If rhetoric is the art of speaking, who is listening? In Being-Moved, Daniel M. Gross provides an answer, showing when and where the art of speaking parted ways with the art of listening-and what happens when they intersect once again. Much in the history of rhetoric must be rethought along the way. And much of this rethinking pivots around Martin Heidegger's early lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric, where his famous topic, Being, gives way to being-moved. The results, Gross (...) goes on to show, are profound. Listening to the gods, listening to the world around us, and even listening to one another in the classroom-all of these experiences become different when rhetoric is reoriented from the voice to the ear. (shrink)

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, _The Secret History of Emotion_ offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and (...) Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how researchers from both the sciences and the humanities can learn from Charles Darwin’s mixed methodology. We identify two basic challenges that face emotion research in the sciences, namely a mismatch between experiment design and the complexity of life that we aim to explain, and problematic efforts to bridge the gap, including invalid inferences from constrained study designs, and equivocal use of terms like “sympathy” and “empathy” that poorly reflect such methodological constraints. We argue that Darwin’s mixed (...) methodology is a model for addressing these challenges even in laboratory work on emotion, because it shows how close observation of emotional phenomena makes sense only within broader historical contexts. The article concludes with 5 practical research recommendations. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 16th century in Germany, religious ends and human art joined forces to produce a sacred rhetoric: a rhetoric that could transform human nature, and explain at the same time how such transformation was possible according to both science and scripture. No longer was it enough to ask in Scholastic fashion ‘What is man?’ - his essence and unique faculties, his special place in God’s world. A new question took on urgency in the wake of religious (...) reformation, namely ‘What could man become?’ But theology alone could not provide a practical response to this question. Rhetoric, in its various adopted forms, could. Consequently rhetoric emerged as architectonic of the human sciences in Reformation Germany, shaping pedagogy as a practical art. Whereas scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the way in which the exact sciences such as mathematics influenced Enlightenment human science, the history of human science as practical art has received little attention. This article contributes to such a history by showing how rhetoric as a practical protreptic art structured human scientific initiatives in the wake of Philipp Melanchthon’s Reformation pedagogy. (shrink)

When we pick up a big book like this with big names including Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, and Warburg, we want to learn something significant we don't already know by way of reading and reputation. And if we are in rhetoric per se, we are especially eager to see how these people are attached substantially to a field that none of them claimed. Following from these initial expectations, we are then owed a plausible methodology that tends neither toward the wish fulfillment (...) of big rhetoric, nor toward one of the more conventional methods—for example biographic, or dictated by the more familiar scripts of philosophy, politics, and art history—that would render these surprises unlikely because the field would have been... (shrink)

“rhetorical theory” since 1800. Data source: Google Trends “rhetorical theory”, “literary theory”, and “critical theory”, since 1800. Data source: Google Trends The old news is that Theory with a capital “T” happened from approximately 1965–85 and then dissipated in scandal. Or to the contrary, Theory is an ancient and global activity we find wherever we have evidence of systematic reflection, upon language especially. Alive and well. But neither of these stories can be adequate given a graph like those above, and (...) given our facts on the ground. For Theory is still, or is again robust, with Philosophy & Rhetoric as a premier venue, at the same time that... (shrink)

