ABSTRACT For Richard McKeon (1975), the relationships between Greek dialectics and dialogue and rhetoric involve the “fruitful interplay of controversy and agreement,” and he judges this interplay to be the contribution that Greek dialectic makes to Western history and thought. Thus, he promises to enrich ongoing challenges of diversity, involving his own ideas on pluralism. This article reflects on and furthers that thinking, connecting early Greek insights on the concepts here identified with the post-McKeon debate on deep disagreement in argumentation.

ABSTRACT On closely reading the Aristotelian-Ciceronian-Kantian-inflected essay “The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts,” Richard McKeon’s 1970 Wingspread Conference address presciently sketches a new rhetoric that is no longer about the approval of an already formed opinion, the steering of public beliefs, or political influence, but rather about dealing with new problems. Showing the “art of discovery, invention and creativity” in action, his inimitable combination of ethos (trust), pathos (emotion), and logos (structure) opens the way to the perception of new facts and previously unnoticed structures and processes, particularly when read in conjunction with the vicissitudes of the relation between words and numbers, the verbal and the numeral across a historically changing trajectory that culminated in the constituted and constitutive force of all pervasive AI digitality. Considering its “inhuman” expansion, the article’s focus on the logos of techne opens a path toward a historical assessment of humankind’s digitally framed existence.

ABSTRACT Argumentation theory tends to treat the distinction between intentional and unintentional fallacies—sophisms and paralogisms—as unimportant for the evaluation of argumentation. The article author believes this is so because argumentation theory tends to be focused on the epistemic functions of argumentation and fallacious arguments pose the same threat to the production of epistemic goods whether they are intentional or not, so the distinction is not needed for the epistemic evaluation of argumentation. This article argues that argumentation has a special connection to respect for autonomy, one that enables it to also produce distinctly moral goods. Sophisms, but not paralogisms, spoil these goods. Worse—sophisms produce potentially continuing moral harms, while paralogisms do not. Therefore, the paralogism/sophism distinction should be reintegrated into argumentation theory’s evaluative toolbox.

ABSTRACT Autonomy is foundational to ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and it has been closely associated with argumentation. What is curious about autonomy is that it has traditionally been explained in terms of reasoning and argument: autonomy involves reasoning because, standardly, someone who’s autonomous is one who thinks things through, who has reasons for their actions. Autonomy regards argument because to respect the autonomy of someone who thinks things through, one must offer them reasons, that is, argue with them. One common thought is that provided one’s arguments meet certain criteria (e.g., they’re not sophistries or clever manipulations), then argument respects autonomy. But is this really so? No. Properly understood, argument is a kind of paternalism, for to argue with someone means to enter into and manage their stream of reasons, the very things that account for their autonomy.

ABSTRACT This introductory article discusses the state of the art in contemporary argumentation theory regarding the relationship between autonomy and argumentation. It introduces the contributions to the special section and discusses their relationship to each other and to the broader debate.

ABSTRACT Since at least the work of Plato, the Western philosophical tradition has observed an ambition to detect fixed truths in the swirling movements of discourse. Related to this is the tension at the heart of our understandings of “argument,” a tension between a set of fixed propositions abstracted from the dynamic of human exchanges, and those exchanges themselves, alive with the uncertainties of experience. This article explores this tension with a view to recovering a sense of “argument” that stays true to the ways in which it is lived in everyday situations.

ABSTRACT Despite Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s well-known influence on argumentation studies, it is striking that their theory of argumentation no longer stands out as a living project in the field. On the one hand, critics argue that their theory is inherently relativistic and therefore incapable of aiding argument evaluation. On the other hand, critics argue that, even as a descriptive theory, it fails to sufficiently justify its own systematic ambitions. This article addresses these dual concerns by returning to one of the most neglected yet most innovative aspects of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of argumentation—its rhetorical methodology. Reconstructing two key aspects of this methodology in phenomenological terms, the author discusses that the theory of argumentation found in The New Rhetoric is a philosophically neutral framework for describing the already norm-laden practice of argumentation.

ABSTRACT The sense of kairos is of time as having an event-like character. Fundamental here is a split between quantitative time and a qualitatively distinct moment. The decisive moment connects the kairological to crisis. By exploring the accounts of kairos in three contemporaries responding to the sense of crisis in 1920s Germany—Benjamin, Heidegger, and Tillich—this article shows the manner in action in the kairos can be understood as both responsive and non-opportunist. Themes such as the “tiger leap” (Benjamin), the “moment of vision” (Heidegger), and the “shuddering” of time (Tillich) are analyzed to demonstrate how these accounts taken in dialogue with one another give an understanding of kairos, as a displacement and disruption of time as chronos and not simply as an interruption in chronological time. Such a disruption of chronological time is a necessary condition for responsible action, giving a measure also for the present.

ABSTRACT This article describes the conceptualizations of the term kairos, generally taken to mean “the opportune moment,” by Isocrates. Though Isocrates was instrumental in developing kairos as a “quasi-technical” concept within the rhetorical art, his use of the word was highly nuanced and could be applied in one of three poles of meaning: (1) “circumstances”; (2) notions of the “appropriate”; and (3) “opportunity,” an orientation of elements within a particular moment that either supplies or shuts off a path toward a strategic outcome. Furthermore, over half of Isocrates’s eighty-five uses of the term and its variants have little to do with rhetorical theory per se but are simply incidental modifiers of matters under discussion. Accordingly, though kairos is an important term of art for Isocrates, only nuanced reading of the context can reveal his meaning for any given use of the word.

