink)

Bodily rhetoric is a burgeoning field, with scholars investing attention to the ways in which non-verbal communication mediates change between individuals and groups in complex scenarios, including political settings. Scenarios in which individuals move together – whether in completely extemporaneous situations or in existing forms such as Contact Improvisation, Argentinian Tango, or Classical Pas de Deux – pose a similarly complex communicative problem. Drawing on the work of Lloyd Bitzer, I demonstrate how rhetorical theory provides methodological insight by (...) which we can better understand the dynamic practice that is always already happening in situations where individuals move together. (shrink)

Rhetoric, Composition, Life is written for teacher-scholars of rhetoric and composition who grapple with the following question: Can my teaching not only make a positive difference in the lives of my students but also, in so doing, contribute to making the world a better place? This dissertation argues that in order to be able to answer this question in the affirmative with a greater sense of possibility for the future, that a re-understanding of how the world and its (...) populations or multiplicities of "actors" co-exist is necessary. Such conceptual work is needed because, under the influence of critical pedagogy, teacher-scholars in rhetoric and composition have placed too much emphasis on consciousness and its role in the dynamics of subjectivity, agency, and social transformation. In an effort to open a new space for thought and pedagogy in rhetoric and composition, Rhetoric, Composition, Life engages in a protracted performance of encounter and response with the work of Martin Heidegger. The dissertation argues that Heidegger's thought not only invites us to think of the aforementioned issues in more ecological and existential-affective terms, but does so in a way that is rooted in and extends a concept at the heart of Aristotle's ethics and politics: phronesis. What emerges from the project is an ethos of pedagogy and politics rooted in the phronetic dynamics of "question-ability" and "response-ability," one that attends to and works with-in dynamics and rhythms of power, life, temporality, agency, and social change from a non-representational, ecological, and existential-affective perspective. (shrink)

The Rhetorical Presidency is not, principally, a book about rhetoric or the presidency. Rather, rhetoric and the presidency are windows on the American constitutional order as a whole. Critics have greatly enhanced the historical narrative but have not undermined the principal historical and theoretical claims. Recent changes in the American polity are best understood as exacerbations of problems described in the book, rather than as fundamental alterations of our political world. Contemporary political pathologies can still be diagnosed as (...) a product of the contending imperatives of the new constitutional order that has been layered on top of the old one. And while problems may be attenuated by a creative melding of the old and new orders, they cannot be solved within the confines of American constitutionalism, as it has been traditionally understood. (shrink)

Figures of a Changing World develops an account of culture change that is based on the distinction between the two rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy. These figures are applied both to the large-scale interpretation of tensions in culture change and to the micro-interpretation of tensions within particular texts.

Classical rhetorical theory distinguished three kinds of genera of oratory - the judicial, the deliberative, and the demonstrative- and there are features of each in Francis Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry VII. The demonstrative genus provided the basic shape of classical and humanist rhetorical history, while the deliberative and judicial methods also contributed significantly. The judicial method in particular may be very important for modern standards of history-writing. The fact that Bacon employed rhetorical strategies to shape his (...) history suggests that the development of historiography is not as free from "literary" techniques as many historians might like to believe. The inadequacies, by modern standards, of Bacon's classicized historiographical methods and understanding do not condemn the art of rhetoric itself. Small shifts in rhetorical technique or emphasis could reflect significant changes of literary perception and philosophical approach, and different historical periods encourage the use of new and different rhetorical topoi. (shrink)

Henceforth "to transform" should mean "to change the sense of sense."The field of the entity … is structured according to the diverse—genetic and structural—possibilities of the trace.The first article in the first issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is "The Rhetorical Situation," Lloyd Bitzer's critical exegesis on "the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse". Bitzer contends that the rhetor produces "the rhetorical text" when a "real" or "natural" —"objective and publicly observable" —situation "calls (...) the discourse into existence". That was 1968. Five volumes later, as you know, Richard E. Vatz flips the causal relation, maintaining instead that... (shrink)