Leading scholars address Heidegger’s 1924 lecture course, “Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy.”.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 308-321 [Access article in PDF] Early Modern Emotion and the Economy of Scarcity 1 - [PDF] Daniel M. Gross Where do we get the idea that emotion is kind of excess, something housed in our nature aching for expression? In part, I argue, from The Passions of the Soul (1649), wherein Descartes proposed the reductive psychophysiology of emotion that informs both romantic (...) expressivism and latter-day psychology. Indeed, one goal of this article is simply to recall that we do not just naturally express emotions generated in our amygdala or wherever, but rather that we are first constituted as expressive agents by what the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment called "social passions." Contrary, however, to these largely optimistic philosophers, such as Hutcheson and Smith, who anchored social passions in a moral sense equally shared by all, I argue that the constitutive power of emotion derives from their unequal distribution. In what follows I work primarily with Aristotle's Rhetoric and Thomas Hobbes to outline a "political economy" wherein passions are (1) constituted as differences in power and (2) conditioned not by their excess but by their scarcity. Though we may reject the political conclusions reached by Aristotle and Hobbes, their analysis of emotion allows us to address important political questions neutralized in the Cartesian paradigm. 1. Descartes If you are tickled to learn that Aztec culture located passions in the liver, here is something at least as quaint from Descartes: "The ultimate and most proximate cause of the passions of the soul is none other than the agitation with which the spirits move the little gland which is in the middle of the [End Page 308] brain," that is, the pineal gland. Or so Descartes proposes in his 1649 treatise on the passions composed for Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. Now compare this to Aristotle's Rhetoric, where for instance anger is defined as "desire, accompanied by distress, for conspicuous retaliation because of a conspicuous slight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or those near to one" (1378a 31-33). For Aristotle anger may indeed be accompanied by physical distress, as in the boiling of blood expressed in crimson cheeks, but its proximate cause is anything but that little gland in the middle of the head. Anger is a deeply social passion provoked by perceived slightsunjustified, and it presupposes a public stage where social status is always subject to performative infelicities.Indeed, we can learn a good deal about the rhetoric of human nature in early-modern Europe simply by asking what passions were. When we do, we find not only that their descriptions disagree, but also that the things described as passions seem incommensurable. Are passions tangible "things" residing in the soul, or are they dispositions of the heart or beliefs of the mind? Is passion a matter of personal expression, or is it something essentially social that a person performs? Do they come from our interior, or from the things we perceive? Can they be measured and manipulated--their causes controlled--or do passions elude control by their very nature? Are they divine, diabolical, or human, and can we distinguish them according to the status of their origin? Are they the enabling condition of virtue or its enemy? Are they necessary or disposable? What is their number and what do they do? Exasperated by endless wrangling over such questions, Descartes complains: There is nothing in which the defective nature of the sciences which we have received from the ancients appears more clearly than in what they have written on the passions; for although this is a matter which has at all times been the object of much investigation, and though it would not appear to be one of the most difficult, inasmuch as since everyone has experience of the passions within himself, there is no necessity to borrow one's observations from elsewhere in order to discover their nature. (331) 2With this preliminary remark Descartes renders human nature in its quintessential modern form: it is something housed in a body subject to the self-evidence... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Google Ngram metadata reveal that the English phrase “rhetorical theory” is not that old, appearing on the scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and then picking up dramatically with critical and literary theory in the 1960s. How do we square this with familiar arguments that rhetorical theory is much, much older? In this forum contribution I argue that the long view applies to our contemporary rhetorical theory only if we equivocate. Much of what currently falls under (...) the heading “rhetorical theory” has little or nothing to do with the systematic conceptualization of persuasive discourse —general, posthuman, eco-, and materialist rhetorics are the most prominent counterexamples. Instead, around 1900, Gertrude Buck develops what I call the short and sharp view that prevails to this day: rhetorical theory offers reality figured by way of its alternatives. (shrink)

At the outset it is worth remembering how Heidegger in the 1970s first appeared prominently, though very differently, at the intersection of rhetoric and philosophy. The "rhetoric of figures and tropes" then seemed compelling due in part to Derrida's Heidegger, who played a key role in the famous Derrida essay translated into English with the added subtitle "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." Compelling for many was the history there referenced from Cicero, book 3 of Aristotle's Rhetoric, book (...) 8 of Quintilian's Institutes through the later French treatises of Fontanier and Du Marsais, which, if read in a certain way, destroyed the language transparency model that seemed threatening at the time.1... (shrink)

Alva Noë, who is a major figure in establishment philosophy, has been producing work that speaks directly to rhetoric in new ways that are important. This "In Focus" project explores how so, with the help of Carrie Noland on dance, Thomas Rickert on music, and, in a previous issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric 53.1, Nancy Struever on the basics of human inquiry including pictorial, which she thinks almost nobody gets right except for R. G. Collingwood, and perhaps now Noë. In (...) each case you will see how "rhetoric" must be stretched by way of these lateral artistic, and at the same time essential, projects in the discipline per se."Rhetoric" in these considerations is certainly not a vague notion that the things we do... (shrink)