How does one describe a crucial moment, a moment that calls for action? What kinds of time are opened, disclosed, or foreclosed in such moments? This section explores a concept that has a long history in rhetoric and philosophy, but which is urgently called for now, in a time that many think of as critical, catastrophic, or even apocalyptic. Changes in the economy, climate, and the state of our democracies demand urgent attention, and while people disagree on the course to be taken, there is a sense that—this is it!—now is the time. The concept of kairos (from ancient Greek καιρός) comprises both a critical time and a perfect opportunity; it is the right moment to act, even though the word could also be interpreted in a more general sense as referring to the issue of right timing. Considered as “one of the most untranslatable of Greek words,” kairos is perhaps related to the verb kurō, “to meet” or “meet accidentally,” as when an arrow meets a target, suggesting that there is a spatial component in the temporal kairos.1 The spatial dimension shines through in the earliest uses of the term discussed in both SeungJung Kim’s article on ancient Greek visual arts and Robert Sullivan’s article on Isocrates (436–338 BCE). According to Sullivan’s survey, Isocrates most often employs the word to refer to a specific situation, occasion, state of affairs, or set of circumstances.How do you recognize, let alone seize, this kind of moment, though? The best-known depiction of this difficulty is a portrait of Kairos personified that dates back to Lysippos in the fourth century BCE, reconstructed visually in three dimensions in Kim’s essay. In Greek mythology Kairos is the god of golden opportunities, which (as we all know!) tend to pass by too quickly. The portrait shows a winged figure with a flowing forelock that ideally gives you something to hold on to. I like to imagine that if you manage to arrest this passing instant, time itself comes to an abrupt halt, which throws Kairos’s hair out in front of his face.Of course, people do not necessarily see it as positive when someone appears to have captured the moment. At the kairos symposium hosted by art historian Barbara Baert in Brussels in October 2018, W. J. T. Mitchell held up a picture of President Donald Trump’s sculpted forelock to illustrate that it all depends on the perspective. Turning the familiar Greek portrait into an image of the opportunist, Mitchell reminded all of us that had gathered to celebrate the legacy of kairos in iconographic, philosophical, theological, semantic, historical, and anthropological studies, of the ethical issues arising in such moments. The question of moral accountability is bound to come up, whether one takes kairos to refer to the act of seizing the moment, involving some form of decision, or to the moment itself, the kairos, which some might claim just seized upon them and carried them away.As Debra Hawhee and Erik Charles White before her have argued, kairos does not seem to be confined by the subjective reason operating in a “rhetorical situation,” but it depends on “the forces pushing on the encounter,” in addition to instinct and intuition, and possibly on habitual impulses springing from experience (Hawhee 2002, 24–25; White 1987; reconsidered by Brod 2021). Audiences may also have a significant role to play, as Kermit Campbell underscores in his discussion of the symbiosis of call and response in African American churches and his reflection on how Martin Luther King’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington replied to a call: “Tell them about the dream, Martin.”The moment of kairos may appear spontaneous and deliberate, both at the same time. The classical rhetoricians in fact insisted on the value of preparing for the unexpected, as we try to do in our current crisis management plans. In his essay, Sullivan documents the incredibly nuanced instructions Isocrates gave on how to exploit a prospective opening in all sorts of civic settings. From a rhetorical viewpoint, kairos can appear both as a strategic point of intervention and as an empowering outlook and toolbox.This is very far from how the word came to be used in the Greek versions of the Bible, where, as Phillip Sipiora has pointed out, kairos occurs hundreds of times describing the divine disruption and absolute command of worldly time (Sipiora 2002a, 3). According to the ecclesiastical saying discussed in Felix Ó Murchadha’s essay, there is “a season, and a time [kairos]” for everything here on this earth (cf. Smith 2002). And then, when Christ opens his mouth to speak as the anointed messiah, his first words are “The time [kairos] is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15; Sipiora 2002b, 114).It is worth observing that when the classical-rhetorical concept was rediscovered in the Christian Renaissance, the pagan god of opportunity was restored to prominence (Baumlin 2002). In a widespread emblem by Andrea Alciato titled In occasionem, a powerful female goddess named Occasio is holding up a spear-like razor, saying, “I am the moment of seized opportunity that governs all” (Alciato 1531).Skills at recognizing such cutting instants were effective instruments of power for those who had received a classical education and who mastered the rules of decorum and every aspect of society and its institutions. Right timing and attunement to the occasion were important not only in politics, the theatre, and book publication, but even in matters of religious persuasion (Paul 2014; Lewis 2020; Johanson 2023; Skouen 2018, 2023). The moment of conversion coincides with the kairos, an obvious—but strangely unrecognized—case in point being the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which even features an arrow; a classical