This paper reassesses the Cooper-Hadot debate surrounding how students are converted to philosophy as a way of life (section 1) through engagement with philosophical protreptics. In section 2, the paper identifies the core “argument from finality” in philosophical protreptics seeking to convert non-philosophers to philosophy, starting from the universal human interest in securing eudaimonia. In line with Cooper, this argument seeks to persuade prospective students on rational grounds, so that their choice to philosophise would be rationally motivated. In section 3.1, (...) the paper illustrates how in Plato's Euthydemus (a) the choice to undertake philosophy is rationally justified by Socrates, using the eudaimonistic argument from finality. In section 3.2, by recourse to Aristotle's Protrepticus, the paper shows how the protreptic texts also compared philosophy to other intellectual pursuits, notably rhetoric, so as to recommend philosophy specifically for delivering a directive wisdom concerning how to live. (shrink)

Early Chinese thought enjoys a wide appeal, in the scholarly world as much as elsewhere, as people are keen on learning about the ideas of Confucius, Mencius, and other thinkers whose views have shaped traditional Chinese culture. In the study of early Chinese thought, emphasis has long been on what thinkers said, not on how they proffered their views. Even studies that do consider the how, tend to focus on logic and argumentation, rather than rhetoric. Fortunately, in the past few (...) decades growing attention has been paid to Chinese rhetoric which has led to an impressive number of publications. This work briefly outlines rhetoric in the West and in China. (shrink)

This essay discusses the most recent manifestations of the debate of the law and literature movement. The essay traces the evolution of the Law and Literature schools and identifies some of their adherents and conclusions, shows how these schools have influenced the conceptual development and teaching of American law, presents connections between the Critical Legal Studies and Law and Economics movements in the U.S., and raises questions about the Law and Literature movement.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric in History as Theory and Praxis: A Blast from the PastThomas B. FarrellPhilosophies of history have fallen on hard times. Grand comic metanarratives were the first casualty, auguring ironically in the futility of their own pronouncements. Positive and negative teleologies were next to fall. But if finalized themes and Utopian schemes are not exactly in vogue, it remains the case that history—as systematic documentation and reminiscence about the (...) past—is and must be ongoing. This is transparently because things that matter continue to happen: with ideas, cultures, nature itself. And even if we never really learn from history, all other things being equal, history has shown that it is helpful to keep careful records. In an age that personalizes nearly everything, it is easy enough to recognize the familiar dissociation of act and accountability on a personal scale. What may appear as nothing more serious than petty truancy for a person may become amnesia, revisionism, and much worse when the zone of accountability is widened, the deeds are deepened, the stakes are increased. In each case, the argument is the same: identification through a sort of opaque empathy. In short, you had to be there.I intend this essay to be a meditation on some of the ways my amorphousarea of study, rhetorical theory, finds itself implicated with history, some possible avenues it may open for invention and judgment in history. Time permitting, I will also hazard a speculation on that great chimera [End Page 323] that dangles before fields of scholarship and historical projects alike: that of progress.Aristotle’s famous definition of rhetoric, “that its function is not to persuade but to see the available means of persuasion in each case” (1991, 35), begins my inquiry in a productively ambiguous way. For one thing, the definition locates the function of rhetoric directly within the sphere of human history, through the terms available and in each case. For unless we believe that means of persuasion are fixed and that cases are eternally recurring, what the rhetorician “sees” must vary with the times. A second note maybe in order here. For Aristotle’s term for seeing, theoresai, also happens to be the Greek root term for what we call “theory.” In its most fundamental sense, then, the ocular-centered aesthetic of Greek tradition gives us theory as a mode of “seeing.” I could add at this point that this “seeing” needs to be shared with others and that there are many ways of “seeing,” but this maybe a less-than-productive ambiguity, given my aims here.Instead, I wish to consider three distinct construals of what sort of practice rhetoric is, along with some implications of these construals for the place of rhetoric as theory and practice in human history. These three construals are rhetoric as productive art, rhetoric as constitutive art, and rhetoricas inventional art.We begin with the conception of rhetoric as productive art. Simply put, this means that rhetoric makes things, prototypically speeches. Such a conception, like the other two I will be discussing, has ebbed and flowed throughout the long history of rhetorical tradition. The Sophists, when not purporting to teach virtue, did profess their competence in instructing other show to create persuasive documents. Such a preoccupation also appears in rhetorics of belles lettres and elocution. Today it can be found in modern composition curricula and in the rather different world of the professional speechwriter.There have been very few attempts to link an exclusively productive art conception of rhetoric to Aristotle and still fewer successful attempts. To view the matter this way, one would need to think of the Rhetoric and the Poetics as essentially parallel documents (one makes poems; the other, speeches). One would also have to ignore a wealth of disconfirming evidence. Nonetheless, Alan G. Gross is able to write (in the aptly titled collection Rereading Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”), “‘What did Aristotle mean by rhetoric?’ At this juncture, I can do little more than reiterate my claim that rhetoric is a productive art, and only a productive art” (2000, 35). George Kennedy, the translator of our earlier passage, sees the matter rather differently: “What [End Page 324] kind of... (shrink)

