Pragmatism’s star in the field of rhetorical studies continues to rise, with more and more scholars mining the depths of figures such as Dewey, James, Addams, and beyond for rhetorically useful material. Part of the challenge comes from the complex historical context that such thinkers are embedded in; another challenge stems from pragmatism’s own commitment to praxis over the production of abstract—and all too often academic—theories divorced from the historical-material conditions of their emergence. Often, its best thinkers are those who (...) both engage in political practice and guide criticism instead of those who exclusively write scholarly books removed from the world of praxis. Steven Mailloux is one of the... (shrink)

The Space Act of 1958 begins, “The Congress hereby declares that it is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.” In March 1982, a Defense Department official commented on the statute: “We interpret the right to use space for peaceful purposes to include military uses of space to promote peace in the world.”1 The absurdity of this willful misinterpretation amazed me on first reading, and months (...) later it readily came to mind when I was looking for an effective way to illustrate the politics of interpretation. With just the right touch of moral indignation, I offered my literary criticism class this example of militaristic ideology blatantly misreading an antimilitaristic text.“But … the Defense Department is right!” objected the first student to speak. Somewhat amused, I spent the next ten minutes trying, with decreasing amusement, to show this student that the Reagan administration’s reading was clearly, obviously, painfully wrong. I pointed to the text. I cited the traditional interpretation. I noted the class consensus, which supported me. All to no avail. It was at this point that I felt that “theoretical urge”: the overwhelming desire for a hermeneutic account to which I could appeal to prove my student wrong. What I wanted was a general theory of interpretation that could supply rules outlawing my student’s misreading.This little hermeneutic fable introduces the three topics of my essay. One topic is the theoretical moment that concludes the narrative; another is the simple plot, a brief rhetorical exchange; and finally there’s the institutional setting in which the exchange takes place. These three topics preoccupy the sections that follow. Section 1 analyzes the problems resulting from the theoretical urge, the impasse of contemporary critical theory. Section 2 proposes my solution to this impasse, a solution I call rhetorical hermeneutics, which leads in section 3 to a rhetorical version of institutional history. 1. “National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958,” United States Statutes at Large , vol. 72, pt. 1, sec. 102, p. 426; Robert Cooper, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, quoted in Frank Greve, “Pentagon Research Retains Vision of ‘Winning’ N-war,” Miami Herald, 27 Mar. 1983, sec. D, p. 4. Steven Mailloux, associate professor of English at the University of Miami, is the author of Interpretive Conventions: the Reader in the Study of American Fiction. He is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled Rhetorical Power: Politics in American Literature, Criticism, and Theory. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Stanley Fish’s ‘Interpreting the Variorum’: Advance or Retreat?” and “Truth or Consequences: On Being Against Theory”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 96-119 [Access article in PDF] Re-Marking Slave Bodies: Rhetoric as Production and Reception Steven Mailloux There is much talk nowadays about the double nature of rhetoric: rhetoric as a practical guide for composing and rhetoric as a theoretical stance for interpreting. The two uses can be viewed as complementary, as flip sides of the same holistic approach to rhetorical studies. But they can (...) also appear in conflict: production models of writing and speaking versus reception models of reading and listening; models for inventing rhetoric versus models for analyzing it. Indeed, though the two models can be mutually supportive, they have often developed in tension within the evolution of academic disciplines over the last 125 years. Different emphases on one or the other model have resulted in different departmentalized disciplines and varied divisions within those departments, as we are all so well aware. One might even claim that advocating one or the other model has contributed significantly to the fragmentation of rhetoric as an interdiscipline during the last century and to the distribution of its parts into various academic units. In many English departments, for example, the continuing divisions between literature and composition faculty arise from contrasting professional interests in reception models focused on interpreting literary works versus production models focused on composing student texts. A similar reception/production antagonism appears in the history of speech departments separating from English departments. In 1915, when seventeen teachers of public address broke off from the National Council of Teachers of English, the production (oratory or debate) model they favored was at odds with the reception (philological or hermeneutic) model of most literature faculty. 1I don't mean to suggest that different choices between models of production and reception fully account for the academic fragmentation of rhetorical study. Nevertheless, practical antitheses do constitute disciplinary [End Page 96] identities. Antitheses between production and reception—between writing/speaking, on the one hand, and reading/listening, on the other—have variously combined with other distinctions between written texts versus oral performances as objects of study and between scientific research versus humanistic scholarship as intellectual traditions, and these assorted configurations of interpretive practices and institutional formations did help shape disciplinary identities throughout the past century. We are now faced with a situation in which rhetoric is distributed across several departments and programs, not in an integrated interdiscipline but as disciplinary fragments, where rhetorical critics in literary and cultural studies, for example, don't read deeply either in the work of rhetoric/ composition faculty in their own departments or the rhetorical scholarship produced in other departments such as communications or classics.Historically, I believe, the separation of written rhetoric (literature and composition) from oral rhetoric (public address and debate) within the academic humanities, this separation of English and speech departments, has been just as debilitating for rhetorical study as the literature/composition split within English departments alone. One might speculate about how these divisions encouraged the eventual exclusion of oratory from British and U. S. literary canons. More important, these divisions have resulted in a fragmented disciplinary approach to everything having to do with tropes, arguments, and narratives in culture, including most recently the study of local and global communication networks, old and new literacies, and past and present media revolutions.In the present essay I suggest an alternative to this disciplinary fragmentation of rhetoric. This alternative, call it rhetorical hermeneutics, learns from the more holistic approach to language arts found at the elementary and secondary levels of our U. S. educational system, where writing, speaking, reading, and listening (and sometimes viewing) are practices often taught in relation to one another. 2 Here production and reception models form parts of the same integrated framework for understanding and participating in the cultural conversations of diverse public spheres. In the following sections, I address these issues of model selection first by considering the objection that rhetorical hermeneutics is exclusively a method of reading and not a heuristic for writing. Then I move to an example of rhetorical hermeneutics in practice: a reception study of rhetorical productions... (shrink)

