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.

This essay revisits two proposals for the abolition of compulsory freshman English: Thomas Lounsbury’s “Compulsory Composition in Colleges” in 1911 and Oscar James Campbell’s “The Failure of Freshman English” in 1939. It demonstrates how the New Literacy Studies provides a generative theoretical perspective from which to make more visible the assumptions, definitions, and attitudes about literacy that perpetuate the compulsory composition debate.

“C.K.’s approach to kairos, to the complex forces that shape rhetorical situations, offers an alternative to the dominant mode of contemporary networked rhetoric: snark.”

Youth perspectives are routinely absent from research and policy initiatives. This article presents a project that infuses youth participation, training and mentorship into the research process and teaches youth how to become policy advocates. Empower Latino Youth (ELAYO) studies the individual and systemic factors impacting sexuality and childbearing among Latino youth and seeks to reduce negative stereotypes and elevate the social standing of Latino youth. As a team-in-training, ELAYO provides adolescents, undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to develop research skills while learning the importance of linking science to policy. This paper was developed in collaboration with Latino youth.

In the wake of postcolonial studies, the culture wars, and the ongoing canon debate, the task of constructing one’s own pedagogical canon as a responsible educator continues to be an arduous one. Drawing in part on the work of Robert Coles on using literature for therapeutic purposes, as well as John Guillory’s notion that representation, in the political sense, is misapplied when it comes to canon formation, this article suggests that professors rethink how they put together their own syllabi. It asks that they consider shifting their primary criteria for inclusion from the much-disputed ideal of representativeness to one of relatability, defined in this instance as a student’s potential ethical engagement with a work. The central idea is that the student’s intuitive identification with some characters and texts should actually be encouraged, not dismissed, as a means of promoting greater engagement, more active learning, and a critical analysis of the text’s and their own personal values.

This essay provides an approach to teaching T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The approach is designed to disassociate the student from the annotation usually provided by either Eliot or an editor. The assignment is presented in multiple frameworks and hopes to make students deal with the poem’s specific lines. The process described has students identify voice shifts in the poem. It is certainly true that there are differing opinions about voice in The Waste Land, but the point of the assignment is not to involve the student in this debate (at least initially). The explicit pedagogical goal of the approach described in this essay is to enable students to develop their own views on the poem and to create a reading that is independent of editorial direction. This develops their ability to read critically and increases their comfort level with a difficult text.

Artist Graham Robertson referred to British performer Ellen Terry (1847–1928) as the “Painter's Actress.” Many nineteenth-century female performers benefited from relationships with fine art, using the image on the canvas as a vehicle for combatting stereotypes surrounding women in the theater. In aligning herself with the bohemian Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, Terry established respectability through fine art and offered a feminine persona that was a powerful alternative to domesticity. Cultivating this persona not only through paintings but also through photographs and textual representations, Terry suggests the ways in which women could employ multimodal arguments to secure their place in the public sphere.

In 2010, during the Google-China dispute, the Chinese Communist Party deployed a rhetoric imbued with the strong pathos of the "century of humiliation" (guochi) that China suffered at the hands of imperialists and used the Google incident to reaffirm its guardianship of the Chinese nation = state. As a case study, this discursive analysis of the Google dispute illustrates the rhetorical techniques and processes the Chinese Communist Party utilized to cement its legitimacy. Relying on the resistance-to-imperialism narrative template, the Chinese Government has circulated discourse that resonates with a public who continue to fear foreign infringement of sovereignty.