This paper deals with the treatment of figures of speech in Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s Treatise on Argumentation (TA), and, more broadly, with the place of figures in argumentation theory. The contrast between two conceptions (or two domains)\n of rhetoric, “a rhetoric of figures” and “a rhetoric of argument” can be traced back to Ramus, and it has been revived in\n the seventies through the perception of an incommensurability between Perelman’s “New Rhetoric” and the École de Liège’s “General\n Rhetoric”. Modern theories (...) of argumentation, oriented towards the characterization and denunciation of fallacious discourse,\n emphasize the gap between sound argumentative discourse and rhetorical discourse seen as a “powerful instrument of error and\n deceit” (Locke). This concept of argument presupposes a vision of language as ideal/transparent—a revised language that is\n not the language of ordinary argumentation. Figures are not basically “decorative”; they are manifestations of the complex\n process of language structuring in speech. Thus rejecting figures amounts to a negation of discourse as such. The second section\n turns to a somewhat neglected aspect of the TA, its both decisive and somewhat cavalier theory of figures of speech, and its extended use and re-definition of a complex set of figures. We argue that the TA, in its quest for descriptive adequacy, breaks with the traditional and comfortable concept of figures as useless fallacious\n “ornaments” and provides us with the first description of what could be characterized as the semantic level of ordinary argumentative\n discourse. This will be shown on the case of “figures of choice, presence and communion”, and could be extended to the discursive\n construction of objects and participants, including the speaker and her emotions. (shrink)

Students of Stoic philosophy, especially of Stoic ethics, have a lot to swallow. Virtues and emotions are bodies; virtue is the only good, and constitutes happiness, while vice is the only evil; emotions are judgements ; all sins are equal; and everyone bar the sage is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Non-Stoics in antiquity seem for the most part to find these doctrines as bizarre as we do. Their own philosophical or ideological perspectives, and the criticisms of the Stoa (...) to which these gave rise, are no less open to criticism than are the paradoxes and puzzles under attack – but they may be, often are, better documented, less provocatively attention-begging, or simply more familiar. Even disputes within the Stoa can be obscured or distorted by modern prejudices. Posidonius rejected Chrysippus' theory of a unitary soul, one rational through and through, on the grounds that such a theory could not satisfactorily account for the genesis of bad – excessive and irrational – emotions, the πάθη . Posidonius' own Platonising, tripartite soul feels more familiar to us because the Republic tends to be a set text rather more often than do the fragments of Chrysippus' de anima; and the balance in Plato's favour is unlikely to change. When Posidonius wrote, on the other hand, the Chrysippean soul was school orthodoxy, and Platonism the latest thing in radical chic. (shrink)

