Meeting in the House of Callias: Rhetoric and Dialectic

The purpose of this paper is to briefly describe and compare the original goals and perspectives of both rhetoric and dialectic in theory and in practice. Dialectic is the practice and theory of conversations; rhetoric that of speeches. For theory of dialectic, this paper will turn to Aristotle's Topics and Sophistical Refutations; for theory of rhetoric, to his Rhetoric. Thus it will appear that rhetoric and dialectic are pretty close. Yet, on the other hand, there is a long tradition of mutual antagonism. The paper tries to summarize the common features of, as well as the differences between, the two. To get a taste of both dialectic and rhetoric in practice the reader is invited to enter the House of Callias, as we know it from Plato's Protagoras. After this visit there remains no doubt that rhetoric and dialectic are intertwined on the level of practice. Moreover, we may look forward to their integration on the level of theory.     

Rereading sophistical arguments: A political intervention

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.     

The uses of Aristotle's Rhetoric in contemporary American scholarship

In contemporary American scholarship, interpretation of Aristotle'sRhetoric has become the locus of sustained and sharp controversy. Differing views of theRhetoric and its significance have become tokens in a more general dispute about what rhetoric is or ought to be. This essay examines three central issues that have emerged in this larger arena of controversy: the relationship between Aristotelian and Platonic conceptions of rhetoric, the relationships among rhetoric, ethics, and epistemology in Aristotle, and the placement of rhetoric within Aristotle's system of arts and sciences.     

Does Complex or Simple Rhetoric Win Elections? An Integrative Complexity Analysis of U.S. Presidential Campaigns

Research suggests that the integrative complexity of political rhetoric tends to drop during election season, but little research to date directly addresses if this drop in complexity serves to increase or decrease electoral success. The two present studies help fill this gap. Study 1 demonstrates that, during the Democratic Party primary debates in 2003–2004, the eventual winners of the party nomination showed a steeper drop in integrative complexity as the election season progressed than nonwinning candidates. Study 2 presents laboratory evidence from the most recent presidential campaign demonstrating that, while the complexity of Obama's rhetoric had little impact on college students' subsequent intentions to vote for him, the complexity of McCain's rhetoric was significantly positively correlated with their likelihood of voting for him. Taken together, this research is inconsistent with an unqualified simple is effective view of the complexity‐success relationship. Rather, it is more consistent with a compensatory view: Effective use of complexity (or simplicity) may compensate for perceived weaknesses. Thus, appropriately timed shifts in complexity levels, and/or violations of negative expectations relevant to complexity, may be an effective means of winning elections. Surprisingly, mere simplicity as such seems largely ineffective.     

Rhetoric, technical writing, and ethics

Many outside science and engineering, especially social scientists and “rhetoricians”, claim that rhetoric, “the art of persuasion”, is an important part of technical communication. This claim is either trivial or false. If “persuasion” simply means “effective communication”, then, of course, rhetoric is an important part of technical communication. But, if “persuasion” has anything like its traditional meaning (a specific art of winning conviction), rhetoric is not an important part of technical communication; indeed, its use in technical communication would be unethical. [By] an advocate is meant one whose business it is to smooth over real difficulties, and to persuade where he cannot convince. —Thomas Henry Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature ^{1 (p. 238)} As a profession, engineers frown on persuasiveness and find it suspect. —Dorothy A. Winsor, Writing Like an Engineer ^{2 (p. 12), A} Michael Davis’s research interests are in the areas of engineering ethics and the social contract. Recent published books include Thinking Like an Engineer, 1998, Oxford, and Ethics and the University, 1999, Routledge.     

