Richard Janko's acclaimed translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_ is accompanied by the most comprehensive commentary available in English that does not presume knowledge of the original Greek. Two other unique features are Janko's translations with notes of both the _Tractatus Coislinianus_, which is argued to be a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics, and fragments of Aristotle’s dialogue On Poets, including recently discovered texts about catharsis, which appear in English for the first time.

1st Gent.: Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves. 2d Gent.: Ay, truly: but I think it is the world that brings the iron. R. L. Scott once explained that the “environment is experienced as being rhetorical,” meaning anything within the milieu can participate in addressivity, that who or what addresses what and whom is variable and multiple. He stressed that human valuing determined participation, but he nonetheless anticipated a more robust, posthuman ecological view when he contended that “one (...) must not think of rhetorical attributes as exclusively the property of speakers, writers, or other message-senders”. Scott claimed an “enlarged concept of rhetoric” was necessary... (shrink)

As scholars have recently suggested, rhetoric has long been remiss when it comes to nondiscursive concerns beyond its traditional purview. While many have sought to broaden rhetoric's scope, no one has yet undertaken a nondiscursive rhetorical investigation of social change in an effort to reconcile the tension between a critique of agency and the perception of human responsibility. This article undertakes such a critique through Alain Badiou's concept of the event, a concept that, I contend, offers the discipline a means (...) of rethinking the opposition between relativism and flat ontology. Analyzing the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi through the frame of the event, I regard Bouazizi's act as an ontic occurrence exerting influence over protestors across the Arab world while demanding collective recognition to emerge as an event. (shrink)

Argument and its performance as debate are ambient phenomena. It takes a world to have an argument, and as the world changes, so will the ways and means of argument. The current narratives circulating about post-truth, truthiness, alternative facts, and the like, while illuminating somewhat different registers, gloss this point. Collectively, they seem to assert that truth's sway in public discourse has lessened, threatening the possibility of robust civic discourse and politics. I am leery of such claims. They are in (...) general regressive, since they are nostalgic, working from a rear-view mirror mirage of stability and surety. Setting aside the panic such writers generate, and considering some deeper implications... (shrink)

In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of the Relational Analysis of attitude reports. The problem I raise involves counterfactual attitude verbs. such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘ S wishes that P ’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P ’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately related to the content of their beliefs. I capture this fact (...) by moving to a framework in which ‘wish’ relates subjects to sets of pairs of worlds, or paired propositions, rather than—as is standardly assumed—sets of worlds. Although other types of counterfactual attitude reports, for example those involving ‘imagine’, may be similarly problematic, at this stage it is unclear whether they can be handled the same way. (shrink)

It is an unsurprising but unfortunate fact that the history of twentieth-century British philosophy has been almost entirely written by British philosophers themselves. The account produced by philosophers such as G. J. Warnock, Gilbert Ryle, and A. J. Ayer, like all histories written by the winners of disciplinary struggles, amounts to a "Whig narrative" emphasizing the triumph of analytic philosophy over outdated, misguided idealist philosophy—a movement from error to truth. British philosophers built this Whig narrative around a justification of their (...) discipline that they frequently advanced between the 1930s and 1960s. This justification was forward-looking: it emphasized the "revolutionary" break between .. (shrink)

Bruno Latour, the increasingly popular French philosopher and foundational thinker for science studies, once wrote: “I know neither who I am nor what I want, but others say they know on my behalf, others who will define me, link me up, make me speak, interpret what I say, and enroll me”. This invocation of an “other” as a self-definition is no longer surprising nor radical but has long been a common answer to Plato’s famous and persistent insistence that we must, (...) before all else, know ourselves. I cannot know myself except insofar as I know and encounter others, who through a collective process, determine what I am. Within rhetoric, Diane Davis, in her recent account of the “prior... (shrink)

As Hannah Arendt has famously argued, politics is a matter of words and deeds. The inability to share language renders politics, which is dependent on speech, impossible. The Trump era not only is symptomatic of a loss of language and of politics, this essay argues, but also reveals an extreme nihilism that is worthy of question and thought. No less a philosopher-rhetorician than Friedrich Nietzsche offers us a diagnosis of this condition, most pithily in the six-moment history of Western philosophy (...) that he presents in Twilight of the Idols.1 Nietzsche frustrates many, offering no prescription, no cure. His history of the "error" that is reason leads into a quandary. In a situation that... (shrink)