image of kairos.2Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept has enjoyed a second renaissance. In the 1920s, classicists and philosophers in different European countries started probing the pre-Socratic and theological origins of kairos. The two Italian articles (cited in Kim’s article) by Augusto Rostagni and, respectively, Doro Levi are considered the most important philological studies. In the wake of World War I, several German thinkers were interrogating the idea of the critical moment, not least the theologian Paul Tillich and his circle of religious socialists styling themselves as the “Kairos-Kreis” (Weidner 2020). This crucial development, also involving Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, is the topic of Ó Murchadha’s article. In the classical tradition kairos is contrasted with chronos, representing the common conception of historical and chronological time, although in times of crisis the urgent experience of both these senses of time “intensify each other” (Hawhee 2023, 58). According to Ó Murchadha, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Tillich engaged with kairos in different ways to critique—not just chronos, but historicism, presenting their own respective ideas of a messianic, destinial, and prophetic temporality.With regard to the Christian understandings of kairos, Heidegger appears to have taken an interest in this as early as 1917 when, as a student, he was reading Friedrich Schleiermacher’s writings on religion (Kisiel 1993, 492). According to Theodore Kisiel, Heidegger’s “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” (1920–21) marks his “discovery of the kairological character of lived time,” connecting the parousia and the kairos, which Heidegger translates both here and elsewhere as der Augenblick (152, 185–86; McNeill 1999, 44–45, 124–25).Ó Murchadha shows how Heidegger, Benjamin, and Tillich worked to broaden the conceptual scope of kairos, responding to their own time of crisis and finding kairos to represent something other than krisis. In the process, kairos took on new existential and ontological meanings. As Daniel Weidner has argued, the way in which Tillich and others reconceptualized kairos in light of their modern, historical context also bespeaks the great flexibility of the concept itself. On the one hand, kairos requires one to adapt to shifting circumstances. On the other, the concept itself has readjusted to different contexts of understanding, at times connoting idealism, at other times realism, involving subjective and objective dimensions, and fulfilling spiritual and material needs (Weidner 2020, 86). As Kim points out in her article, the ancient Greek term was already very complex, involving both spatial and temporal dimensions, and having different implications in different domains, such as visual art and aesthetics, ethics, athletics, rhetoric, or medicine.Further proof of this extraordinary adaptability can be found in Antonio Negri’s essential chapter on kairos first published in Italian in 2000 and appearing in English in Time for Revolution (2003). Starting with “the classical image of the act of releasing the arrow,” Negri introduces kairos, “here in postmodernity,” as “an extremely singular force of production of temporality, the reverse of the very sad and naked Heideggerian figures of powerlessness” (2003, 142). To Negri, kairos is not just “the quality of the time of the instant, the moment of rupture and opening of temporality,” but it is also “a fundamental ontology of time” (142, 152). Indeed, it is our very power to experience, grasp, and express temporality, and through it, time is “broken and rendered creative” (152, 159). Expanding earlier notions of kairos, Negri describes how “being opens itself, attracted by the void at the limit of time” and deciding, as it were, “to fill that void” (152). For the Marxist philosopher, it is crucial to ask how “a revolutionary subjectivity” could potentially “form itself within a multitude of producers,” and the concept of kairos inspires hope that many singular kairoi might open up to each other in common acts of naming the void (144, 155).This understanding of kairos emphasizing its ontological aspects contrasts sharply with the current everyday uses of the word. Online, there are many competing companies and services by that name, such as business advisors and career coaches wanting to teach people how to become more proactive. Life in digitized societies offers an unprecedented stream of opportunities and kairos does seem the right word at the right time, even though Isocrates characterized the concept in much the same way about 2,500 years before the digital era began. Yet, the familiar legends of “opportunity” warrant criticism as they emerge from and are associated with a white, Western hegemony. In his essay, Campbell stakes out new directions in kairos theory by comparing earlier notions of kairic time to modes of Black discourse and soul power, and by claiming that Kairos might be the ideal mythical figure representing African American rhetoric.What kind of response does the right moment require? The cluster of essays presented here fills an obvious gap—or what rhetoricians of science such as Carolyn R. Miller (1992) would call “the kairos” demanding new research, for even though there has been an increasing amount of work done in the last decades, no comparable interdisciplinary set of essays yet exists. This special section seeks to reclaim the Greek word from its current limited, instrumental, everyday senses, providing new sources of reference on what kind of moment the kairos really is. The four essays also employ kairos as a conceptual tool for thinking about urgent points in time, which is the kind of time we live in now.

