In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 109-118 [Access article in PDF] Editing the Rhetorical Tradition Patricia Bizzell The rhetorical tradition is always being edited. I know because I have edited it myself—that's a sort of pun, in which the words "the rhetorical tradition" refer both to a book and to the cultural phenomenon the book represents. Bruce Herzberg and I (2001) have co-edited an anthology entitled The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings (...) from Classical Times to the Present. That project also involved editing the tradition itself, because, at least since the days of Isidore of Seville, it is through inclusions and exclusions in anthologies such as ours that the rhetorical tradition is established, grows, and changes. Anthologies seem always to have played a large role in the definition of the rhetorical tradition because the accessibility of texts has so often been an issue in the study of rhetoric, whether transmission problems have been caused by the dissipation of classical learning at the end of the Roman period or are caused by the vagaries of print publication today. Then and now, the changing shape of the tradition may be discerned from the tables of contents of anthologies, a circumstance that has become especially evident to me now that we have had the opportunity to edit our volume twice. The tables of contents of the first edition, appearing in 1990, and the second, in 2001, show both some enduring similarities and some interesting differences.It is important to remember that what we inherit as the "rhetorical tradition," for blessing or curse, comprises at least three modalities: texts deemed worthy of rhetorical study, methods of analyzing those texts, and methods of teaching rhetoric according to precepts and principles derived from those texts. Such a description of our cultural legacy would seem to put texts at the center of the tradition, and indeed, anthologies focus our attention on the rhetorical tradition as a set of texts. Tables of contents organized chronologically suggest a neat progression of supposedly major works marching through the centuries, but why those particular works? In [End Page 109] the study of rhetoric as in the study of imaginative literature, scholars now realize that these supposedly inevitable textual monuments to an unbroken and progressively more sophisticated discipline are in fact quarried from among the masses of material each era produces by traditions, that is, methodological and pedagogical traditions, in how to study rhetoric. Although the tradition appears to be text-based, how we wish to analyze verbal productions and how we prefer to teach the art of producing them govern our choices of rhetorical texts to preserve, elevate, or delete. And modern histories of rhetoric have shown that the preferences governing these choices arise out of complex cultural factors relating to gender, race, social class, national identity, and more.Once upon a time, these choices were dominated by the preferences of socially privileged men who saw Western culture as the best in the world, and that culture itself as springing primarily from Greek and Roman roots. As Walter Ong (1981) has explained in Fighting for Life, these men believed that education in rhetoric must be for men only and that boys must be introduced to it via agonistic competition. From these assumptions sprang buttresses for what we might call the "traditional tradition" in the study of rhetoric, a progression of texts written by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Erasmus, Bacon, Blair, and so on. This kind of study of rhetoric required extensive education, first, in Latin and Greek, often inculcated with the aid of corporal punishment, as Ong describes, and it persisted well into the twentieth century (though, one trusts, with much less flogging—that went out with co-education, as Ong explains). For example, until 1936, Greek was a graduation requirement at the Jesuit college where I teach, the College of the Holy Cross, and Latin was not dropped as a graduation requirement there until 1959 (the college was still all male, but the rationale for dropping the requirement appears to have centered upon the need to make room in the curriculum for pre-professional studies). Here... (shrink)

In the Renaissance, educating for philosophy was integrated with educating for an active role in society, and both were conditioned by the prevailing educational theories based on humanist revisions of the trivium. I argue that women's education in the Renaissance remained tied to grammar while the education of men was directed toward action through eloquence. This is both a result of and a condition for the greater restriction on the social opportunities for women.

Intra- and intergroup conflict are likely to have been recurrent features of human evolutionary history; however, little research has investigated the factors that affect men’s combat alliance decisions. The current study investigated whether features of previous one-on-one combat with an opponent affect men’s interest in allying with that opponent for future group combat. Fifty-eight undergraduate men recruited from a psychology department subject pool participated in a one-on-one laboratory fight simulation. We manipulated fight outcome, perceived fighter health asymmetry, and the presence (...) of a witness over six sets of five rounds of fighting. Following each set, we asked men how interested they would be in allying with their opponent for future group combat. We found that men were more interested in allying with their opponent for future group combat if their opponent won the fight or if a witness was present, but perceived fighter-health asymmetry did not affect men’s decision to ally with their opponent. Exploratory analyses revealed a two-way interaction between fight outcome and the presence of a witness, such that winners without a witness present expressed less interest in allying with their opponent for future group combat. Our findings suggest that men attend to the benefits of allying with a man who has demonstrated relatively superior fighting ability. Alliance with a previous opponent for group combat may vary with the relationship value of the opponent and the utility of demonstrating cooperativeness to third-party observers. These findings inform our understanding of coalition formation. (shrink)