China has a longstanding tradition of stressing the values of harmony and coherence, and Chinese society has often been portrayed as a culture in which conflict avoidance is viewed more positively than direct confrontation and argumentation. In order to evaluate the validity of this claim, this paper sketches Chinese people’s feelings and understandings about interpersonal arguing by reporting results of a data collection in China, using measures of argumentativeness, verbal aggressiveness, argument frames, and personalization of conflict. These results were compared (...) to those from a US sample. Chinese and US data differed in complex ways, but did not show Chinese respondents to be more avoidant. The Chinese correlations among variables were a reasonable match to expectations based on Western argumentation theories, although they did not replicate the US results precisely. The paper offers evidence that Chinese respondents had a more sophisticated understanding of interpersonal arguing than their US counterparts, and were more sensitive to the constructive possibilities of face-to-face disagreement. (shrink)

The Rhetoric to Alexander (second half of the fourth century B.C.) is among the oldest contributions to the study of argumentation. From antiquity on, this treatise, which abounds in opportunistic advice, has come under heavy criticism on normative grounds. And yet, as I shall maintain here, it clearly takes into account the requirements of rational argumentation which are still in use today. Moreover, it contains the seeds of a whole series of doctrines found in modern normative argumentation theory. There are (...) reasonable grounds for maintaining that some of these modern doctrines stem indirectly from the tradition to which the Rhetoric to Alexander belongs. (shrink)

This paper will examine chronically derailed church-state separation arguments in order to explore the extent to which rhetorical and dialectical approaches can be reconciled. I will consider broader conceptions of rhetoric than those employed to date in studies of strategic manoeuvring. While rhetorical appeals, such as claims of persecution, can terminally polarize church-state arguments, they may also serve as means for recovering from dialectical derailment.

If there is a specifically rhetorical approach to argumentation, I believe it is one that studies argumentation that is specifically rhetorical. So if we want to ask, “What is the rhetorical approach to argumentation?” we should first ask, “What is rhetorical argumentation?” It is worthwhile focusing on this question because various misleading definitions of rhetorical argumentation have been in circulation for almost as long as rhetoric has existed. Some misleading definitions see the defining property of rhetorical argumentation in the arguer’s (...) aim. And that aim, which is often assumed to override all the arguer’s other considerations, is strategic: to persuade his hearer(s) by any available means and .. (shrink)

Only all the effete latecomers, with their overly clever wit, believe that they can be done with the historical power of seeming by explaining it as “subjective,” where the essence of this “subjectivity” is something extremely dubious.The Gorgias dialogue is widely recognized as the source of Plato’s harshest condemnation of rhetoric. In it, he ultimately concludes that rhetoric is not “a technē but a knack, because it can give no rational explanation of the thing it is catering for, nor of (...) the nature of the things it is providing, and so it can’t tell you the cause of each. And I don’t give the name ‘technē’ to something which is unreasoning”.1Perhaps less widely.. (shrink)

By elaborating upon pivotal twentieth-century studies in language, representation, and subjectivity, Being Made Strange reorients the study of rhetoric according to the discursive formation of subjectivity. The author develops a theory of how rhetorical practices establish social, political, and ethical relations between self and other, individual and collectivity, good and evil, and past and present. He produces a novel methodology that analyzes not only what an individual says, but also the social, political, and ethical conditions that enable him or her (...) to do so. This book also offers valuable ethical and political insights for the study of subjectivity in philosophy, cultural studies, and critical theory. (shrink)

This essay explores the dialectics of theory and practice in terms of argumentation theory. Adapting Jonsen and Toulmin's (1988) notion of a Theory-Practice spectrum, it conceives Theory and Practice as extreme ends of a continuum and discourses as falling at various points along the continuum. Every theoritical discourse has essential practical aspects, and every practical discourse has essential theoretical aspects. Practices are theorized to varying degrees but every practice is thorized to some degree. Reflective discourse, which is discourse about practice, (...) moves to and fro along the Theory-Practice continuum. Reflective discourse involves argumentation. Practical argumentation connects theory to practice; it appeals to general warrants, which may be simple or may tap into elaborate conceptual structures, in order to establish grounds for practical judgments. A practical discipline is a relatively coherent intellectual-professional enterprise that cultivates a field of social practice by engaging within itself and with practitioners in a reflective discourse. The argumentation of a practical discipline, like ordinary practical reflection, moves to and fro along the Theory-Practice continuum but in more methodical steps informed by systematic methodological reflection on the reflective process itself. (shrink)

(1994). Rhetoric of environmental policy: From critical practice to the social construction of theory. Social Epistemology: Vol. 8, Public Indifference to Population Issues, pp. 289-310.