In this provocative book, Edward Schiappa argues that rhetorical theory did not originate with the Sophists in the fifth century B.C.E, as is commonly believed, but came into being a century later. Schiappa examines closely the terminology of the Sophists—such as Gorgias and Protagoras—and of their reporters and opponents—especially Plato and Aristotle—and contends that the terms and problems that make up what we think of as rhetorical theory had not yet formed in the era of the early Sophists. His revision (...) of rhetoric’s early history enables him to change the way we read both the Sophists and Aristotle and Plato. Schiappa contends, for example, that Plato probably coined the Greek word for rhetoric; that Gorgias is a “prose rhapsode” whose style does not deserve the criticism it has received; that Isocrates deliberately never uses the Greek work for "rhetoric" and that our habit of pitting him versus Plato as “rhetoric versus philosophy” is problematic; and that Aristotle "disciplined" the genre of epideictic in a way that robs the genre of its political importance. His book will be of great interest to students of classics, communications, philosophy, and rhetoric. (shrink)

United States law and culture have yet to find a constructive and fair way to talk about rape, especially in “non-paradigmatic” rape cases like acquaintance or date rape. Particularly on college campuses, acquaintance rape is an ongoing, severe problem. Leading legal minds disagree sharply on how to address it. In part, this polarizing debate stems from our collective inability to free our language of the myths and stock stories that plague the subject of rape. No court case better exemplifies the (...) problem than the notorious decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Commonwealth v. Berkowitz, one of the most widely taught rape cases in the United States. In his empirical study of attitudes on rape, Professor Dan Kahan used the Berkowitz facts in part because they are such an iconic representation of some of the more difficult and troubling issues surrounding acquaintance rape. In that study, Kahan concluded that whether people perceive a story as describing “rape” depends primarily on cultural cognition, meaning the cultural group to which the reader of the story belongs. The text and substance of the law’s definition of rape mattered little. Kahan concluded that if we wish to change outcomes in rape cases, the cultural understandings of rape, more than the law, must change. This essay takes Kahan’s conclusion that cultural understanding is the primary driver of rape outcomes and asks the question: from where does that cultural understanding come? In no small part, this essay argues, those cultural beliefs come from the law, particularly from legal narratives. The facts of judicial opinions reflect the judges’ cultural understanding of rape and then that cultural understanding becomes what rape is (and isn’t). That image of rape then powerfully influences cultural understanding within and outside of law. It is a recursive process by which legal narratives create and reinforce cultural understanding which then itself creates and reinforces legal narratives and so on in an endless loop. In this way, law is neither irrelevant nor innocent in the outcome of rape cases. It is just exerting its influence, often imperceptibly, through rhetoric. (shrink)

The rejection of rhetoric has been a constant theme in Western thought since Plato. The presupposition of such a debasement lies at the foundation of a certain view of Reason that I have called propositionalism, and which is analyzed in this article. The basic tenets of propositionalism are that truth is exclusive, i.e. it does not allow for any alternative, and that there is always only one proposition which must be true, the opposite one being false. Necessity and uniqueness (...) are the ideals of propositionalism. But the question of the necessity of such a necessity is bound to arise. Foundationalism and propositionalism are intrinsically related. Since necessity excludes alternatives, rhetoric, which is based on the possibility of opposite standpoints, is unavoidably devalued as the crippled child of Reason, identical to sophistry or eristic. But propositionalism cannot justify itself and provide a justification for its own foundation without circle or contraditction. Since it responds to the problem of eradicating problems and alternatives through propositional entities, propositionalism is ultimately based on questioning to which it replies in the mode of denial. The unavowed foundation of Reason is therefore the question of questioning, even though this very question is suppressed as propositionalism. The trace of such a question is not only historical, but can also be seen, for instance, in the role played by the principle of contradiction in the constitution of propositional Reason (Artitotle): opposite “propositions” are not the expression of a problematic situation, they are either possible or successively unique propositions.We want to replace propositionalism by problematology which allows for the conceptualization of alternatives, thereby rendering a true rhetoric possible. Argumentation cannot then be equated with eristic any more, as propositionalism maintained.Rationality must be seen as having questioning as its true starting-point. Reason must be rhetorical if it is to survive the death of propositionalism which took place after the radical criticisms of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Even if it is still hard ffor philosophers and rhetoricians to think within another framework and even though they prefer endlessly to deconstauct the old one instead of changing it, problematology is bound to impose itself as the new voice for rationality, because Reason has always endeavored to solve problems. Propositionalism has been only one way of conceiving problems, based on the view that solutions could be but the suppression of questioning. (shrink)

