Philosophy and Rhetoric in Dialogue
Redrawing Their Intellectual Landscape
Publication Year: 2007
Published by: Penn State University Press
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Philosophy and Rhetoric: An Abbreviated History of an Evolving Identity
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With this volume, Philosophy and Rhetoric begins its fortieth year of publication. As a milestone of longevity, it is both a mark of its youth and its maturity. Most disciplines have ﬂagship journals with considerably longer spans of continuous publication, in some cases exceeding 100 years. Philosophy and Rhetoric, however, has no professional society as its sponsor. Its survival has and continues ...
The Philosophical Basis of Rhetoric
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I want to begin by distinguishing between what has a philosophical basis at all and what has none. Science, history, morals, and art have a philosophical basis. Fishing, tennis, needlecraft, and carpentry do not. The criterion that determines membership in each list is simple: an activity has a philosophical basis if, and only if, the practice of it distinguishes man from the animals. It must be disqualiﬁed ...
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I knew Henry Johnstone as a colleague and friend for nearly three decades, one of which was the decade (1976–87) during which I served as editor of Philosophy and Rhetoric. My editorship fell between Johnstone’s ﬁrst tenure as founder and editor and his second period of editorship, during his retirement. Johnstone introduced me to the importance of rhetoric while we were colleagues at Penn ...
Theoretical Pieties, Johnstone’s Impiety, and Ordinary Views of Argumentation
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The greatest single inﬂuence on rhetorical theory throughout its long history, and likewise on its daughter or sister enterprise, the theory of argument, has without doubt been students. In part, the inﬂuence has been bad. Docile students have (it seems) offered little resistance to their teachers’ theoretical hobbyhorses, being willing to cram for the exam, or the speech, fantastical systems of staseis, topoi, ﬁgurae and ﬁve ...
Kinship: The Relationship Between Johnstone’s Ideas About Philosophical Argument And The Pragma-Dialectical Theory Of Argumentation
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As he himself declared in Validity and Rhetoric in Philosophical Argument (1978, 1), the late philosopher Henry W. Johnstone Jr. devoted a long period of his professional life to clarifying the nature of philosophical argument. His well-known view was that philosophical arguments are sui generis, i.e., not to be judged by the standards of argumentation in science or everyday discourse. ...
Rhetoric Achieves Nature: A View from Old Europe
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I would like to quote a well-known example used by Frege to illustrate the difference between Sinn and Bedeutung, as a point of departure for this essay: Venus is the morning star and the evening star—it depends on the beholder1—but Venus, the celestial body, it objectively is. In the eyes of the beholder lies “sense” (Sinn); in an objective view, resides “reference” (Bedeutung). Or, to put ...
On Rhetoric as Gift/Giving
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In this essay, I explore the possibilities of rhetoric as gift. I begin with the Homeric gift economy and the rhetorical resources of this economy.1 My use of “economy” here is not reducible to a monetary exchange system, but rather a more general system of practices orchestrating cultural identity and relations. As Georges Bataille suggests, studying a general economy may hold the key to ...
Rhetorical Criticism and the Challenges of Bilateral Argument
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To assume editorial responsibilities for Philosophy & Rhetoric after Henry W. Johnstone was to have assumed rather a lot. He was, for starters, a philospher, and I am not. This much appeared to bother Henry not a bit, and in fact it proved the occasion of many productive discussions and facilitated my apprenticeship in ways for which I am still grateful. By trade a rhetorical critic, I was particularly ...
The Faith and Struggle of Beginning (with) Words: On the Turn Between Reconciliation and Recognition
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In a beginning that strives to constitute the grounds for understanding from the terms of fate’s violence, the promise of the word is not (self) fulﬁlling. Caught within those conflicts that ban the self from its own voice and which use the codicils of law’s precedent to deter expression and collective (inter)action, the power of language is simultaneously rendered absolute and suspect. As such ...
No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror
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At the same time that the Bush Administration’s declaration of the so-called war on terror and intervention in Iraq exacerbated tensions between its long-standing allies as well as enemies on the international front, it miraculously delivered the American people back to itself. Suddenly a whole host of high-proﬁle domestic conﬂicts on whose outcome the very viability of the nation was said ...
Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature
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In 1960, Professor Donald R. Pearce edited and published a small volume entitled The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats.1 Some editorial decisions Pearce made serve to focus attention on what the distinctive features of spoken, instigative discourse may be.2 Pearce included in his volume of “speeches” a body of extensively interrupted discourse on divorce, delivered in the Irish Senate. This material comprises ...
Page Count: 188
Publication Year: 2007