456 RHETORICA passant par Horace. Quant à Martial, s'il recourt, comme d'autres, à l'ironie, à l'ambivalence ou à une forme d'hyperbole qui dépasse le vraisemblable, c'est aussi par l'agencement même de ses poèmes que, dans le cadre d'une une lecture suivie, il permet de repérer la critique. Avec la partie sur l'Antiquité tardive, on est en plein dans la rhétorique. En effet les poèmes étudiés sont majoritairement des panégyriques ou des invectives, et les poètes en suivent scrupuleusement les codes. Tel est le cas de Claudien (Br. Bureau) et de Sidoine Apollinaire (R. Alexandre). Mais les choses, là encore, peuvent être retournées. L'irrévérence elle-même, ou plutôt l'invective, peut se retourner en éloge, comme dans le Contre Eutrope qui est en creux un éloge de Stilicon. Dans le panégyrique pour le sixième consulat d'Honorius l'irrévérence consiste simplement à exprimer des idées politiques et on obtient une sorte de miroir des princes, un portrait idéal de lui-même offert à Honorius pour qu'il s'y conforme. R. Alexandre présente une étude très intéressante du point de vue rhétorique sur trois panégyriques d'empereurs, montrant comment les circonstances extrêmes induisent une forme de réserve qui peut paraître irrévérencieuse. Sidoine gauchit les éléments traditionnels du panégyrique, retourne les exempta, mais surtout recourt à la prosopopée pour faire dire par d'autres ce qui est difficile à entendre. Le développement sur le discours figuré à propos du panégyrique de Majorien est, là encore, très bien venu. Des genres « mineurs » sont aussi pratiqués, où l'irrévérence se montre plus naturelle. Il s'agit d'une épigramme et une deprecatio de Claudien, dirigées contre un certain Hadrien (Fl. Garambois-Vasquez) et d'une épigramme d'Ausone que M. Squillante analyse comme «désémantisée» , le poète transformant l'irrévérence en pur jeu poétique. Une bibliographie, un index locorum et un index hominum complètent utilement cet excellent volume, qui touche à un enjeu central dans la rhéto­ rique: comment dire sans dire? Sylvie Franchet d'Espèrey Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) Françoise Laurent, Pour Dieu et pour le roi. Rhétorique et idéologie dans l'Histoire des ducs de Normandie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure (Essais sur le Moyen Âge 47), Paris: Honoré Champion éditeur, 2010. 388 pp ISBN 978-2-74532-041-4 En 1999, Jean-Marie Moeglin rappelait dans un article de synthèse 1 histoire des rapports entre 1 «historiographie moderne et contemporaine en Reviews 457 France et en Allemagne» et «les chroniqueurs du Moyen Âge1 ». Dans cette histoire longue, il repérait l'émergence, très tardive en France, de 1 idée selon laquelle << l'analyse du 'travail de l'historien' a une valeur propre» (p. 327): de cette «vision neuve du texte historiographique» (p. 332), témoigna en particulier la parution (en 1980) du livre de Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dons l'Occident médiéval. D'autres travaux, et pas seulement en France, lui succédèrent, tous consacrés à la poétique spécifique mise en œuvre par l'historien médiéval, à sa pratique, à son statut et à celui de son texte. Ces tra­ vaux, attentifs à la logique propre de ces textes et de leurs conditions de production, ont pris pour objets tant la production latine que les productions en langue vernaculaire, qui la transposent et rivalisent avec elle ou entre elles. L'ouvrage de Françoise Laurent s'inscrit dans ces perspectives2 en s'intéressant hardiment, comme l'annoncent le titre et l'introduction, aux «choix idéologiques et rhétoriques» (p. 12) de l'«écrivain» Benoît de Sainte-Maure, qui à l'initiative d'Henri II Plantagenêt succède à Wace dans les années 1170 et écrit sa propre version de l'histoire des ducs de Normandie. Afin de replacer le texte dans son «contexte historico-littéraire» (p. 12), l'Auteur privilégie donc l'analyse conjointe de la « rhétorique » et de «l'idéologie», dimensions de l'œuvre dont la définition reste certes