My intention is to demonstrate how Hobbes’ attempts to adapt two ancient institutions from Roman Law to his own time and knowledge of theology and philosophy. Treason could be quite significant within the context of Hobbes’ understanding of the figure of the sovereign and sovereignty. The central part of the text is an endeavor to ascertain the source and unconditional condition for treason as such, within the framework of Hobbes’ theory of representation which he writes about in Chapter 16 of (...) the Leviathan. The act or performance in which we could perhaps recognize a traitorous gesture could be found in the so-called paradox of representation. The “traitor” breaks the chain of the transfer of power and empowerment, thus stops representation, and puts an end to speaking in the name of the other. If it is possible to discover whether this is possible and whether speaking and acting in one’s own name always carries elements of treason, then we can conclude that differing forms of “direct” speech and action are “acts of treason.” In that case, what interests me is whether “treason” is found within the heart of representative democracy, and thus if it is de facto an integral part of a democratic order and society. (shrink)

The ‘constructivist turn’ in political representation literature has clarified that representation is crucial in forging identities – through the creation of ideological and symbolic representations that mobilize and coalesce otherwise scattered and undefined social forces – and thus also why it is essentially an interpretative and performative activity. In this article I argue that, as a consequence of this emphasis on interpretation and performativity, this approach makes clear why the ethos of representatives is important in representation. To prove this, I (...) employ some insights from rhetoric. Rhetorical persuasion and democratic representation, indeed, call for a similar kind of judgment, as they both need to mediate between opposing exigencies: rhetoric between attentiveness to the specificity of the audience and the creation of new beliefs, and representation between being responsive to specific interests and giving them a new articulation. Mediating this tension requires an exercise of judgment that, being directed toward the future, inevitably introduces uncertainty into the relation. This is why both in rhetoric and representation the ethos is an essential element. However, as I argue in the conclusion, the personal qualities that should be considered relevant here are above political qualities, rather than technical or moral ones. (shrink)

Topoi in Critical Discourse Analysis Topos is one of the most widely-used concepts from classical argumentation theory. It found its way not only in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics; it found its way in everyday life and everyday conversation as well.In this article, I will examine the role that topoi play in Critical Discourse Analysis. Starting with definitions from Aristotle and Cicero, contrasting them with new conceptualisations by Perelman and Toulmin, and examining the superficial use of topoi in everyday conversation, (...) I will try to show that Critical Discourse Analysis relies mostly on simplified, unreflected use of topoi as found in everyday use, thus neglecting much more productive, theoretical elaborations of the concept. (shrink)

Raquel Cascales and Luis Echarte focus on the development of practical wisdom and what they call ‘seeing with the heart’ for science students by means of reading science fiction literature. They argue that literature can bring the student into contact with the reality of moral life as moral dilemmas are made concrete by the characters and circumstances in a novel. They provide an analysis of how Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World can be read in the classroom and show how the (...) novel invites students to think about the role of science in society, the evolutionary paradigm, advances in genetic and psychological manipulation, as well as questions concerning human emotions,suffering, and friendship. (shrink)

Recalling a public lecture that Georg Simmel gave in Berlin in 1910, Paul Fechter described him as `philosophizing with his whole body'. This article focuses on the role of the communicative body in the production, reproduction and reception of sociological ideas by investigating the dissemination of Simmel's sociological thought through the medium of the lecture. It utilizes contemporary reports of Simmel's lecturing style as observational data, and his own writings on the `Sociology of the Senses' and the `Aesthetic Importance of (...) the Face' as a theoretical framework. This examination of Simmel's lectures, focusing on both physiognomic expression and perception, reveals that the lecture as a complex communicative event is structured on a dialectic of closeness and distance. (shrink)

Arendt's concept of common sense has generally been misunderstood. It is almost exclusively interpreted in light of Kant's common sense, either as an espousal of the latter or as a distortion of it. This narrow reading of Arendtian common sense has led to a problem, as her uses of the concept do not always fit its Kantian understanding. This has led to accusing her of being inconsistent, or as holding on to several, incompatible concepts of common sense.This article argues that (...) Arendt has one complex concept of common sense, used more or less consistently throughout her writings. Rather than understanding Arendt's common sense in light of Kant's, as most readers do, I demonstrate its links to Aristotle and to the eighteenth‐century Scottish school of common sense. By doing so I turn attention to a difficulty that has thus far not been adequately treated, namely the fact that Arendt presents two, allegedly contradictory pictures of the relation between common sense on the one hand and science and philosophy on the other: a picture in which science and philosophy depend upon common sense, versus one in which they find themselves in a conflict that eventually leads to the loss or demise of common sense. The last part of the article suggests a way to settle the tension between these two pictures, by understanding the political significance Arendt ascribes to them as two distinct yet complementary ways of approaching the modern phenomenon of totalitarianism. (shrink)