We learn something from the mistakes we make with a book. In this case I read the word “quarkism” where I should have read the word “Quakerism.” As in the sentence on page 102 of Lisbeth Lipari’s quirky book: “This kind of listening is perhaps what is called in Quakerism [or was it “quarkism”] the ‘gathered meeting,’ where the assembled silent worshipers cease being individual selves and instead join together in ‘gathered harkening.’” You can guess “worshipers” alerted me to this (...) mistake, but the first part seemed perfectly plausible, as the discussion in the first chapter of holism versus atomism runs through quantum mechanics and brings up subatomic particles like quarks and the space in between.I venture there.. (shrink)

In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the relation of consciousness, the will, and our intentional and voluntary actions. Wegner claims that our experience and common sense view according to which we can influence our behavior roughly the way we experience that we do it is an illusion.

The science of well-being studies an evaluative kind, well-being, which raises natural worries about the ability of empirical research to deliver. This paper argues that well-being research can provide important information about how people are doing without entangling itself very deeply in controversial normative claims. Most life satisfaction research, for instance, purports only to tell us how people see their lives going relative to what they care about ? something most people can agree is important, whatever their theory of well-being. (...) At the same time, such research can mislead if it does not in fact have the significance it seems to have. Life satisfaction measures in fact have this problem: life satisfaction attitudes have deep in-principle limitations in their ability to reflect the subjective quality of people's lives, for instance because they are only weakly constrained by the facts about how people see their lives going. You might, e.g., reasonably be satisfied with your life even if you think it's going badly for you. I propose largely replacing such measures with aggregate life evaluation measures, which dispense with both the global judgment and ?satisfaction? elements of life satisfaction. (shrink)

This essay defends the controversial and indeed counterintuitive claim that there is a good argument to be made from a Lockean perspective for government action to guarantee access to health care. The essay maintains that this argument is in some regards more robust than the well-known argument in defense of universal health care spelled out by Norman Daniels, which this essay also examines in some detail. Locke's view that government should protect people's lives, property, and freedom–where freedom is understood as (...) independence and self-determination–justifies government action to ensure access to health care, because (roughly), just as individuals cannot protect themselves from crime and foreign invasion, so individuals are unable to provide for their own health care. Defense from disease is as important as defense from crime, and–although this is arguable–government action to guarantee access to health care does not itself undermine freedom. (shrink)

Includes a foreword by Kevin M. Gilmartin, PhD, author of the bestselling Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement: A Guide for Officers and Their Families. This book offers practical, research-based strategies to help police officers improve wellness, strengthen ethical commitments, and boost resilience both on and off-duty. Your power as a police officer does not come from your badge, gear, or tactical skills. It comes from your POWER: police officer wellness, ethics, and resilience. This book offers a research-based approach to dealing (...) with the daily challenges you face in your law enforcement job. It describes personal and professional steps you can take, on-duty and off-duty, to optimize your health and maintain your performance. When you proactively practice the skills, tips, and exercises outlined in this book, you will be better prepared to defuse crisis situations before they happen, and more capable of coping with them when they do. As a law enforcement officer, you deal with enormous challenges on a daily basis. Policing involves daily risks and stressors that can compromise your health, shorten your career, and make life harder on your loved ones. Even if you have a gym or access to counseling at work, you need a personal plan to maintain your overall wellness-physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Economics and Philosophy of Economics Six Central Methodological Problems Inexactness, Ceteris Paribus Clauses, and “Unrealistic Assumptions” Contemporary Directions in Economic Methodology Conclusion References.