In light of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s call that abolition means to “change everything,” how might we understand an abolitionist literary method? An abolitionist literary method dials into the language of critiquing prisons. This essay contends that recent developments in U.S. discourse concerning prison reform and prison abolition rely on the distinction between metaphor and metonymy. As rhetorical tropes, metaphor and metonymy both operate by means of figurative language. Metaphor creates a parallel formation between terms, popular in prison reformist language (...) (i.e. “prison as labor,” “prison as slavery,” “schools as prisons,” or “black holes as prisons”), while metonymy demonstrates a network between materially related sites, persons, and objects (as in “flesh,” “black holes,” or “the Prison Industrial Complex”) more central to the rhetoric of prison abolition. Following Emily Apter’s critique of Fredric Jameson’s “carceral metaphors,” I demonstrate these distinctions between metaphor-reform and metonymy-abolition through textual analysis of a Black feminist archive by considering the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, George Jackson, Evelynn Hammonds, and Assata Shakur. These different thinkers employ metonymy to illuminate theoretical possibilities for abolition through economics, flesh, motherhood, intimacy, sexuality, and physics over a period of thirty years. That being said, none of these writers define their work by the principal status given to metonymy, and this essay seeks to bring together their interventions through this rhetorical trope. I propose that abolition’s stretch through metonymy is central to an abolitionist literary method, provoking the animated reconsideration of language-use by scholars and activists. While not eliding metaphor entirely, this historical materialist work demonstrates that the careful elaboration of words and phrases becomes more robustly anti-carceral when one indexes where, how, and why metaphor and metonymy contract or extend imaginative political possibility. (shrink)

The rhetoric of moral, spiritual and political decline represents a recurrent rhetorical form, one that has appeared throughout history in a variety of contexts. This article takes a closer look at one episode in the history of decline rhetoric -- the fourth-century anti-Christian critiques regarding Roman imperial decline, and Augustine's responses to them in his City of God -- in order to explore the phenomenon of decline rhetoric more deeply. Augustine's response to those who blamed Christianity for (...) the empire's decline took place on both the empirical and the interpretive levels. First, he drew on the Roman historians Sallust and Livy to argue that moral decline, if it took place at all, predated Christianity. Second, his theory of the two cities took issue with the notion of decline as a fundamental misunderstanding of historical change. The article closes by drawing out some implications of this particular study for approaching decline rhetoric in political life more generally, concluding with a consideration of the controversial remarks of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who viewed the 11 September attacks as divine punishment for American moral decline. (shrink)

Development of the cochlear implant, discussed in this article, depended vitally on deaf people being persuaded to undergo implantation. Media "reconstruction" of the device as the "bionic ear" was typically encouraged by implant pioneers. Unexpectedly, however, a "counter-rhetoric" based on a very different understanding of deafness emerged. With it, deaf people are slowly succeeding in gaining influence over the further deployment of the technology. The analysis suggests modifications to existing theoretical models of technological change in medicine.