What did it mean to “vulgarize” in Renaissance Italy? Was it simply a matter of translating into the vernacular, or did it mean making a text more accessible to the people – to in some sense popularize it? The answer is far from simple and certainly never one-sided; therefore, each individual case needs to be independently assessed on its own merits. This article seeks to shed some light at least on the major treatments of the theory of vulgarization by the (...) likes of Ludovico Castelvetro, Faustus Longianus, Francesco Robortello, Alessandro Piccolomini, Orazio Toscanella and Girolamo Catena, which were central to the debate from the 1540s onwards. (shrink)

Hyperbole is an easily misunderstood and misused trope, and it is largely unexplored in current rhetorical studies. Yet, at moments within thought and discourse, the excessiveness of hyperbole elicits a constructive, transformative ambiguity that can reveal alternative epistemological and ontological insights. Indeed, hyperbole is often the most effective way of trying to express seemingly impossible and inexpressible positions. I argue for the reexploration and critical examination of hyperbole, and I offer a theoretical framework from which to view texts and discourse (...) from a hyperbolic perspective. I identify the metafunction of hyperbole, and I offer two specific functions of hyperbole. Hyperbole is more than simply an obvious and intentional exaggeration and thus can benefit from an exploration that considers it beyond its traditional tropological limits. It can be engaged as a mode of inquiry in order to delve into the complexities and paradoxes of theo-philosophical discourse, and it can also be appropriated as a critical position from which one might, for example, propose interpretations of various textual expressions that differ from their more normative interpretations. (shrink)

How can citizens construct the political authority under which they will live? I argue that Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) answers this question concerning the constitutive power of political and normative agency by employing four dimensions of mimesis from the Greek and Roman traditions. And I argue that mimesis accounts for the know-how, or power/knowledge, the general ‘man’ draws upon in constructing the commonwealth. Hobbes revalues poetic mimesis through his stylistic decisions, including the invitation to the reader to read ‘himself’ in (...) the portrait of the general man depicted in the text. Hobbes aims for Leviathan to change the ethical dispositions of its readers, turning them from bad to good men as they witness the general man undergoing this ethical transformation in the transition from the state of nature to the civil state. He emphasizes the anthropological dimension of mimesis to explain political disorder since he argues that men assess the honor others attribute them by observing signs and gestures in others’ behavior. Hobbes employs the linguistic dimension of mimesis to describe how men acting as agents can build a normative consensus out of the state of nature. This article positions mimesis as a key term for understanding the intersection between aesthetics and politics before the term ‘aesthetics’ came into parlance. (shrink)

This paper analyses the features of Kant’s view of memory, which Kant himself described explicitly in his lectures on anthropology and implicitly in the A edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. I shall offer a review of literature on Kant’s view of memory up to this day. I suggest that memory is a cognitive faculty that has the power to store and reproduce representations. Kant distinguishes among three different kinds of memorization which are relevant for human cognition. I offer (...) reasons to hold that imagination and memory must be differentiated by their functioning, although the first one grounds the second one. Finally, I hold that certain functions of memory need to be presupposed at a transcendental level, in which memory would play a fundamental function with regard to the possibility of experience. Resumen Este artículo analiza los rasgos de la concepción de la memoria de Kant, los cuales él describió explícitamente en sus lecciones sobre antropología e implícitamente en la edición A de la Crítica de la Razón Pura. Proporcionaré una revisión de la literatura sobre la concepción de Kant acerca de la memoria hasta el presente. Sugiero que la memoria es una facultad cognitiva que tiene el poder de almacenar y reproducir representaciones. Kant distingue tres tipos diferentes de memorización, los cuales son relevantes para el conocimiento humano. Asimismo, proporciono razones para sostener que la imaginación y la memoria deben ser diferenciadas por su funcionamiento, aunque la primera es el fundamento de la segunda. Finalmente, sostengo que ciertas funciones de la memoria necesitan ser presupuestas a un nivel trascendental, en el cual la memoria cumpliría una función fundamental con respecto a la posibilidad de la experiencia. (shrink)

