Online research in philosophy

Recent rhetorical critiques of philosophy and science assume a contrast between rational argument and rhetoric that is inherited from an antirhetorical tradition in philosophy. This article rejects that assumption. Rhetoric is compatible with reasoned discourse in a strong sense originally outlined by Aristotle. Rhetorical analysis reveals the inadequacy of purely demonstrative accounts of rational argument and cognitive accounts of the conditions for rational assent to propo sitions. Social studies of the rhetoric of science, and in particular of credibility claims, need not fall into the forms of relativism and global antirealism with which they have become associated.

Rhetorical ethos and dramatic theory -- Syntax, style, and ethos -- The worth of words -- Memory and ethos -- Shaw, ethos, and rhetorical wit -- Athol Fugard's dramatic rhetoric -- Rhetoric and silence in Holocaust drama.

The publication two decades ago of a collection of essays on the "rhetorical turn" in the natural and social sciences consolidated what had already become a peculiar academic ritual, wherein discipline after discipline discovered, or found itself confronted by, the rhetorical foundations of its own knowledge claims (Simons 1990). The discovery should not have been as shocking as it was, since a robust if often dormant or suppressed tradition dating back to the Sophists had insisted, frequently against fashion, that all truth is the product of rhetorical operations. Nonetheless, the book's editor, Herbert Simons, and most of its contributors eagerly welcomed this belated but auspicious acknowledgment of rhetoric's ..

CHAPTER ONE On the Rhetorical Point of View. Why rhetoric declined, and what remained of it. Once upon a time rhetoric was a vast and influential branch of ...