The author had had a plan for a kind of melodrama constructed around two orders of motivation. In the foreground of the stage, there was to be a series of realistic incidents, dealing with typical human situations, such as family quarrels, scenes at a business office, lovers during courtship, a public address by a spell-binder, etc. In the background, like a set of comments on this action, there was to be a primeval forest filled with mythically prehistoric monsters, marauding and (...) fighting in silent pantomime. These two realms were to have no overt connection with each other. The monsters in the "prehistoric" background would pay no attention to the everyday persons of the... (shrink)

In the introduction to his recent book outlining a "deep rhetoric" that can affirm rhetoric's "philosophical foundations," James Crosswhite celebrates a remark made by the late Henry Johnstone, the founding and long-time editor of Philosophy and Rhetoric. Johnstone, claims Crosswhite, "once suggested that rhetoric was an attempt to be 'philosophy without tears'". The passage to which Crosswhite refers appears in Johnstone's foreword to the book Rhetoric and Philosophy, a collection of essays edited by Richard Cherwitz. There, in a bungled bid (...) to praise rhetoric's "increased interest in philosophy during the past few decades," Johnstone attributes the "belief that [rhetoric] is 'philosophy without tears'"... (shrink)