Recent rhetorical critiques of philosophy and science assume a contrast between rational argument and rhetoric that is inherited from an antirhetorical tradition in philosophy. This article rejects that assumption. Rhetoric is compatible with reasoned discourse in a strong sense originally outlined by Aristotle. Rhetorical analysis reveals the inadequacy of purely demonstrative accounts of rational argument and cognitive accounts of the conditions for rational assent to propo sitions. Social studies of the rhetoric of science, and in particular of credibility claims, need (...) not fall into the forms of relativism and global antirealism with which they have become associated. (shrink)

Originating in the Sophistic pedagogy of Protagoras and reflecting the sceptical practice of the New Academy, Quintilian's rhetorical pedagogy places a special emphasis on the juxtaposition of multiple, competing claims. This inherently dialogical approach to argumentation is referred to here as controversia and is on full display in Quintilian's own argumentative practice. More important to this paper, however, is the role of controversia as an organizing principle for Quintilian's rhetorical curriculum. In particular, Quintilian introduces the protocols of controversia through a (...) series of progressively more complex exercises in imitation, role-playing, and declamation (now referred to as situational games). All of these exercises are open for adaptation by contemporary teachers who would promote a dialogical approach to argument, i.e. argument with its methods of inquiry, invention, and judgment based on direct interaction with opposing parties. (shrink)

Critics in both philosophy and literary studies have rightly emphasized a “poetics of transition” relating the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson to that of William James. However, less attention has been given to the ways that Emerson's philosophy of rhetoric correlates with James's rhetorical perspectives on psychology and philosophy. Fundamentally rhetorical interests in the contiguous circumstances and contingent reception of thinking link James to Emerson beyond matters of poetics and style. This article correlates Emerson's understanding of a rhetoric of metonymy (...) as the basis of thinking with the principle of contiguity crucial to James's philosophy of mind. This relation between rhetoric and philosophy reiterates a rhetoric of mind that both Emerson and James associate with the older liberal education of the college just at the point that this curriculum is displaced by the professional, specialized disciplines of the emerging university in late nineteenth-century America. (shrink)

The third and final installment of this book-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation” treats two further writers in seventeenth-century England whose work is not representative of any stance or discourse that contextualist historians have recognized as available in that era. In Aemelia Lanyer's poetry, we find a resistance to established perspectives that is related to her sense that divine signification is always incomplete and that, therefore, the diffidence of female cognition is superior, when approaching religious texts, (...) to the assertive mentality that she associates with men. Despite his sex, however, and his reputation for theological and political radicalism, Milton too explicitly contends that the interpretation of scripture should always be “non-committal” because its signification is always incomplete. The “very magnitude” of the “great mystery” of the Incarnation, Milton argues in De Doctrina Christiana, should encourage the reader's mind to stand on “guard from the outset” against the tendency to make “rash or hasty assertions.” The urge to tamper with, pry into, add to, or hasten to understand the signifiers of divine meaning is shown, in Paradise Lost, to be the original sin of the first human couple. As much as for Lanyer, then, sex is for Milton bound up with hermeneutics—and, for both poets, the individual's relationship with God is a consuming passion, about which one may report a phenomenology of affects but can offer no contentions or arguments. (shrink)

Often, when Seneca wants to defend a thesis that seems original to him in relation to the Stoic school, he claims to enjoy distracting himself with subtle games that quickly become boring puzzles....

The purpose of this study is to focus on the coexistence, during the transmission of the doctrine on the Topics in the early Middle Ages, of two different interpretations: although both emerge from two commentaries on Cicero’s Topics, however, they gave rise to two different readings: the one transmitted by Marius Victorinus who thought the topics almost exclusively in the service of Rhetoric, the other conceived by Boethius who intended to restore the centrality that the Topics had in the Aristotelian (...) Logic, by subordinating the rethorical Topics to dialectical Topics. My conclusion is that the Early Middle Ages can be considered, from an epistemological point of view, as a long boetiana aetas. Although the corpus of Boethius’s logical writings was not yet available until the second half of the 11th century, Boethius’s methodological approach on the Topics somehow continued to support the slow but constant absorption of the topical doctrine into the new Christian sensibility. (shrink)

Jim Mackenzie; Authority, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 57–65, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1988.tb00177.x.

