A recent issue of Report from the Institute for Philosophy and Public Affairs identifies four ethical issues for the 21st century. By not including media ethics, the Report overlooks a crucial logical priority. That oversight is reflected in greater academe where media ethics (unlike, say, biomedical ethics) is scarcely acknowledged. This article argues that communication ethics, as an integral part of the wider enterprise of media literacy, deserves greater prominence in our town-and-gown communities.

Christian Kock’s essays show the essential interconnectedness of practical reasoning, rhetoric and deliberative democracy. They constitute a unique contribution to argumentation theory that draws on – and criticizes – the work of philosophers, rhetoricians, political scientists and other argumentation theorists. It puts rhetoric in the service of modern democracies by drawing attention to the obligations of politicians to articulate arguments and objections that citizens can weigh against each other in their deliberations about possible courses of action.

For Aristotle, the classification of the audience is the basis of distinguishing the main genres of rhetoric. Due to the auditor receiving political, judicial or educational content, there is a distinction into deliberative, judicial, and epideictic rhetoric. There are three more specific ends of rhetoric connected with the three basic types of auditors. Due to the communicative character of rhetoric, these ends are achieved against the background of the relation to the subject of the speech, referring to the decisions made (...) by the auditor. Deliberative rhetoric is speech or writing that attempts to persuade an audience to take (or not to take) some action. The specific end of this rhetorical genre is good. Judicial rhetoric is speech or writing that considers the justice or injustice of a certain charge or accusation. Epideictic rhetoric is speech or writing that praises (encomium) or blames (invective). Persuasion in rhetoric happens because of a specific end: goodness, justice, nobility. Thus, the specific nature of the end of persuasion is taken into account. Perceiving the end against the background of the subject of persuasion allows one to develop a method. The method that determines the applicability of rhetoric occurs in the tradition of peripatetic rhetoric in a non-autonomous way, but is closely related to the end and to the subject of speech. (shrink)

By virtue of its epistemic deficits, propaganda is very much an unethical phenomenon. Coping effectively with propaganda requires a communicative response that confronts its inherent unethicality with ethically grounded resistance. In this article, I propose two congruent plans of communicative action, each of which rests on an apparent ethical connection: J. Michael Sproule's (1994) reclaiming of classical eloquence, and Jonathan Rauch's (1993) provocative program of "liberal science.".

A substantial body of literature has been produced in the twentieth century by religious and philosophical writers on the ethics of belief. Discussion of this topic has generally focused on the processes leading up to belief within the individual, so that it would not be inaccurate to say that for most of these writers ‘the ethics of belief’ means ‘the ethics of coming–to–believe’. There has been little attention among these writers, however, to the moral questions which surround the production or (...) inducement of beliefs in others, to the ethics of persuasion . An extension of the ethics of belief to cover moral issues which arise in connection with persuasion seems reasonable; the ethics of belief, widely construed, might be said to encompass questions about both the production of beliefs within oneself and the inducement of beliefs in others. (shrink)

It has been a decade since the phrase virtue argumentation was introduced, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that it burst onto the scene, it would be just as much of an understatement to say that it has gone unnoticed. Trying to strike the virtuous mean between the extremes of hyperbole and litotes, then, we can fairly characterize it as a way of thinking about arguments and argumentation that has steadily attracted more and more attention from argumentation (...) theorists. We hope it is neither too late for an introduction to the field nor too soon for some retrospective assessment of where things stand. (shrink)