ABSTRACT Despite the common understanding of kairos as a temporal concept, it also harbors a spatial notion that holds particular significance in relation to Greek visual arts. The inquiry into its primary role in the formation of aesthetic beauty requires a phenomenological reading of the Lysippan personification of the concept, as it resonates with its counterparts in the fields of philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. Using Andrew Stewart’s suggestion as a starting point—that the Lysippan Kairos may serve as the artist’s manifesto, consciously constructed in response to the earlier Polykleitan Canon—the evidence for kairos as the sire of beauty is shown to reside not only in its principal role in characterizing the perfect proportion and harmony, but also in its relationship to somatic intuition and sensory understanding, implicating the viewer as a key participant in the process.

ABSTRACT Although Kairos in Greek mythology is often depicted as the winged son of Zeus who grants to those who lay hold of his single lock of hair their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, in traditional African American culture, particularly when it comes to speech, Kairos is essentially family. Given how much African American speakers depend on seizing the moment to invoke spiritual connections, emit laughter, and profess the truth, Kairos, or what we might call CPT (“Colored People’s Time”), can be summoned almost at will. One of the African American discourses this article will use to illustrate this point is Call and Response, a verbal exchange in which speakers and listeners attune to one another and to the timeliness of an event. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech was such an event, but it wouldn’t have been so were it not for the timely responding of his favorite gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the theoretical concept of meta-argumentative fallacy is useful. The authors argue for this along two lines. The first is that with the concept, the authors may clarify the concept of meta-argumentation. That is, by theorizing where meta-argument goes wrong, the authors may capture the norms of this level of argumentation. The second is that the concept of meta-argumentative fallacies provides an explanatory model for a variety of errors in argument otherwise difficult to theorize. The authors take three as exemplary: the straw man, both sides, and free speech fallacies.

ABSTRACT The welcome expansion of kairos beyond its traditional locus in public debate to a broad range of discourse forms and persuasive actions has not been matched by a reevaluation of the temporal logic of kairos, which is still seen as located in teleologic time. This article suggests that Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time could refigure kairos as a nonteleological relationship among past, present, and future. Benjamin provides a theoretical rationale for kairotic action that is distributed in time and space and accounts for kairos of objects, places, technologies, and works of art. These temporal affordances, usually developed separately in contemporary theory, are deeply connected in Benjamin’s writing; his understanding of time therefore integrates currently unconnected lines of research and supports a fluid but coherent understanding of kairotic agency.

ABSTRACT The logic of humor has been acknowledged as an essential dimension of every joke. However, what is the logic of jokes, exactly? The modern theories of humor maintain that jokes are characterized by their own logic, dubbed “pseudo,” “playful,” or “local,” which has been the object of frequent criticisms. This article intends to address the limitations of the current perspectives on the logic of jokes by proposing a rhetorical approach to humorous texts. Building on the traditional development of Aristotle’s almost neglected view of jokes as surprising enthymemes, the former are analyzed as rhetorical arguments. Like enthymemes, jokes are characterized by natural inferences that can be represented as topics, and quasi-formalized in argumentation theory as argumentation schemes. Like rhetorical arguments, jokes express a reason in support of different types of conclusions and proceed from distinct kinds of reasoning and semantic relations.

ABSTRACTSpeakers may argue in ways that facilitate cooperation, without really establishing unity. If emphasis is put on the word “composite” in composite audience, then the complementary act of addressing such an audience can be understood as an orchestration of different people, who may cooperate toward a conclusion. This brings attention to the multidimensionality of issues in pluralistic communities and the range of consequences proposals may have. Following Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric, I discuss how the compositeness of such argumentation can be fruitfully approached pluralistically. I argue that proposals on practical issues imply concomitant situations, wherein audiences are assigned different roles to play toward the ends of argumentation. This means that rhetorical argumentation performs implicit diplomacy, with implications for different audiences and the relationships between them. I conclude this article by discussing what this pluralistic and interactional account means for the analysis and evaluation of arguments and their rhetoric.

ABSTRACT Discourses conceal as much as they reveal, but in their concealment they may invite an audience into the silences of the gaps and pauses they contain in order to reflect and find insight. The moments of opportunity provided by these gaps suggest two sides to the concept of kairos, capturing both the ability of the author/speaker to create the opportune moment in the discourse, and the ability of the reader/listener to see that moment and the experience it invites.

ABSTRACT In the West’s Will to Know and its attendant rhetorical forms, speech has been related to silence in primarily three ways. In rhetoric and dialectic, speech pursues speech; in rhetorical education, silence pursues speech; and in sacred, ascetic rhetoric, silence pursues silence. These three relations of speech to silence as a form of knowledge in the Western rhetorical tradition leave a fourth untraversed. Yet to be explored is speech in pursuit of silence. This essay turns to the Buddhist tradition of rhetoric and dialectic to identify a form of knowledge where speech—negation—pursues silence. I then trace the same model of negatory speech in pursuit of silence in the long-repressed practice of sophistic antilogos.

ABSTRACT Many rhetorical theories of ethos mark their relationship with time by focusing on two temporal poles: the timely ethos and the timeless ethos. But between these two temporal poles, ethos is also durative; it lingers, shifts, accumulates, and dissipates over time. Although scholarship often foregrounds the kairotic and static senses of ethos popularized in Aristotle's Rhetoric, this article highlights how the chronic elements of ethos are no less important to rhetoric. By examining Xenophon's and Plato's representations of the trial of Socrates, this article contends that these competing views about the temporalities of ethos have a storied history that predates Aristotle's writings. This analysis also expands received understandings of Plato's contributions to rhetoric by illuminating how his view of ethos is deeply intertwined with ongoing philosophical practice. The article concludes by arguing that rhetorical studies has much to gain by more closely attending to the cumulative aspects of ethos.