Perelman's work has been very influential in various disciplines, among them philosophy, rhetoric and law. Especially the typology of argumentative schemes which he developed together with L. Olbrechts-Tyteca has been considered as an excellent classification of arguments in natural language. There are, however, some weaknesses of this typology which make its application to empirical research quite difficult, namely, the lack of explicitness and the absence of clear criteria of demarcation. Still, the typology is highly relevant for empirical research, if these (...) weaknesses are removed. This is illustrated with an example: the scheme called ‘the division of the whole into its parts’ by Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca is described explicitly and then applied to the analysis of a sample of everyday arguments (mostly taken from newspapers). (shrink)

This paper deals with what has been called "ars inveniendi" (’art of finding‘) in antiquity, medieval and early modern times. A survey of different techniques of finding tenable and relevant arguments is presented (among them, the Topical tradition, Status theory, Debate theory, Encyclopedic systems, Creativity techniques). Their advantages and disadvantages are critically compared. It is suggested that a mixture of strategies of finding arguments should be used. Finally, a few remarks showing the relationship beween the strategies of finding arguments and (...) creativity in general are given. (shrink)

Despite an initially warm reception, over the past two centuries assessments of the literary character of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations have gradually but unmistakably turned negative. This transformation in the public reception of Smith’s text began during his lifetime and culminated in Heilbroner’s assertion that Smith wrote with ‘an encyclopedic mind, but not with the precision of an orderly one’. However, where Heilbroner and many of his predecessors saw obscurity and tedious attention to minor detail, recent scholarship has (...) begun to perceive remarkable literary subtlety and nuance. This article continues and builds upon that project. It commences with an assessment of three competing explanations of Smith’s literary style and settles on a philosophic and pedagogic explanation of The Wealth of Nations’ distinctive composition. In discerning a unique heuristic strategy and philosophic object in the text, the article places particular emphasis on Smith’s employment of syntactic complexity, stylistic juxtaposition and elliptical citation. The article concludes, somewhat ironically, with the observation that The Wealth of Nations itself succumbed to the maladies of the emerging commercial world-view, in classroom and market place, that its careful construction aimed to ameliorate. (shrink)

The pragmatics underlying Paul Grice’s analysis of utterance-meaning provide a powerful framework for investigating the commitments arguers undertake. Unfortunately, the complexity of Grice’s analysis has frustrated appropriate reliance on this important facet of his work. By explicating Cicero’s use of apostrophe in his famous “First Catilinarian” this essay attempts to show that a full complex of reflexive gricean speaker intentions in essentially to seriously saying and meaning something.

A recent conference had as a theme, Ethics in the Fractured State. That theme presumes that there is a fractured state – if not everywhere then somewhere, if not now, then soon. This paper looks at the nature of the fracture and at the implications for the teaching of ethics. Three important lines of fracture – plural, secular, anti-business – are considered in the paper, each described and distinguished separately. The fracture makes ethics more relevant not only in business schools (...) but also in professional faculties such as engineering and pharmacy. The recent rise in anti-business sentiment and its potential impact for the teaching of ethics, especially business and professional ethics, is discussed. The focus is on the implications for the teaching of applied ethics. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe secret of invention or the art of inventing has recently become the object of positive or experimental research, aimed at discovering the logic of the initial mental processes that lead to “innovation.” But the problem is old and goes back to antiquity: The art of memory, rhetoric, symbolics. Does the succession of thought in invention follow a rule, such that its variations could be classified? Here I offer but a general direction: There is an analogy between the two (...) relations: invention/innovation and fecundation/maturation – namely, a male and a female principle.The Ancients thought that inventing was a divine art and that man receives the spark to then brood over its fruit in his mind. Today's still dominant materialist tendency insists on the importance of this secondary maturation and minimizes the role of the primordial spark.Thus becomes possible the ranking according to a unique order — but not without hesitations and guilt — of thinkers as far apart as Mandeville, Adam Smith, Hegel, Buffon, Rousseau, and Herder, to find the contemporary trend to which François Dagognet belongs. (shrink)

Edward R. Murrow's reputation began and grew with World War II. This analysis, focused on his radio reporting, concerns two reports filed after he accompanied a bombing mission over Germany. The two reports provide a unique analytic opportunity because their foundation is in a singular experience. It is an analysis of the decision process, with ethical questions central to the development of the story, it is an application of classical ethical theory to a historical object for the purposes of creating (...) an understanding of media heritage and the application of moral philosophy. (shrink)

How do Dutch people let each other know that they disagree? What do they say when they want to resolve their difference of opinion by way of an argumentative discussion? In what way do they convey that they are convinced by each other’s argumentation? How do they criticize each other’s argumentative moves? Which words and expressions do they use in these endeavors? By answering these questions this short essay provides a brief inventory of the language of argumentation in Dutch.

Just as sports scholars have long been frustrated by the relative paucity of philosophical writing about sports in the classical tradition, biblical scholars have been surprised by the persistent u...

The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding missing (...) reasons, for deductive arguments, e.g., semantic tableaux are suggested. (shrink)