Scholastic philosophy is often associated with dialectical reasoning and the consideration of universal theses, in contrast to the variable and practical questions considered by disciplines such as politics and rhetoric. However, while the primacy of dialectical inquiry in Scholastic thought is difficult to deny, the movement also produced advances in rhetorical theory as well. Specifically, I argue that the works of Thomas Aquinas present a view of rhetorical reasoning and deliberation aligned closely with the virtue of prudence and dependent on (...) sensory experience ordered within the memory. Building from an understanding of rhetoric as an intellectual operation dedicated to the consideration of questions about... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophistical Wisdom:Politikê Aretê and “Logosophia”Christopher Lyle JohnstoneThe pursuit of Wisdom is at the center of the Western intellectual tradition, its attainment the literal ideal and end of all philosophical inquiry. It is recognized by various religions and belief systems as the key to a meaningful, fulfilling, happy life. Yet for all this, its nature remains unclear and the means of its attainment uncertain. Is it one thing, or are (...) there different kinds of wisdom? How is it acquired? Can it be taught or communicated to others? How, if at all, do speech and language figure in the attainment and dissemination of wisdom?The relationship between wisdom and utterance, reflected in the connection between philosophy and rhetoric, has been a focus of intellectual interest in the West since at least the time of Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 500 BCE): Parmenides, Empedocles, Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Bacon, Vico—all have been concerned, either directly or indirectly, with the interrelation of speech or eloquence and what they view as the highest form of knowledge. Recent scholarship has pursued this relationship along several related lines of inquiry, albeit sometimes obliquely. Some investigators have examined the role of speech in the creation of all human knowledge.1 Others have concentrated more particularly on the role of rhetoric in the creation or exercise of wisdom.2 In an effort to illuminate the ancient foundations of these connections, several scholars have lately studied the link between language and thought in Greek philosophy and rhetoric.3My present interest centers on the linkages between wisdom and speech—between sophia and logos—in the teachings of those pivotal thinkers of the fifth-century Greek "Enlightenment," the Older Sophists. Although the doctrines of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Archelaus, and the Atomists took up moral and political topics, presocratic thinkers generally had concentrated on the origins and mechanical workings of the physical world in which human beings live. As contemporaries of Protagoras and Gorgias, the Atomists—Leucippus and Democritus—are particularly noteworthy for having initiated inquiry into [End Page 265] the relationship between custom or law (nomos) and nature or objective reality (physis), which became a central concern for many of the Older Sophists.4 Such moral and political themes were taken up in earnest by the thinkers and teachers who resided in or were drawn to Athens in the fifth century BCE. Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Antiphon, and others raised questions that were fundamentally political and moral: How should one live one's life? What are the values that should guide one's conduct? By what moral standards should our actions be judged, and how are these standards to be discovered? What legitimizes the laws that govern society? Are law and morality rooted in the nature of things, or are they merely matters of custom and convention? Such questions mark a shift in intellectual inquiry away from the sorts of naturalistic, metaphysical, and ontological problems that preoccupied presocratic thinkers and toward a primary concern with matters of praxis, politics, and morality.My aims in this essay are, first, to illuminate the conceptions of wisdom that can be reconstructed from our evidence for the teachings of the Older Sophists, and then to discern the role of speech in the attainment and exercise of this wisdom. The past half-century or so has witnessed a growing interest in the Sophists of fifth-century Athens. This interest is particularly noteworthy because it involves a determination to consider the Sophists on their own terms rather than through Plato's eyes, as had been customary in most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sophistical studies. Though an early precedent was set by Grote's (1846) effort to challenge the Platonist bias in historical treatments of the Sophists, it was such scholars as Untersteiner (1949, 1954), Cornford (1950), Kerferd (1950, 1981), and Guthrie (1968, 1971) who inspired more recent revisionist histories of sophistical ideas.5 More recent studies have sought to illuminate the philosophical foundations of such ideas and their implications for the theory and practice of rhetoric. J. Poulakos (1983a, 1983b, 1984, 1990, 1995), Schiappa (1990, 1991, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999), de Romilly (1992), Consigny (2001), McComisky (2002), Gagarin (2002... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Scholars have understood Aristotle’s theory of equity in two different ways. On the one hand, some claim that equity is an extra-normative criterion, that is, it goes beyond the law and reaches a supra-legal level identified with a metaphysical order of natural justice. On the other hand, some hold that equity is intra-normative, that is, the judge rectifes legal justice without going beyond its limits. Considering this second point of view and by using a methodology that combines legal philosophy (...) and some of the main theories about emotions in ancient Greece, this paper aims to demonstrate that equitable judges should not have broad discretion according to Aristotle’s thought. To hold that claim, I will mainly address the role of emotions in the formation of judgment and the power they have to endanger the possibility of giving just and rational judicial decisions. (shrink)