ABSTRACT Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that leading judges into passions is like warping a rule or kanon before using it. Rather than seeing this as an exclusion of emotion from rhetoric, I argue that the ability for the pathe to bend judgment has its appropriate use in achieving equity. The pathe are themselves a kanon, resembling the soft, leaden rule used by Lesbian masons, referred to in his discussion of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics. In problematic cases, the rigidity of law requires the correction of a judge's pathetic capacity. I then read Lysias's Against Simon, a speech given under strict relevancy requirements, to show how the pathe are used in the narration of the accused party in seeking an equitable judgment. I conclude with how such a view may inform contemporary rhetorical inquiry on the emotions.

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the debate about the strawman fallacy. It is the received view that strawmen are employed to fool not the arguer whose argument they distort, but instead a third party, an audience. I argue that strawmen that fool their victims exist and are an important variation of the strawman fallacy because of their special perniciousness. I show that those who are subject to hermeneutical lacunae or who have since forgotten parts of justifications they have provided earlier are especially vulnerable to falling for strawmen aimed at their own positions or arguments. Adversarial argumentation provides especially fertile ground for strawmen that fool their own victims, but cooperative argumentation is no fail-safe protection from them either.

ABSTRACTOne of the most important developments in twentieth-century rhetorical theory is Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's insight that concepts, when under strain, can be split or dissociated into two separate terms. Not a simple binary, these terms remain interconnected in a value hierarchy with one term serving as the normative frame for the other. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca theorize that either term can be dissociated further, producing a fan-type dissociation. Unlike ordinary dissociations, fan-types place three or more terms in hierarchical relationship, resulting in unique rhetorical features. Fanning a dissociation can serve three basic rhetorical functions: purging undesirable elements, preserving less undesirable elements from total devaluation, and purifying desirable elements. Building on these basic functions, rhetors can perform complex rhetorical actions, from intensifying a dissociation's values to completely undoing a dissociation. Long ignored by theorists and critics, fan-types complicate our understanding of dissociation, argumentation, and value-based reasoning, and therefore deserve more scholarly attention.

ABSTRACTPhilosophy consists primarily in or of texts. The implications of this very basic fact for the subject—both as a writer and as a reader—and philosophy's conception of itself as a privileged form of argumentation and for establishing the truth have, however, been largely neglected. In order to address these issues, the article reconsiders Foucault's “double reading” of Descartes's Meditations as “demonstration” and “exercise” that both affects and transforms the meditating subject. I argue that such a double reading is not only proper to the Meditations but constitutive of all philosophical texts. This leads to a revised notion of truth that derives its argumentative consistency precisely from the entanglement of demonstration and exercise.

ABSTRACT This article asks if soundscapes are reasonable by inquiring if they can be designed to enhance the capacity for reasoned judgment. Using a normative pragmatic approach to argumentation theory, I demonstrate that soundscapes can be strategically designed to amplify or attenuate obligations, increase or weaken conviction, and create or mask argumentative context. I use the paradigm case of the 2012 casserole protests in Quebec to identify how arguers can use soundscapes to compel a response, increase the desire for advocacy, and create a public context. This expands the multimodal argumentation literature to incorporate sound. This article also intervenes into sound studies by supplying critical norms of reasonableness to assess soundscapes.

ABSTRACTBy way of generative critique, this article considers the premises, potential, and consequences of object-oriented ontology (OOO) and object-oriented rhetoric (OOR). To do this, it moves through four progressive and accumulative sections: first, the primacy and necessity of meaning-formation (signification) in any meaningful ontology, and thus the rhetorical exigency of any ontology in the first place; second, the potential and pitfalls of any specifically object-oriented rhetoric; third, the function of doxa (and episteme / logos) as means to recalibrate OOO and bridge it to a proper OOR; and fourth, extending from such a doxical approach, the ethical and political consequences of OOO/OOR, which we mark as a “dark politics” for two reasons—(1) the appropriately withdrawn, but nonetheless actual, politics of OOO/OOR, and (2) how such an ontological politics, whether intended or not, has “dark” (destructive) potential for bodies and lives.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes Heidegger's rhetoric in his most famous political address, the Rektoratsrede, which he delivered at the University of Freiburg on 27 May 1933. After I set out the political and philosophical kairos of the Rektoratsrede by drawing on Heidegger's contemporary lectures, letters, and Ponderings, in part 2 I use classical rhetorical resources and Heidegger's philosophy of temporality in Sein und Zeit (1927) to analyze the arrangement of his speech. In part 3, I examine two key National Socialist terms in the speech's climax. In part 4, I consider Heidegger's elocutio—his artful use of charged figures of speech and thought in the Rektoratsrede—in more detail. Concluding remarks reflect on the value and limits of the analysis in the context of debates about Heidegger's politics and its imbrication with his thought.

ABSTRACTSome arguments that are delivered in a dialectical exchange are never again recalled. Others are repeated again and again across argumentative situations and settle in a community's shared cognitive environment, thus demonstrating a memetic quality along lines that have become popular with several cultural theorists as a way of describing the evolution of culture. Moreover, some arguments may themselves act as memes. If memes “are replicators and tend to increase in number whenever they have the chance” (Blackmore 1999, 37), then they should be of interest to rhetoricians and argumentation theorists. I explore the relationship between arguments and memes, considering the nature of the meme and its argumentative potential. While controversial, meme theory promises to shed new light on how persuasion works in our mutual cognitive environments, and the attention it gives to how reasons move from mind to mind encourages the effort of the exploration.