In der Tradition der Musik ist diese selbst immer wieder als eine Kunstform verstanden worden, die in einem besonders innigen Verhältnis zu dem steht, was uns auszeichnet: unsere Identität. Die Beiträge des Bandes spielen in unterschiedlicher Weise den Gedanken durch, dass Musik an der Konstitution von Subjekten sowie der Gestaltung individueller und kollektiver Selbstverständnisse in geschichtlichen Lebensformen beteiligt ist. Dabei wird vor allem nach der Rolle musikalischer Praktiken und Erfahrungen für die Konstitution, Transformation und Reflexion unserer Selbst als Subjekte gefragt (...) und das Verhältnis von Musik und Subjekt konstruktiv thematisiert. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the structure, strategy and methods of assessment of orthodox theoretical economics. In Part I Professor Hausman explains how economists theorise, emphasising the essential underlying commitment of economists to a vision of economics as a separate science. In Part II he defends the view that the basic axioms of economics are 'inexact' since they deal only with the 'major' causes; unlike most writers on economic methodology, the author argues that it is the rules that (...) economists espouse rather than their practice that is at fault. Part III links the conception of economics as a separate science to the fact that economic theories offer reasons and justifications for human actions, not just their causes. With its lengthy appendix introducing relevant issues in philosophy of science, this book is a major addition to philosophy of economics and of social science. (shrink)

Dan Haybron presents an illuminating examination of well-being, drawing on important recent work in the science of happiness. He shows that we are remarkably prone to error in judgements of our own personal welfare, and suggests that we should rethink traditional assumptions about the good life and the good society.

La modernità incompiuta e l'ermeneutica dell'umano: sulla filosofia di Domenico Jervolino -- Sulla mortalità dell'essere morale: note su ontologia e diritto con Gabriel Marcel -- Matrimonio e "diritto naturale vignete" in Sergio Cotta -- La molteplicità degli ordinamenti giuridici nella riflessione di Giuseppe Capograssi -- Last not last.

As a young college student studying philosophy, Klein filled a notebook with short quotes from the world's greatest thinkers, hoping to find some guidance on how to live the best life he could. As he revisits the wisdom he relished in his youth, each extract is annotated with Klein's inimitable charm and insights. He tackles life's biggest questions-- and leaves us chuckling and enlightened.

This book is about preferences, principally as they figure in economics. It also explores their uses in everyday language and action, how they are understood in psychology and how they figure in philosophical reflection on action and morality. The book clarifies and for the most part defends the way in which economists invoke preferences to explain, predict and assess behavior and outcomes. Hausman argues, however, that the predictions and explanations economists offer rely on theories of preference formation that are in (...) need of further development, and he criticizes attempts to define welfare in terms of preferences and to define preferences in terms of choices or self-interest. The analysis clarifies the relations between rational choice theory and philosophical accounts of human action. The book also assembles the materials out of which models of preference formation and modification can be constructed, and it comments on how reason and emotion shape preferences. (shrink)

This book, by one of the pre-eminent philosophers of science writing today, offers the most comprehensive account available of causal asymmetries. Causation is asymmetrical in many different ways. Causes precede effects; explanations cite causes not effects. Agents use causes to manipulate their effects; they don't use effects to manipulate their causes. Effects of a common cause are correlated; causes of a common effect are not. This book explains why a relationship that is asymmetrical in one of these regards is asymmetrical (...) in the others. Hausman discovers surprising hidden connections between theories of causation and traces them all to an asymmetry of independence. This is a major book for philosophers of science that will also prove insightful to economists and statisticians. (shrink)

Anger, disgust, elevation, sympathy, relief. If the subjective experience of each of these emotions is the same whether elicited by moral or nonmoral events, then what makes moral emotions unique? We suggest that the configuration of moral emotions is special—a configuration given by the underlying structure of morality. Research suggests that people divide the moral world along the two dimensions of valence (help/harm) and moral type (agent/patient). The intersection of these two dimensions gives four moral exemplars—heroes, villains, victims and beneficiaries—each (...) of which elicits unique emotions. For example, victims (harm/patient) elicit sympathy and sadness. Dividing moral emotions into these four quadrants provides predictions about which emotions reinforce, oppose and complement each other. (shrink)