Do we determine our actions, or are our actions ruled by the structure of our society? Does our culture create us, or do we create our culture? Within history and social theory there is a fundamental division of opinion between those who explain human action by considering the intentions, reasons and motives of individuals and those who use broader social structures. Structural Idealism presents a theory of social and historical explanation which argues that “idealists” such as Hegel, who champion human (...) agency, and “materialists” such as Marx, who support social structure, have grasped but part of a larger truth. The book contends that we have to explain human actions simultaneously by both the ideas human actors bring to a situation and the way in which previous actions have created social structures that condition those ideas. Through this realization we can see how all forms of knowledge, from the historical roots of modern philosophy to today’s popular culture, both condition and are conditioned by structural ideals. This book challenges our perception of how cultures and ideals are formed, and shows that while structural ideals allow people to co-operate as they work toward goals — their own or those of their community — these images of perfection, so easily accepted as the unalterable structure of our society, can be changed, and are changed, by individuals. Structural Idealism asks us to think beneath the surface of our society, and will be of special interest to philosophers, sociologists, historians and cultural theorists. (shrink)

My paper aims to find potential elements of comparison between ancient oratoria popularis and modern populist oratory. I will consider case studies drawn from Gracchan speech style and from the oratory of Donald Trump.

General agreement exists among historians of rhetoric that Augustine’s De doctrina christiana is the first original theoretical conceptualization of rhetoric in the West after that of Cicero. Kenneth Burke called book 4 of De doctrina christiana “the first great Christian rhetoric” (50). This general opinion has not changed much: the introduction to a 2008 collection of seminal essays on De doctrina christiana states that it “may be the first significant exploration of the relationship between rhetoric and religion in that Augustine (...) negotiates a union between two seemingly irreconcilable ideologies (that is, religious fideism and rhetoric)” (Hermanson et al. 2008, 7–8). However, this understandable focus on .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some Aspects of Christian Mystical Rhetoric, Philosophy, and PoetryRyan J. StarkThis is an article about poets and poetic philosophers who make spirited arguments. My purpose in particular is to clarify the nature of mystical rhetoric, which needs to be distinguished from secular rhetoric (i.e., “secular” as nonspiritual). As ways of existing in language, they are ontologically incommensurable, and we should treat them as such. Mystical rhetoric is that into (...) which Spirit enters, conveying to both writer and reader some aspect of providential kairos that cannot otherwise be attained. That is, God completes mystical inferences. God participates, illuminating the hearts of those who open themselves to grace through faith. Or, in other words, writers and readers who want to enter into numinous arguments must shelve the hermeneutics of suspicion. An overly critical stance actually diminishes the possibility of insight, even if it is well intended, much like nervous backseat driving, which—though aimed at producing safety—inevitably works against it. I am not suggesting, however, that skeptics are at a complete loss when approaching mystical rhetorical situations. Rather, they simply do not grasp the metaphysical, enchanted, or occult dimensions of the discourses at work, because they have closed themselves off to Spirit or—more commonly—have attempted to transmogrify Spirit into secular concepts, which distorts spirited language and leads to mischaracterizations of religious experience.1 In contrast, I provide a Christian approach to [End Page 260] mystical rhetoric, one that neither discounts nor sidesteps the real presence of the supernatural.Inspired Rhetoric and HermeneuticsFuror poeticus is a key element of mystical persuasion. The phrase literally means “poetical fury,” and the idea behind it in a Christian framework is that the Holy Spirit aids writers in creating imaginative texts (e.g., sonnets, sermons, essays, novels, blogs, etc.) or, in pernicious instances, demons aid writers.2 In either case, a mysterious force helps the author to compose. Moreover, furor touches readers or listeners, a point seldom emphasized but nonetheless central to this sublime practice of composition. Inspired writing requires inspired reading: furor poeticus needs furor lectoris.3 The Spirit aids readers in understanding mystical rhetoric, as long as those readers participate earnestly in the discourse. John Milton (1674, 7.31), for example, famously envisions such a “fit audience” in the third invocation to the Muse in Paradise Lost (i.e., the “great Argument”), where he calls on the reader for hermeneutical verve, a spirited reading to complement his enthusiastic writing. Søren Kierkegaard also writes to an audience capable of spiritually minded hermeneutics, allowing him to perform various edifying dissimulations through pseudonyms: the despairing aesthete, the unscrupulous seducer, the rigid moralist, and so forth. These inspired writers expect believing readers to contribute to their works, to complete their disputations, in fact, through spirited exegesis. Their methods of composition demand it, which is to say that writers touched by furor leave little room in their arguments for the sustainable disposition of the uninspired reader.Cicero explains spirited rhetoric and hermeneutics in De divinatione, where Quintus talks about how inspired readers experience the same type of furor as inspired writers, seers, and prophets: “Men capable of correctly interpreting all these signs of the future seem to approach very near the divine spirit of the gods whose will they interpret, just as scholars do when they interpret the poets” (1938, 226). Scholarship, in other words, is capable of tapping into mystical energy, making the scholars as prophetic as the vates on which they write. In the second book of On Christian Doctrine (1958, 75–78), Augustine also explains the importance of mystical exegesis as a form of prophecy, where sincere readers undergo the same type of inspiration as mystical writers. For Augustine, spirited reading begins with prayer and ends with revelation. In both accounts of furor, Cicero’s and Augustine’s, [End Page 261] the inspired audience and the inspired writer together experience rapture, a divine vision or illumination, which is precisely the type of communion that occurs during mystical discourses.4Still, the idea of seeking communion with God is potentially unsettling. The notion produces anxieties of psychosis, possession, and self-erasure. Plato famously expresses such concerns in Ion, for example... (shrink)