ABSTRACT This article gives an account of the nature and purpose of Kant's poetic rhetoric in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. I argue that Kant employs a poetic mode of rhetoric in order to provoke a passionate, enthusiastic response in his audience. I go on to show that Kant became increasingly skeptical of poetic rhetoric's pathetic power after publishing Dreams. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Kant's confrontation with the Sturm und Drang led him to formulate a moral critique of poetic rhetoric and its tendency to undermine its audience's rational autonomy. I conclude by highlighting the significance of this critique in and for the development of Kant's mature rhetorical theory.

ABSTRACTThe Aristotelian concept of magnitude (megethos) can expand our understanding of how abundant information accumulates in ways that expand beyond epistemic registers, creating a sense of coherence. This sense of coherence, in turn, is more of an aesthetic effect than the result of epistemic validity drawn from that evidentiary abundance. In this article, I explore two different examples of archival magnitude: one is the fine-grained enormity of conspiracy discourse and the second is the large-scale quantities that power big data. These examples of archival magnitude are simply two narratives through which to explore the aesthetic and rhetorical operation of megethos. By redefining discourses that call on magnitude—the power of more—as aesthetic discourse, we may also find that the most fitting response is likewise an aesthetic one.

AbstractThis article examines Rancière's account of politics from a performative perspective. It brings insight about linguistic performativity to bear on key examples of political subjectification in order to illuminate the value and limits of a Rancièrean account of politics. It argues that Rancière's account of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political activism helps shed light on how language produces the political subjects of dissensual politics and illuminates the important role citationality plays in that production. Nonetheless, a performative analysis reveals that Rancière's account, with its emphasis on the momentary character of politics and its briefly detailed and decontextualized examples, glosses over the necessity of citational repetition to the intelligibility and disruptiveness of an act of resistance. Without an account of politics more attuned to these iterative dimensions we may be unable to cultivate the ethos required by the conditions of our age or the terms of Rancière's own account.

Abstract“Morality is relative to culture” is a descriptive claim, but in practice its normative entailment is rarely embraced. It is often claimed that this poses a problem of consistency for relativism as a morally normative theory: either relativists do not act in accordance with their beliefs or they hold different beliefs from what they espouse. This article evaluates a debate between Paul Boghossian and Stanley Fish over relativism, analyzing their arguments on the relationship between theory and practice in ethics and the tenability of moral relativism. I defend two claims: that the truth or falsity of moral relativism has significant bearing on action and that morality is based on a conjunctivity of doxastic and practical discursive commitments. Establishing the conjunctive commitment argument, I make the case that the doxastic and the practical lie at the heart of normative reasoning in general and ethics in particular and discuss the implications of such a view for rhetorical theory and community.

ABSTRACT This article examines the rhetorics of recognition in postclimate change political theory. As the future of human life—or a human way of life—is put under pressure from the heating of the planet, critical theory has increasingly leveled the ontological distinctions among biological, geological, and meteorological existents, and a posthuman critique is giving way to a postliving critique and biopower is giving way to geontopower. Building on my recent reflections on geontopower, I explore how critical theory is absorbing nonliving existents into late liberal forms of democracy, focusing more specifically on the logos-oriented model of Jacques Rancière and post-Deleuzean vitalist oriented models.

ABSTRACTIn “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam,” Bruno Latour wonders whether academia, particularly the humanities, can rethink its dedication to critique and cultivate an ethos that cares. I question whether Latour's commitment to enlightenment without modernity, particularly his allergy to transcendence, inhibits his ability to transform critique into care. For Latour, transcendence makes impossible the due process of his proposed collective and the corresponding practice of real world politics precisely because it dangles a truth beyond compromise. While Latour regards notions of a transcendence in terms of a beyond as a precursor to terror, Levinas finds terror in the practice of philosophy without the disequilibrium transcendence can bring. Thus, I argue that Levinas offers Latour a way to uncross God that posits the beyond as something other than ineffectually and debilitatingly distant, as something that can inspire us to care.

AbstractThe representation and classification of the structure of natural arguments has been one of the most important aspects of Aristotelian and medieval dialectical and rhetorical theories. This traditional approach is represented nowadays in models of argumentation schemes. The purpose of this article is to show how arguments are characterized by a complex combination of two levels of abstraction, namely, semantic relations and types of reasoning, and to provide an effective and comprehensive classification system for this matrix of semantic and quasilogical connections. To this purpose, we propose a dichotomous criterion of classification, transcending both levels of abstraction and representing not what an argument is but how it is understood and interpreted. The schemes are grouped according to an end-means criterion, which is strictly bound to the ontological structure of the conclusion and the premises. On this view, a scheme can be selected according to the intended or reconstructed purpose of an argument and the possible strategies that can be used to achieve it.