This chapter looks closely at the use of resilience as a value in pandemic discourses, and particularly at how it reflects the moral complexity of the situation the pandemic presents: an extended crisis where shocks and stressors interact and have an uncertain end. We review key aspects of how resilience has been conceptualised, generally speaking, focusing on its normative implications. Insofar as resilience is suggested as a goal, or used to evaluate individuals, groups and systems, the rhetorical use of resilience (...) in the pandemic has moral implications that we unpack. Asking questions such as resilience to what, of what, and for whom, drives our analysis of the multiple scales at which morally relevant factors must be considered, in terms of distance and certainty, and across space and over time. Further, we highlight the importance of particularly challenging, intersecting scales both within and beyond the pandemic, such as the interaction between other- and self-regarding concerns and the tension between transformation and conservation, as we consider when to take up opportunities for improving ourselves, our society and our systems, in times of extended crises and radical change. Given that a ‘return to normal’ is neither universally desirable nor likely, we recommend in this chapter ways to address resilience as a value that can shape approaches to policy and behaviour while also being explicit about the normative—evaluative and also prescriptive—implications of its use. (shrink)

Socrates believes that living well is primarily an intellectual undertaking: we live well if we think correctly. To intellectualists, one might think, the body and activities related to it are of little interest. Yet Socrates has much to say about food, eating, and cookery. This paper examines Socrates’ criticism of ‘feeding on opson’ (opsophagia) in Xenophon’s Memorabilia and of opson cookery (opsopoiia) in Plato’s Gorgias. I argue that if we consider the specific cultural meaning of eating opson, we can see (...) that Socrates takes a nuanced stance on food and cookery: he recommends careful consumption and skillful production, not austerity or abstinence. This nuance in Socrates’ discussion of food changes our interpretation of Socrates’ criticism of rhetoric in the Gorgias: in comparing rhetoricians to opson chefs – not to pastry chefs, as many have assumed – Socrates evokes the dangers of indulging in speeches while acknowledging their necessity for Athenian public life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.4 (2000) 319-335 [Access article in PDF] Rhetoric as a Technique and a Mode of Truth: Reflections on Chaïm Perelman Alan Gross In memoriam: Henry Johnstone, fons et origo.In one of his many criticisms of The New Rhetoric, the philosopher Henry W. Johnstone Jr. complains about its chapter "The Dissociation of Concepts" that "one is never sure whether [Chaïm Perelman is] thinking of (...) rhetoric primarily as a technique or primarily as a mode of truth. One wonders, too, what status [he is] claiming for the book itself" (1978, 99). 1 Since the chapter in question largely concerns philosophical argument, the doubt is very much apropos. But the response to Johnstone's implied question--a response that Johnstone does not think available--is that the correct answer legitimately varies in a systematic way. While in philosophical contexts, and, incidentally, in scientific ones, rhetoric is invariably a mode of truth, in contexts of public address it need not be. To see how this systematic variation might be the case, I will focus, as does Johnstone, on the dissociation of concepts as a test case of the robustness of a rhetoric oriented toward truth. To do so, I must first define dissociation and then come to terms with the way in which concepts are dissociated in public address, in philosophy, and in science. In treating these examples, however, I must be wary. While they will vary systematically according to field, they are not each instances of any general "law" of dissociation. Johnstone is surely right to "doubt whether there is any general logic of dissociation; there is only the logic of each particular dissociation, generated in each case by a particular problem" (99). When I have run through my examples, I can return to Johnstone's question about the status of rhetoric and of Perelman's study of it.Suppose that, in a campaign for the United States Senate, my opponent says that the central issue is high taxes, not the rise of medical costs, while I say that the central issue is medical costs, not high taxes. Neither of us [End Page 319] need be engaged in the dissociation of concepts; we may simply be excluding taxes and medical care, respectively, from political matters that deserve our immediate and full attention; we may simply be breaking the link between these issues and those of high political salience. In Perelman's words, "[T]he technique of breaking up a liaison consists... in asserting that elements that should remain separated and independent are improperly associated" (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 411). Yet, if we think that adequate medical care for all Americans is a moral issue, that it transcends politics, we are dissociating this issue from the category of campaign issues of the ordinary sort, those that deal "merely" with expediency. In the process, we are devaluing matters of mere expediency. Dissociation is a way of taking the argumentative high ground, of putting an issue on a different plane, an act that in this case turns a political race into a moral contest. In Perelman's words, "[T]he dissociation of notions brings about a more or less profound change in the conceptual data that are used as a basis of argument. It is then no more a question of breaking the links that join independent elements, but of modifying the very structure of these elements" (412).To illustrate this difference, I will use two parallel passages on the same topic: one from Stephen Douglas and the other from Abraham Lincoln, both from the debate between them in Alton, Illinois, on 15 October 1858. In his passage, Douglas stoutly defends states' rights: This government was made on the great basis of the sovereignty of the States--the right of each state to regulate its own domestic institutions to suit itself, and that right was conferred with the understanding and expectation that inasmuch as each locality had separate and distinct interests, each state must have different and distinct local and domestic institutions, corresponding to the wants... (shrink)