The Independence of Practical Ethics

After criticizing three common conceptions of therelationship between practical ethics and ethical theory, analternative modeled on Aristotle's conception of the relationshipbetween rhetoric and philosophical ethics is explored. Thisaccount is unique in that it neither denigrates the project ofsearching for an adequate comprehensive ethical theory norsubordinates practical ethics to that project. Because the purpose of practical ethics, on this view, is tosecure the cooperation of other persons in a way that respectstheir status as free and equal, it seeks to influence thejudgments of others by providing them with reasons that areaccessible to their own understanding. On this account, theindependence of practical ethics is rooted in an appreciation ofthe constraints that non-ideal circumstances place on the rolethat the philosophically refined premises of moral theory canplay in such public deliberations. Practical and philosophicalethics are united, not by shared theoretical frameworks orprinciples, but by the need to exercise intelligently the sameintellectual and affective capacities. They are separated, notby the particularity or generality of their starting points, butby their responsiveness to the practical problem of facilitatingsound normative deliberations among persons as we find them,under non-ideal circumstances.     

Chaïm Perelman: Justice,argumentation and ancient rhetoric

Theoretical interest in Perelman's thought is linked, for the main part, to the place he accords to the notion of argumentation, defined in his work in reference to the Greek philosophy, as represented by Plato and Aristotle, in contrast to the assertions of the sophists and rhetors. He separates the notion of demonstration and that of argumentation and supports his position on an analysis of the debates which were common in the sophistic and rhetoric period.It is in different ways that the notion of argumentation comes into the work of Perelman. By taking up again the analysis of justice with the aim of removing the various strata of meaning which had accumulated on it as a result of the reductions of Plato and the dialectical analyses of Aristotle, Perelman showed that the theory of argumentation transcends the domain of right in which it is rooted and ought not be abandoned to lawyers only. Thus, he follows a train of thought to which he accords a certain nobilty in the name of the new rhetoric. This manner of considering the relationship of the moderns to the Greeks leads him to set up the notion of argumentation in his own texts, where it demonstrates a logical retreat which enables him to work back from Aristotle to Plato and from him to the rhetors and sophists, whose discourse is defined on the level of the self-referential.The exemplary character of Perelman's work is on account of this rehabilitation of argumentation in the old rhetoric which will be examined here.A slightly different version of this essay was presented at the Third Intenational Philosophy Symposium on Justice, Athens, 22–27 May 1987.     

CICERO, AMBROSE, AND AQUINAS "ON DUTIES"OR THE LIMITS OF GENRE IN MORALS

To compose a Christian book on exemplary Christian living, Ambrose appropriates and criticizes Cicero's book on “duties,”De officiis. In many passages within the moral part of his Summa of Theology, Thomas Aquinas incorporates quotations from both Cicero and Ambrose. Comparison of the three texts raises issues about the relation of genres to terms, arguments, rules, and ideals in religious teaching. Genre becomes a useful category for analyzing religious rhetoric only when it is conceived as a set of persuasive or pedagogical relations below a text's surface disposition.     

“Let Me Tell You Why!”. When Argumentation in Doctor–Patient Interaction Makes a Difference

This paper throws some light on the nature of argumentation, its use and advantages, within the setting of doctor–patient interaction. It claims that argumentation can be used by doctors to offer patients reasons that work as ontological conditions for enhancing the decision making process, as well as to preserve the institutional nature of their relationship with patients. In support of these claims, selected arguments from real-life interactions are presented in the second part of the paper, and analysed by means of a model of argumentation borrowed from classical rhetoric, and refined according to the modern orientation of the pragma-dialectic approach.     

Response to Critics

In this “Response to Critics,” Cathleen Kaveny continues the conversation in the JRE symposium centered on her recent book, Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square. The book's central argument is that adequate discussion of contention in the contemporary public square requires attending to matters of rhetoric, particularly the rhetoric of prophetic indictment. Kaveny engages the comments of four interlocutors: Alda Balthrop‐Lewis, James Childress, William Hart, and Martin Kavka. The first section, “Overarching Goals,” summarizes the objectives of the book. The second section, “Methodology,” engages critics regarding methodological issues, highlighting Kaveny's commitment to a version of MacIntyre's tradition theory and her indebtedness to her legal training. The third section, “Structure,” responds to particular questions her interlocutors raise about the four parts of the book. The fourth section, “Larger Questions,” ponders the next stages of the academic and political discussion about contention in the public square.     