Abstract This article revisits stasis theory, the rhetorical tool that outlines the strategic options of a defendant in a moral or legal accusation. By analyzing the burden of proof of an accuser and deducing a comprehensive model for a modern theory of stasis from the resulting obligations, it develops a system of ten vital staseis (key issues), each of which is by itself sufficient for a defense in front of a reasonable audience. The resulting modern theory of stasis can be a useful heuristic tool for the rhetorical defense against moral and legal accusations as well as for the systematic analysis of judicial speeches and debates.

ABSTRACTThis article argues for a definition of rhetorical argumentation based on the theme of the argumentation, that is, the issue in dispute, rather than its aim (e.g., to “win”) or its means (e.g., emotional appeals). It claims that the principal thinkers in the rhetorical tradition, from Aristotle onward, saw rhetoric as practical reasoning, that is, reasoning on action or choice, not on propositions that may be either true or false. Citing several contemporary philosophers, the article argues that this definition highlights certain distinctive properties of rhetorical argumentation that tend to be overlooked or undertheorized in argumentation theory.

ABSTRACT This article examines Jürgen Habermas's argumentation theory for an answer to the question of the role of rhetoric in cogent argument-making practices. At first glance, Habermas's triadic synthesis of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric appears conventionally neo-Aristotelian and logocentric. However, in aligning rhetoric with a formal, idealized understanding of argument as a process, Habermas gives rhetorical evaluation an authoritative role in certifying nonrelativistic public knowledge. Further elaboration of the implications of his model reveals a radically social view of rational persuasion and of reasonable opinion formation that makes intellectual humility a central virtue. Humility heavily restricts the scope for reasonable disagreement and dissent, particularly in polarized controversies. Examination of such a controversy shows the limits of the Habermasian conception of rhetoric.

ABSTRACT There is something importantly right about an audience-centered approach to argumentation, but it raises questions. For example, when it is said that the argumentation is a function of the audience addressed, what does “audience” mean here? Who constitutes this audience? More important, how does the arguer gain this knowledge of this audience? And is acceptance by the audience really the best way to view the goal of argumentation? This article broaches these questions, turning to discussions of audience by Chaïm Perelman, Christopher Tindale, and Trudy Govier to ask how one comes to know one's audience and whether acceptance by the audience is the goal of argumentation.

ABSTRACTThe most important contemporary development in rhetoric for the theory of argumentation is Jeanne Fahnestock's program of figural logic, the ruling insight of which is that figures epitomize arguments. Working primarily with the antimetabolic formula at the heart of Gregor Mendel's paper “Experiments in Plant Hybridization,” I investigate the figural bases of the logic anchoring this foundational essay in genetics. In addition to antimetabole, the formula also depends crucially on ploche, polyptoton, onomatopoeia, antithesis, synecdoche, reification, and metaphor.

ABSTRACTThis article appropriates Thomas Conley's (1990) four classical positions on the nature and function of rhetoric, and assesses their relevance vis-à-vis three contemporary normative approaches to argumentation: the epistemological approach, pragma-dialectical theory, and informal logic. In each case, the room for the integration of rhetorical insights into argument evaluation is found to be restricted by dialectical and logico-epistemic norms endorsed in these approaches. Moreover, when rhetorical insights could fit the so restricted room, then the reliability and the specificity of such insights remain inversely related, with methodologically well-hardened knowledge of what persuades remaining too general. The trade-off between reliability and specificity of suasory knowledge, or so is our thesis, undermines the claim that rhetorical insights can presently inform the evaluation of natural language arguments in these three normative approaches.

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the value of argumentation as an instrument for rational persuasion in doctor-patient (and general health professional–patient) communication. Argumentation can be used to influence those beliefs that form the basis of an individual's attitudes and decision-making process. In the medical context, argumentation can be used to legitimize the points of view of the doctor and the patient; to correct, add to, or modify a patient's set of beliefs; and to enhance the patient's central processing of the information that is foundational to his or her decision making. Overall, argumentation as a method of rational persuasion is an important communication tool for establishing conditions that are conducive to a patient's autonomous decision making. In this article, the issue of argumentation as rational persuasion is set within the context of several key topics in the area of health communication, namely, autonomy, the ways that doctors and patients interact and share information, and the effectiveness of information dissemination through traditional and new channels. Also, the difficulties of using argumentation effectively in this field are discussed, and areas of interest for future argumentation theory–based studies focused on enhancing its quality are highlighted.

ABSTRACT The contemporary study of argumentation has produced sophisticated new theories that attempt to capture norms for evaluating arguments that are much more complex and more suited to actual argumentation than the traditional logical standards. The most prominent theories also make explicit attempts to distinguish themselves from rhetorical approaches. Yet, in the case of at least three major systematic theories of argumentation, a reliance on rhetorical theory persists. Despite denials, each account ultimately grounds its norms in considerations of reception and audience. There are good reasons why these theories are attracted to rhetoric, and there are understandable factors that produce their concern about it. Ultimately, though, the rhetorical dimension of these theories is one of their major theoretical virtues and a clear sign of their staying close to the realities of argumentation.