Ranke's work marks a turning point in the development of historiography: it changed from literature to science. Ranke's introduction of reason into historiography gave it a certain aesthetic quality, which modern historical studies have forgotten. Traditional rhetoric, or the use of language for strategic purposes, was discarded for its fictitious nature. In its place, Ranke advocated a synthesis of the scientific principles of research and the more artistic principles of writing history. This synthesis initiated the aesthetics of historiography, and (...) yielded a hidden rhetoric in the form of linguistic patterns of significance, or topoi, which give the facts of the past their sense and meaning for present-day life. Historiography, by its aesthetics, addresses its audience in a way that makes visible the mental forces which constitute the identity of the addressed people in the temporal course of their life. The postmodern recognition of rhetoric in historiography should not lead us back to premodern rhetoric but forward to a rhetoric of historiography which preserves the necessity of liberating reason in historiography and which reflects this reason not simply as a technique of research, but 'With a much wider and deeper approach to historical studies as a question of the aesthetics of historiography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Narrative, and the Lifeworld: The Construction of Collective IdentityAlan G. GrossAt the beginning of King Lear, at the point of ceding his throne to his three daughters, Lear asks each for a public acknowledgment of her love. Goneril and Regan flatter their father with effusive declarations, but Lear’s youngest, and his favorite, Cordelia, refuses to do so:I love your Majesty According to my bond; no more or (...) less...................... Good my lord, You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me; I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all.(1936, 1.1.94–107) [End Page 118]Furious, Lear disinherits his daughter.Cordelia’s speech is remarkable only in its articulation of what Lear should have known; its dramatic impact is a consequence of Lear’s reaction to his daughter’s argument for divided loyalty that is based on a string of commonplaces that are part of the lifeworld that Lear and his daughter—and every other person in the play—inhabit. Any part of this lifeworld may be thematized, of course; it may be brought out into the open as a topic of discussion. That is what Cordelia does; under duress, she shifts from what Jürgen Habermas calls communicative action to a level he calls discourse, a level that reveals the relationship between the personal and the social as well as their underlying cultural presuppositions. Because Lear refuses to grasp the obvious, the narrative progress of the play is temporarily interrupted and permanently veers off course. Although on occasion we can thematize aspects of our lifeworld, the lifeworld as a whole cannot be subject to scrutiny; it is the totality of certainties, skills, practices, and interpretative frames that we take for granted as we each find our way in the everyday worlds that form the changing horizons of our experience. I take it for granted that too many cooks spoil the broth; telephoning is a skill I do not puzzle over; waiting patiently in line is a social behavior I practice without thinking; with no special effort, I interpret the intimacy of a couple’s relationship by the way they publicly behave toward each other.The lifeworld, a concept initiated by Edmund Husserl and elaborated by Alfred Schütz, Martin Heidegger, and Jürgen Habermas, has been largely neglected by rhetorical theorists and critics. It is the purpose of this paper to show that remedying this neglect opens up fruitful avenues of critical practice and theory. I proceed, first, by defining the lifeworld. Next, I shift perspectives: I analyze how collectivities make sense of their lives by telling stories about themselves grounded in their lifeworld values. It is in the lifeworld’s role in storytelling that, I claim, Aristotle’s Rhetoric becomes an important part of the picture. This is because the Rhetoric is, at bottom, a theory of the way lifeworld values enter into the public sphere. This characterization of the Rhetoric permits us to reconcile two important instantiations of the lifeworld, Habermas’s and Aristotle’s, a reconciliation in which communicative action becomes a special case of rhetorical interaction. Finally, from the perspective of the lifeworld, I reflect on the significance of an exemplary case of the construction of collective identity, the Selma march. [End Page 119]Defining the LifeworldEdmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences contains the first explicit philosophical analysis of the lifeworld as “the world that is constantly pregiven, valid constantly and in advance as existing.... Every end presupposes it; even the universal end of knowing it in scientific truth presupposes it, and in advance” (1970, 382). Because the lifeworld is presupposed in everyday communication, it can be entered only by disciplined reflection: “Contemplation is privileged to the extent that it reveals the structures of the world and has them as theme” (1973, 65). Although the lifeworld... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetorical Definition:A French InitiativeNancy S. StrueverRhetoric as TheoryIl y a quelque chose de démesuré et de prématuré à entreprendre une histoire de la rhétorique dans I'Europe moderne(Fumaroli 1999).When in his preface to the Histoire de la rhétorique Marc Fumaroli states that the project itself is overambitious and premature, he proceeds to justify his judgment by listing the complications of rhetorical definition: rhetoric is Protean in nature, and in (...) this it simply matches the fluidity of the phenomena of speech, parole ; it is oxymoronic as the science of the uncertain, trying to ally incertitude of topic with intelligibility of explanation; it intricates theoria and ergon, the concept of parole with an engagement with parole in act. Long a part of early education, it generates grace in adult expression, finesse. It is as well a primary source for reflection on communication phenomena. It is manifest in works of genius, yet, it is democratic in its accessibility; it is perdurable, remarkably persistent through change; and, it recognizes that the sharing and abusing of parole are intimately bound together. Finally rhetoric stimulates, for it may illumine the contemporary "exile" of literature and the arts, an exile that poses for us the issue of, perhaps intractable, cultural decline (Fumaroli 1999, 2–3). [End Page 401]These disparate elements of rhetoric, I would argue, by their very complexity justify rhetoric as mode of inquiry, and prompt our continuing consideration of the investigative protocols of rhetoric as hermeneutic. Roman rhetoric, subdivided into three communicative tasks—docere, delectare, movere —sponsors three investigative tasks: instructing requires command of the strategies of argument; delighting sponsors an ecology of desire, and moving requires a socio-pathology of community assent and dissent. The rhetorical interest in discursive effect, then, sponsors a second-order inquiry, the task of reviewing the basic assumptions of the communicative community: the beliefs, doxa, the shared opinions, endoxa, habits, dispositions. Rhetoric collects assumptions; thus Aristotle's Rhetoric has been characterised as a compendium of the collective wisdom of the polis. Rhetorical topoi, commonplaces, are the rubrics that organize common sense, sensus communis. Rhetoric has the task of understanding the means of asserting, rejecting, altering beliefs, the transfer of theory into practice, dealing with the transformations of idea into ideology.Rhetorical interests, in the Habermasian sense of motives that color knowledge initiatives, can correct careers of inquiry; a shift to a rhetorical investigative focus is pragmatic, to a most distinctive engagement with practice. And thus Martin Heidegger's aphorism: "Rhetoric functions inside politics." Rhetoric is framed, compromised by politics defined in the generous sense of discursive negotiations within the communal domain of beliefs, shared opinions, habits of action, dispositions. Rhetorical inquiry has to identify the beliefs and habits of action of a community in its efforts to preserve and extend its identity, and rhetoric must analyze the discursive negotiations for affirmation and alteration of beliefs vital to the continued existence of the polity.The work of Marc Fumaroli is of intrinsic interest to the historian of rhetoric as an instantiation of rhetorical interests driving an entire career, a practice shaped by rhetorical tasks and habits of action in inquiry; the effect is that of a kind of alchemy, of the transformation, at every turn, of the history of culture into the history of cultural politics. "Cultural politics" does not denote, of course, an exclusive focus on state policy, dirigisme in culture. Rather, we have a combination of a compendious notion of culture as all our inventions, artifices—political, theological, affective, aesthetic—with a generous sense of politics as all our discursive negotiations of differences of public import, a combination that sets a topic that Fumaroli prefers to call a "politics of the spirit" (Fumaroli 1992a, 80–81).1 If we distinguish rhetoric as discipline, oratory as product, eloquence as value, we [End Page 402] see Fumaroli's career is exemplary of a modern initiative that links rhetoric as disciplined inquiry to the politics of value. Thus, he will give us a rhetorical definition of the Académie Française's communal, historical duty to French "eloquence," to a pursuit of a national excellence (Fumaroli 1996a, 304, 1992b, 78). And... (shrink)