Des raisons d'être d'une argumentation rhétorique selon Aristote

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons Aristotle gives for being able to use rhetorical argumentation, which is obviously not a scientific mode of expression. This faculty which was condemned by Plato as lacking morality, is paradoxically regarded by Aristotle as necessary on moral grounds. For, according to him, it would be blameworthy to keep silent when being verbally assailed. The necessity of rhetoric is, however, more deeply founded. First, because justice has to be saved from its enemies in the City's courts of law. Secondly, because everyone has to be convicted to follow in practice the rules of the City's laws and such a conviction, in the case of the multitude, cannot be obtained by the means of scientific arguments. Thirdly and above all, because, in forensic disputes, characteristics of free political societies, the demagogic power, which regularly leads to tyrannical regimes, can only be avoided by the weapons of rhetoric. From these explanations, one does see that rhetoric, for Aristotle, seems to be the necessary substitute for ancient and traditional instruments securing obedience to legal justice, i.e. myths and pure constraint or coercion. In civilized and free political communities, rhetoric is required for civilization and freedom.

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Des raisons d'être d'une argumentation rhétorique selon Aristote

     

The Rhetoric Side of Fake News: A New Weapon for Anti-Politics?

Abstract

As an “insidious form of post-truth rhetoric”, fake news find a fertile ground in the complex scenario of new media and fruitful fertilizers in several psychological foundations and social phenomena. As a consequence, social scientists and psychologists are more and more interested to deepen these dynamics. Nonetheless, the study of the discursive and rhetoric facets of fake news has been rather neglected. The aim of this work is to investigate their discursive construction in one of the preferred domains of this misleading process of construction of reality, the political world. Through the discourse analysis applied to several fake news involving a very popular female Italian politician, we emphasize the risk of empowering the (already widespread) anti-political feeling.     

Perelman's rhetorical foundation of philosophy

This article is a Gadamer-Perelman's debate. The author points out the limits of the gadamerian's hermeneutic conception of philosophy and criticizes this conception from Perelman's new rhetoric point of view. Instead of speaking of truth as an ontological originary experience, the rhetorical foundation of philosophy allows us to say that in philosophy the important is the contrastation and the confrontation of criteria and that, for that reason, philosophy is above all characterized by discussibility.Philosophical argumentation, like juridical argumentation, constitutes applications, to different domains, of a theory of argumentation which we consider as a new rhetoric.By identifying this theory with the general theory of persuasive speech, which seeks to obtain the intellectual as well as the emotional adherence of an audience, no matter which, we state that all speeches which do not aspire to an impersonal validity proceed from rhetoric. (Ch. Perelman,L'empire rhétorique, p. 177).But, if one does not admit that the philosophical thesis may be founded on evident intuitions, it will be necessary to reccur to argumentative technics to make them prevail. The new rhetoric then becomes the indispensable tool of philosophy. (Ch. Perelman,L'empire rhétorique, p. 21).     

On the metaphysical presuppositions of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Conclusion In what precedes, I have argued that Aristotle does not, in his ethics, commit three metaphysical errors sometimes imputed to him: he does not define the good as a fact; he does not claim that human beings move by nature towards their telos; he does not claim, in the ergon argument, that human beings are fixed rather than versatile. Instead, I have shown, he does the opposite in each case: he argues that the good cannot be defined as a fact; he claims that human beings move towards their telos only if they have virtue and virtue is not by nature; he locates, in the human ergon, that which is responsible for human versatility. Finally, I have shown by example that the metaphysical commitments of Aristotle's account of human happiness are not as controversial as they seem.If all of this is true, then perhaps the disorder that has existed in ethics since the enlightenment has been misdiagnosed. Perhaps it is not due to an unhappy choice between end-neutral emotivism on the one hand and Aristotle's bad metaphysics on the other. Perhaps instead it is due, at least in part, to a too hasty rejection of Aristotle's ethics on the grounds of a rejection of his biology.     