(1994). The rhetoric of science and the challenge of post‐liberal democracy. Social Epistemology: Vol. 8, Public Indifference to Population Issues, pp. 261-271.

This paper presents an analysis of the city council meetings of a northeast Ohio city government. Drawing on grounded theory, conversation analysis, and critical discourse analysis, the paper investigates the participants of the council meetings and the roles they occupy, the kinds of discourse practiced, and the extent of participation in the discourse. The results demonstrate the potential for citizen participation in city government due to citizen access to the council meetings, solicitation of citizen participation, and citizen allotment of designated (...) times to participate in the meetings. However, the findings also demonstrate that the role citizens played, the discourse they used, and the extent of their participation was disproportionate to that of government officials and was significantly limited in both size and scope. (shrink)

This essay argues that Aristotle's categories of oratory are not as useful in judging the methods of Sophistical rhetoric as his presentation of time. The Sophistical argumentative method of “making the weaker the stronger case” is re-evaluated as a political practice. After showing this argument's relation to power and ideology, Aristotle's philosophy, which privileges a procedure of argument consistent with the politics of a polis-ideal rhetoric, is offered as reason for objecting to Sophistical rhetoric. The essay concludes that Sophistical rhetoric (...) prefers the concept of possibility over Aristotelian actuality, and offers a need for an ideological space of radical, generative possibility in rhetorical theory. (shrink)

(1994). Perils of a modern Cassandra: Rhetorical aspects of public indifference to the population explosion. Social Epistemology: Vol. 8, Public Indifference to Population Issues, pp. 221-237.

One of the most intriguing consequences of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, from the perspective of intellectual history, was that it prompted a 20-year-long political and theological controversy about...

(1995). Migrating across disciplinary boundaries: The case of the periodicity paper of David Raup and John Sepkoski. Social Epistemology: Vol. 9, Boundary Rhetorics and the Work of Interdisciplinarity, pp. 151-164.