According to an ancient stereotype, prominent in Cicero’s writings, Stoics hated rhetoric and were really bad it. But Horaces’ Satires are populated with lecturing Stoics using colorful, effusive language to cure their audience. The paper asks how “rhetorical” Stoics really were and argues that there was a continued tradition of Stoic rhetoric linking the diatribic speech of the Imperial period to its Hellenistic practitioners. It surveys the evidence for Stoic orators and rhetorical writers in the Hellenistic period and (...) presents evidence that Greek Stoics were more eloquent than their stereotype. The paper also suggests reasons for the wood-cut and sometimes fictitious representation of Stoic rhetoric in ancient accounts, in particular a propensity for classification in rhetorical theory, Cicero's dissatisfaction with Stoic terminology, and Cicero's own agenda in self-fashioning his image as an orator and writer of philosophy. (shrink)

From the analysis of Perelman by the philosopher Cristobal Holzapfel about the new rhetoric and on rhetoric itself, we can help but ask where lives the usefulness of rhetoric today. One sensible answer connects us with the sophists and the humanists’ period, for whom language was a powerful tool to change the world. Nevertheless, Holzapfel calls about the importance of rhetoric today in the construction of the world, in more or less the same way we (...) saw in the sophists and the humanists’ period. The main argument of this essay is that it makes sense to talk about rhetoric today, as Holzapfel does, because it is a medium to make a projection of the world and because it may be a good moment to propose a projection of a different world; a projection where need to have a full audience to change and take down what exists today and what we don’t like as such. Al leer el análisis del filósofo Cristóbal Holzapfel sobre la nueva retórica de Perelman y sobre la retórica en sí misma, no podemos evitar preguntarnos dónde reside la utilidad de la retórica hoy. Una respuesta sensata nos conecta con el periodo de los sofistas y el de los humanistas, en los que el lenguaje era una poderosa herramienta para cambiar el mundo. Sin embargo, Holzapfel llama la atención sobre la importancia que tiene hoy en día la retórica en la construcción de nuestro mundo, más o menos del mismo modo que vemos en los periodos de los sofistas y los humanistas. La tesis de este ensayo es que sí tiene sentido hablar hoy de retórica, como hace Holzapfel, porque es el medio para realizar una proyección de mundo y porque tal vez este sea un buen momento para proponer una proyección de un mundo diferente; una proyección para la que necesitamos contar con un auditorio nutrido para cambiar y en definitiva abatir lo que hay y lo que no nos gusta. (shrink)