Three studies test eight hypotheses about (1) how judgment differs between people who ascribe greater vs. less moral relevance to choices, (2) how moral judgment is subject to task constraints that shift evaluative focus (to moral rules vs. to consequences), and (3) how differences in the propensity to rely on intuitive reactions affect judgment. In Study 1, judgments were affected by rated agreement with moral rules proscribing harm, whether the dilemma under consideration made moral rules versus consequences of choice salient, (...) and by thinking styles (intuitive vs. deliberative). In Studies 2 and 3, participants evaluated policy decisions to knowingly do harm to a resource to mitigate greater harm or to merely allow the greater harm to happen. When evaluated in isolation, approval for decisions to harm was affected by endorsement of moral rules and by thinking style. When both choices were evaluated simultaneously, total harm -- but not the do/allow distinction -- influenced rated approval. These studies suggest that moral rules play an important, but context-sensitive role in moral cognition, and offer an account of when emotional reactions to perceived moral violations receive less weight than consideration of costs and benefits in moral judgment and decision making. (shrink)

This essay explains what the Causal Markov Condition says and defends the condition from the many criticisms that have been launched against it. Although we are skeptical about some of the applications of the Causal Markov Condition, we argue that it is implicit in the view that causes can be used to manipulate their effects and that it cannot be surrendered without surrendering this view of causation.

We often consciously will our own actions. This experience is so profound that it tempts us to believe that our actions are caused by consciousness. It could also be a trick, however – the mind’s way of estimating its own apparent authorship by drawing causal inferences about relationships between thoughts and actions. Cognitive, social, and neuropsychological studies of apparent mental causation suggest that experiences of conscious will frequently depart from actual causal processes and so might not reflect direct perceptions of (...) conscious thought causing action. (shrink)

Drawing on theories of William James, Freud, and Dewey, as well as on studies in mood control, cognitive therapy, and artificial intelligence, this...

Participants watched themselves in a mirror while another person behind them, hidden from view, extended hands forward on each side where participants’ hands would normally appear. The hands performed a series of movements. When participants could hear instructions previewing each movement, they reported an enhanced feeling of controlling the hands. Hearing instructions for the movements also enhanced skin conductance responses when a rubber band was snapped on the other’s wrist after the movements. Such vicarious agency was not felt when the (...) instructions followed the movements, and participants’ own covert movement mimicry was not essential to the influence of previews on reported control. (shrink)

This essay develops an account of health, the functional efficiency theory, which derives from Christopher Boorse's biostatistical theory. Like the BST, the functional efficiency theory is a nonevaluative view of health, but unlike the BST, it argues that the fundamental theoretical task is to distinguish levels of efficiency with which the parts and processes within organisms and within systems within organisms function. Which of these to label as healthy or pathological is of secondary importance. Because the statistical distributions that Boorse's (...) account relies on are distributions of functional efficiency, the functional efficiency theory arguably complements rather than challenges the BST. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This paper examines the norms that should guide policies aimed at promoting happiness or, more broadly, well-being. In particular, we take up the question of which conception of well-being should govern well-being policy, assuming some such policies to be legitimate. In answer, we lay out a case for ‘pragmatic subjectivism’: given widely accepted principles of respect for persons, well-being policy may not assume any view of well-being, subjectivist or objectivist. Rather, it should promote what its intended beneficiaries see as good (...) for them: pleasure for hedonists, excellence for Aristotelians, etc. Specifically, well-being policy should promote citizens’ ‘personal welfare values’: those values—and not mere preferences—that individuals see as bearing on their well-being. Finally, we briefly consider how pragmatic subjectivism works in practice. While our discussion takes for granted the legitimacy of well-being policy, we suggest that pragmatic subjectivism strengthens the case for such policy. (shrink)

The tenuous claims of cost-benefit analysis to guide policy so as to promote welfare turn on measuring welfare by preference satisfaction and taking willingness-to-pay to indicate preferences. Yet it is obvious that people's preferences are not always self-interested and that false beliefs may lead people to prefer what is worse for them even when people are self-interested. So welfare is not preference satisfaction, and hence it appears that cost-benefit analysis and welfare economics in general rely on a mistaken theory of (...) well-being. This essay explores the difficulties, criticizes standard defences of welfare economics, and then offers a new partial defence that maintains that welfare economics is independent of any philosophical theory of well-being. Welfare economics requires nothing more than anevidentialconnection between preference and welfare: in circumstances in which people are concerned with their own interests and reasonably good judges of what will serve their interests, their preferences will be reliable indicators of what is good for them. (shrink)