Queerly evangelical: the rhetoric of inverted belonging as a challenge to heteronormativity in evangelical theology

ABSTRACT

As a small but growing number of evangelical congregations, organizations, and individuals have adopted certain pro-LGBTQ beliefs in recent years, an intriguing rhetorical strategy has emerged: these evangelicals are claiming in various ways that their newfound beliefs, far from being an impediment to their evangelical identity, actually render them more faithful evangelicals than their anti-LGBTQ counterparts. Through what I call a rhetoric of inverted belonging, those who have long been regarded as irrevocable outsiders of evangelicalism are portraying themselves as more rightful insiders than those who exteriorize them from their religious tradition. In this paper, I illustrate the rhetoric of inverted belonging through a variety of examples from the theological discourse of pro-LGBTQ evangelical individuals and institutions. Analyzing this discourse through the lens of a prevalent definition of an evangelical, I demonstrate how the rhetoric of inverted belonging poses a unique challenge to heteronormative theologies within evangelicalism today.     

Some reflections on the notion of hypotyposis in Kant

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant, despite his strong condemnation of rhetoric, introduces the figure of hypotyposis at the very moment he sets out to tackle the philosophical problem of presentation as such. This study holds that this choice of the rhetorical term is not fortuitous. Its connotations of vivid illustration, synopsis, and moral grandeur serve Kant in arguing that, on a transcendental level, presentation secures the mind's life, unity, and self-affection. Although of rhetorical origin, hypotyposis is thus shown to link up with a specifically philosophical meaning of the term in the writings of Aristotle.     

Justice,instruction, and the good: The case for public education in Aristotle and Plato's Laws

This paper develops an interpretation and analysis of the arguments for public education which open Book VIII of Aristotle's Politics, drawing on both the wider Aristotelian corpus and on examination of continuities with Plato's Laws. Part I: The paper opens with the question of why Aristotle would say that no one will doubt that education should be the concern of the legislator, and Sections I–III identify the nature of his enterprise in the Politics, the audience he wishes to address, the conclusions he seeks to establish in VIII. 1, and what public education would amount to for him. An important conclusion reached is that the first of Aristotle's two conclusions in VIII.1 has been routinely misidentified.     

Justice,instruction, and the good: The case for public education in Aristotle and Plato's Laws

This paper develops an interpretation and analysis of the arguments for public education which open Book VIII of Aristotle's Politics, drawing on both the wider Aristotelian corpus and on examination of continuities with Plato's Laws.Part II: Sections IV–VII examine the arguments for the first of the two conclusions which Aristotle advances in VIII. 1, namely that education is important enough to merit the legislator's attention. It is shown, through a development of links between Politics V and the arguments of VIII. 1, that Aristotle's two arguments for this conclusion are calculated to appeal to two distinct subgroups within his intended audience, those who would be moved by a desire to promote the common good, and those who could only be counted on to desire the preservation of their own rule.     

Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Twenty-First Century

The paper presents a historical overview of some characteristic differences between rhetoric and dialectic in the pre-modern tradition. In the light of this historical analysis, some current approaches to dialectic are characterized, with special attention to Ralph Johnson's concept of dialectical tier.     

The Role of Rhetoric in Rational Argumentation

The structure of this discussion will be tripartite. First it will set out a way of distinguishing between rhetoric and strictly rational argumentation. Next it will consider some of the ramifications of this proposed way of looking at the matter – in particular what its implications are for rationality and for rhetoric, respectively. Finally it examines how this perspective bears on the project of philosophizing. The paper's ultimate aim, accordingly, is to consider what light such an analysis can shed upon philosophy and philosophizing.