ABSTRACT Theories of argumentation that give serious attention to rhetorical features, such as those of Aristotle and Chaïm Perelman, assign an important role to the audience when considering how argumentation should be constructed and evaluated. But neither of these theorists provides ways of thinking about audience that is adequate to the range of questions raised by this central concept. In this article, I explore one of these questions—that of audience identity—and consider the degree to which this issue has been recognized by the theorists in question and how we might move from their conceptions of it to a better understanding of the importance of identity in argumentation and how it should be treated.

ABSTRACTIn her 2006 article “The Task of the Bow” Carol Poster shows through an analysis of the fragment “For the bow, its name is life but its task is death” that for Heraclitus the instability of the material world also infects language and that investigating the unstable logos—its hidden, double, oblique meanings—discloses this extralinguistic world instability. This article conducts similar analysis of the wordplay in Heraclitus's opening lines, challenging the long-standing debate over the meaning of logos in the first fragment. Through reconsidering the context of Aristotle's references to Heraclitus's paradoxes, this article develops a set of hermeneutic criteria that may be applied to contemporary interpretations of the first fragment. Understood as a paradox, the hidden meaning of this logos must be sought through its primary meaning (speech or discourse), and its fuller interpretation requires an expansion (not contraction) of its possible signification. By such an interpretation, the logos as speech of the first fragment is concomitant with the volatile flux of the material world itself.

ABSTRACTTraditionally, kairos is defined by its transience. Scholars assume that in order to capitalize on the rhetorical power of kairos, a speaker must capture the “opportune moment” before it passes. This article makes the case that the kairic moment can be sustained indefinitely through the sacralization of physical space. Linking rhetorical theories of kairos as “God's time” to Mircea Eliade's discussion of “sacred hierophanies,” the article performs an analysis of the National Cathedral in Washington DC and concludes that rhetoric can circumvent traditional contingencies when deployed within kairic space.

ABSTRACTJoining the New Rhetoric project's conversation about argumentation as justice, this article aims to add an expanded version of the psychological to the just resources of argumentation. After examining how Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric justifies attention to—yet ultimately swerves from—contingencies of psycho-physical sensation, I turn to Burke's highly elaborated concept of identification, which adds to the New Rhetoric project by articulating the relations of physiological sensation, attitude and emotion, and persuasion. Linking ethics and form, identification provides a means by which one may grow increasingly aware of the sensation-driven defensiveness that can undermine dialogic exchange. After making this case that Burke's rhetoric can help develop what is not in the New Rhetoric project but should be—the resource of constitutive, affective identification—I end with what should be in Burke but is not—a universality that a “we” of substantially different constitutions would agree on.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on attunement as a concept that intervenes in the question of how we learn to act ethically in the face of radical alterity. I use Jacques Derrida's concept of a “contraband” tonality and Gilles Deleuze's discussion of “haptic” tone to argue that tonality resonates with dimensions of affect and desire that cannot be accommodated through familiar interpretive acts of listening, hearing, and seeing. Because we are unable to fully understand and account for the tonality of others, the article suggests, we need to approach attunement as a disposition or ethos that prolongs our engagement with the alterity of others' marks and noises. Repositioned as living practice, attunement can redefine ethical action by drawing attention to the material, physical, and emotional challenges of preserving what Diane Davis calls a “radically hospitable opening to alterity.”

Abstract The relationship between William James and the stoics remains an enigma. He was clearly influenced by reading Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus throughout his career. Some work has been done on the thematic convergences between Jamesian pragmatism and stoic thought, but this study takes a different path. I argue that the rhetorical style that James uses in arguing for his moral claims in front of popular audiences can be better understood if we see it in light of the stoic style of argumentation. I look at a text James read closely and recommended to close acquaintances—Marcus Aurelius's Meditations—to extract a sense of stoic rhetorical style. James's use of the stoic's tactics of vivid examples and rhetorical questions to shape the rhetorical experience of his audience and to thereby make his points becomes understandable as a possible extension of the stoic style of persuasion.

Abstract It does not seem terribly unfair to say that studies of both rhetoric and dialogue have tended, by and large, to pass over listening in favor of speaking. In scholarly as well as quotidian parlance, it would appear that both rhetoric and dialogue are principally concerned with speech, banishing listening to the silent subservience of rhetoric's other. Whichever way it is glossed—as rhetoric, dialogue, language, or argumentation—the Western conception of logos emphasizes speaking at the expense of listening (Fiumara 1990). And the problem with conceiving of logos in terms of speech and speaking is not only that it ignores the importance of listening but also that it obscures how listening makes the ethical response possible. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this article examines the ethical exigency of the face and its relation to primordial discourse in order to disclose the otherwise hidden ethical significance of listening and its vocation as a form of co-constitutive communicative action that can “listen persons to speech.”

AbstractIn this article the author offers a reading of mimetic style (lexis) as it is presented in book 3 of Plato's Republic with the aim of disclosing the importance of style in the acquisition and employment of knowledge—whether scientific or ethical. In fact, the author argues that a careful reading of Socrates' words in the text occasions the idea that reflection on the way that we imitate our inherited content—the ethos, the comportment, in which we exhibit that content—makes visible a potential to appropriate received content and imitated knowledge in original and wakeful ways. In consequence, the author argues that it might be style, not content, that harbors the capacity for us to take a genuine, critical responsibility for our inherited concepts.