The crux of Fish's argument in "Interpreting the Variorum" is that people read in different ways because they belong to different interpretive communities. True enough. However, in the course of his argument Fish seems to collapse the distinction between the interpretive act of reading and the interpretive act of criticism. Fish uses the term interpretive strategies to refer to both the interpretive strategies performed by readers and to his critical strategy which describes these acts. However, critical models are not isomorphic (...) with reading strategies; that is, critical interpretations like Fish's are descriptions of perpetual strategies and not the strategies themselves. Fish's implicit dismissal of the reading process/reading description distinction for his own approach leads him to dismiss the distinction for other approaches. And since he has already acknowledged that people read in different ways, he concludes that different critical models are equally valid. Therefore, according to Fish, critics disagree because they read differently.1 But, as I will show, critical interpretations differ, not because critics belong to different interpretive communities of readers, but because they belong to different interpretive communities of critics. · 1. Of course, the definition of reading becomes crucial here. I am using the term to refer to the temporal interaction of the reader with the text, the moment-by-moment psycholinguistic process that occurs from the instant I open a book and perceive the title or first line, "In my younger and more vulnerable years . . ." to the moment I comprehend the final sentence, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Steven Mailloux, a doctoral candidate in rhetoric, linguistics, and literature at the University of Southern California, is coeditor of Checklist of Melville Reviews, and his Herman Melville: The Critical Reception and Henry David Thoreau: A Reference Guide are now in press. He is currently working on a book about contemporary movements in American literary criticism. (shrink)

“Why theory now?” and related questions have punctuated the history of critical theory. During the so-called Theory Boom of the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. academy, such questions were asked throughout the humanities and interpretive social sciences, and the array of answers included causes and motives both internal and external to the institutional context of the disciplines asking the questions. External accounts cited the sociopolitical upheavals of the period in the broader culture, and internal explanations noted interdisciplinary events such (...) as the importation of contemporary Continental philosophy into U.S. universities, most often by way of departments and centers outside of philosophy departments. One... (shrink)

Reason and Value collects 15 new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the work of Joseph Raz. Raz has made major contributions in a wide range of areas, including jurisprudence, political philosophy, and the theory of practical reason; but all of his work displays a deep engagement with central themes in moral philosophy. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. Especially significant are his (...) explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value, which constitute a sustained and penetrating treatment of a set of issues at the very center of moral philosophy as it is practiced today. The contributors to the volume acknowledge the importance of Raz's contributions by engaging critically with his positions and offering independent perspectives on the topics that he has addressed. The volume aims both to honour Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and to contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the significance of his work for the subject. (shrink)

The anti-sceptical relativism and self-conscious rhetoric of the pragmatist tradition, which began with the Older Sophists of Ancient Greece and developed through an American tradition including William James and John Dewey has attracted new attention in the context of late twentieth-century postmodernist thought. At the same time there has been a more general renewal of interest across a wide range of humanistic and social science disciplines in rhetoric itself: language use, writing and speaking, persuasion, figurative language, and the effect of (...) texts. This book, written by leading scholars, explores the various ways in which rhetoric, sophistry and pragmatism overlap in their current theoretical and political implications, and demonstrates how they contribute both to a rethinking of the human sciences within the academy and to larger debates over cultural politics. (shrink)

Every act of communication assumes a hermeneutic and a rhetoric, an implicit theory for interpreting public contexts of rhetor, discourse, and audience as well as a communicative practice that produces private/public effects through an audience responding to a rhetor’s call.1 The dominant model for such rhetorical hermeneutics represents an interpersonal communication between living human agents. In what follows, I explore an alternative to this model, one that embodies extrahuman, nonpersonal communication between the human and the divine.Humanist controversies of the last (...) century provide a convenient starting place for this exploration. Various humanisms, antihumanisms, and posthumanisms assume some version of .. (shrink)

This article discusses two twentieth-century examples of humanist controversies in order to demonstrate some rhetorical paths of thought involved in developing and securing rhetorical humanism within philosophy and rhetorical studies. The article begins with Martin Heidegger's antihumanist provocation and examines Ernesto Grassi's response in his revisionist interpretation of a nonmetaphysical Renaissance humanism. Next it takes up the post-Heideggerian moment of late twentieth-century postmodern critiques, including attacks on humanist foundationalism and essentialist notions of agency, and compares Grassi's defense of rhetorical humanism (...) within Continental philosophy to Michael Leff's reinterpretation of Ciceronian humanism within communication studies. Both Grassi and Leff propose a rhetorical humanist alternative to Heidegger's and postmodernism's philosophical antihumanism. These two rhetoricians demonstrate an interpretive power and a rhetorical creativity that not only revitalize rhetorical humanism in the present age but also provide valuable resources for its extension into the future. (shrink)

This essay takes a rhetorical pragmatist perspective on current questions concerning educational goals and pedagogical practices. It begins by considering some challenges to rhetorical approaches to education, placing those challenges in the theoretical context of their posing. The essay then describes one current rhetorical approach—based on Kenneth Burke’s dramatism and logology—and uses it to understand and redescribe another rhetorical approach—Jesuit teaching of eloquentia perfecta. Proceeding in this way, the essay presents both a general theoretical framework for discussing educational aims and (...) a specific practical example of how such aims might be achieved. (shrink)

The typical kind of color realism is reductive: the color properties are identified with properties specified in other terms (as ways of altering light, for instance). If no reductive analysis is available — if the colors are primitive sui generis properties — this is often taken to be a convincing argument for eliminativism. That is, realist primitivism is usually thought to be untenable. The realist preference for reductive theories of color over the last few decades is particularly striking in light (...) of the generally anti-reductionist mood of recent philosophy of mind. The parallels between the mind—body problem and the case of color are substantial enough that the difference in trajectory is surprising. While dualism and non-reductive physicalism are staples, realist primitivism is by and large a recent addition to the color literature. And it remains a minority position, although one that is perhaps gaining support. In this paper, we investigate whether it should be accepted, and conclude it should not be. (shrink)

The concept of yinyang lies at the heart of Chinese thought and culture. The relationship between these two opposing, yet mutually dependent, forces is symbolized in the familiar black and white symbol that has become an icon in popular culture across the world. The real significance of yinyang is, however, more complex and subtle. This brilliant and comprehensive analysis by one of the leading authorities in the field captures the richness and multiplicity of the meanings and applications of yinyang, including (...) its visual presentations. Through a vast range of historical and textual sources, the book examines the scope and role of yinyang, the philosophical significance of its various layers of meanings and its relation to numerous schools and traditions within Chinese philosophy. By putting yinyang on a secure and clear philosophical footing, the book roots the concept in the original Chinese idiom, distancing it from Western assumptions, frameworks and terms, yet also seeking to connect its analysis to shared cross-cultural philosophical concerns. (shrink)

Recent Work on Intrinsic Value brings together for the first time many of the most important and influential writings on the topic of intrinsic value to have appeared in the last half-century. During this period, inquiry into the nature of intrinsic value has intensified to such an extent that at the moment it is one of the hottest topics in the field of theoretical ethics. The contributions to this volume have been selected in such a way that all of the (...) fundamental questions concerning the nature of intrinsic value are treated in depth and from a variety of viewpoints. These questions include how to understand the concept of intrinsic value, what sorts of things can have intrinsic value, and how to compute intrinsic value. The editors have added an introduction that ties these questions together and places the contributions in context, and they have also provided an extensive bibliography. The result is a comprehensive, balanced, and detailed picture of current thinking about intrinsic value, one that provides an indispensable backdrop against which future writings on the topic may be assessed. (shrink)

Despite All Critique (2014) -- World Politics and Western Reason (1980) -- The Doubled Outsides of the Modern International (2005) -- The Subject of Security (1995) -- The Protection of Nature and the Nature of Protection (2005) -- Social Movements/World Politics (1994) -- Europe is Not Where It is Supposed to Be (2000) -- They Seek it Here, They Seek it There : Looking for Politics in Clayoquot Sound (2003) -- Violence, Modernity, Silence : From Weber to International Relations (1993) (...) -- Hobbes, Origins, Limits (2011) -- War, Terror, Judgement (2002) -- International, Imperial, Exceptional (2005) -- Which Democracy for Which Demos? (2013) -- The Political Theory of Boundaries and the Boundaries of Political Theory : Interview With Raia Prokhovnik (2012). (shrink)

This book focuses upon the perennial question of the existence and nature of an obligation to obey the law. Leading writers have, at one time or another, emphasized considerations such as gratitude, 'divine ordering, ' prudence, contract, autonomy, and utility in seeking to justify, or to deny any justification for, some sort of obligation to obey the positive law. The book provides relevant selections from a sampling of the historical approaches to legal obligation taken by writers such as Plato, Augustine, (...) Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Thoreau, Bentham, Marx and Engels, and Martin Luther King, Jr. These classical discussions are augmented by critical questions and commentary, by independent discussions of the question of legal obligation by a wide range of contemporary writers, and by relevant judicial cases discussing matters such as conscientious objection and civil disobedience. (shrink)

A central tenet of contemporary moral psychology is that people typically reject active forms of utilitarian sacrifice. Yet, evidence for secularization and declining empathic concern in recent decades suggests the possibility of systematic change in this attitude. In the present study, we employ hypothetical dilemmas to investigate whether judgments of utilitarian sacrifice are becoming more permissive over time. In a cross-sectional design, age negatively predicted utilitarian moral judgment (Study 1). To examine whether this pattern reflected processes of maturation, we asked (...) a panel to re-evaluate several moral dilemmas after an eight-year interval but observed no overall change (Study 2). In contrast, a more recent age-matched sample revealed greater endorsement of utilitarian sacrifice in a time-lag design (Study 3). Taken together, these results suggest that today’s younger cohorts increasingly endorse a utilitarian resolution of sacrificial moral dilemmas. (shrink)

BLWith new text and full apparatus criticus The Eudemian Ethics was one of two ethical treatises which Aristotle wrote on the subject of ethica or `matters to do with character'. Although the two works cover much the same ground, the Nicomachean Ethics is better known; the poor manuscript tradition of the Eudemian Ethics has made correct translation and interpretation of the text extremely difficult. The subject of the work is the choice of a certain means of conduct, made by a (...) `man of practical wisdom', between two extremes of behaviour: asceticism and yielding to uncontrolled impulses. Aristotle also stresses the notion of moral intention and the importance of virtue of character. This new Oxford Classical Text of the Eudemian Ethics is the result of many years of work. After Sir David Ross's death, his original text was substantially reworked and revised by his friend and colleague R. R. Walzer, who was aided in the revision by his former pupil Mrs Jean Mingay, who continued his work after his death in 1974. Mrs Mingay was fortunate in being able to make use of previously unpublished contributions from D. J. Allan after his death in the late seventies, and more recently has been helped in her work by the suggestions of Professor D. A. Russell, David Robinson, and Christopher Rowe. (shrink)

R. S. Peters, C. A. Mace; VII—Emotions and the Category of Passivity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 117–142, h.

"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes in the debate over Martin Heidegger and Nazism from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger's work. He reveals crucial aspects of Heidegger's thinking that betray an affinity with dimensions of Jewish thought.

The authors of this paper earlier argued that concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value, which is not reducible to the value of states of affairs that concern the object in question. Our arguments have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano-inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention is given to a (...) yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive, it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)

Being a patient and living a life -- Clinical space and traits of healing -- False starts and frequent failures -- Three journeys : A.'Ibuprofen and love', B. 'Staying tuned up', C. 'We all want the same things' -- Being a patient : the moral field -- Rethinking healthcare ethics : the patient's moral authority.

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

The young Hegel was entranced by the notion of intellectual intuition, and this notion continues to entrance many of Hegel’ commentators. I argue that Kant provided three distinct conceptions of an intuitive intellect, that none of these involve aconceptual intuitionism, and that they differ markedly from Fichte’s and Schelling’s conceptions of intellectual intuition. I further argue that by 1804 Hegel recognized that appealing to an aconceptual model, or to Schelling’s model, or to his own early model of intellectual intuition generates (...) inevitable and insoluble problems of question-begging. By incorporating several important points from Kant’s Transcendental Ideal into his reinterpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and Refutation of Idealism, Hegel’s mature discursive and conceptual account of ‘absolute knowing’ performs some of the functions Kant assigned to the intuitive intellect, though without invoking any such intuitive intellect. I discuss several of these functions. (shrink)