problématique. La dimension « rhétorique » semble bien référer ici à un ensemble de règles, dessinant une norme de l'art d'écrire nécessaire à une réception contrôlée de l'œuvre selon le triple enjeu cicéronien (placere, docere, movere), que Françoise Laurent rappelle à chacune des articulations de son livre. Cette construction rhétorique maîtrisée est « offerte » à Henri II, dont Benoît n écrit pas la « vie » mais vers qui, pourtant, «convergent tous les événements historiques et toutes les aspirations de l'écrivain» (p. 134): les règles d'écriture que Benoît mobilise brillamment dans la nouvelle langue gouvernent une démonstration concertée de la «perfectibilité» du lignage (p. 167), tendu vers la «vie» du duc-roi Henri, «gemme pretiose» couron­ nant les autres «ovres» (vv. 10098-10104). Dans la première partie de l'ouvrage, intitulée «Les enjeux de l'Histoire des ducs de Norman­ die» (pp. 19-136), et dans le dernier sous-paragraphe de l'ouvrage (à la fin de la troisième partie), intitulé «Les redites de l'histoire» (pp. 337-341), ces règles que l'Auteur repère de manière très détaillée ] Saint-Denis et la royauté. Etudes offertes à Bernard Guenée, éd. F. Autrand, C. Gauvard, J.-M. Moeglin (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 301-338. 2Citons, sur le même thème, le livre de Laurence Mathey-Maille. Écriture du passé. Histoires des ducs de Normandie (Paris: Honoré Champion éditeur, 2007) 458 RHETORICA dans les lieux (rubriques de manuscrits; prologues et épilogues;«frontières du récit», entre excursus initial et «fin suspendue») où se manifeste l'« intention auctoriale» (p. 22) de Benoît sont celles d'historiographes chrétiens, d'Eusèbe de Césarée à Aimoin de Fleury. Dans la deuxième et dans la troisième parties, intitulées respective­ ment «Portraits et panégyriques des ducs normands » (pp. 137-230) et«Les voix de l'histoire» (pp. 233-342), les règles mises en œuvre avec brio par Benoît dans l'éloge et le discours représenté sont celles de la rhétorique classique antique, telles du moins que les comprennent et les utilisent les historiens grecs ou latins. Dans le cas des composantes du discours (rapporté ou direct), par exemple, l'Auteur rappelle que les historiens latins privilégiaient largement la narration (brève) et l'argumentation: Benoît, qui exploite abondamment les techniques du discours, suit leur exemple (pp. 291-295). Mais dans l'écriture de Benoît, transparaît aussi une «rhétorique scolaire»: l'acte com­ plexe de compilation (que l'on reprocha longtemps aux historiens médiévaux) ou encore les procédés d'amplifientio et de variatio en sont, comme le montrent les Arts poétiques des xiie et xiiie siècles, des traits stylistiques fondamentaux. Ce sont toutes ces règles, travaillées dans le creuset d'une nouvelle langue, que Françoise Laurent repère par le moyen de nombreuses études d'extraits. Ce travail, dont nous ne pouvons ici rendre compte de toute la richesse, propose au fond deux processus parallèles de contex­ tualisation de l'œuvre de Benoît, propre à restaurer sa spécificité en prouvant son insertion dans deux traditions précises. D'une part, il montre la captation (p. 108) par la langue vernaculaire des caractères les plus prestigieux de la « littérarité » latine, selon l'expression de Mi­ chel Banniard: ce «beau langage», que véhicule la rhétorique grécolatine (p. 345) et que Benoît explore et exhibe, donne à son entre­ prise historiographique une garantie d'autorité éthique et esthétique. Le passage (ou translatio, p. 345) à la langue vernaculaire rendait nécessaire cette captation dans une société où c'est au latin, celui des ecclésiastiques maîtres de l'Église et de ses rituels, que revient le pouvoir de convaincre et de persuader, de «faire-croire» et de sauver. D'autre part, le travail de Françoise Laurent expose la façon dont ce «beau langage» est soumis aux exigences d'une rhétorique chrétienne et de ses composantes: ce «haut langage» est soucieux toujours de marquer un écart avec un «beau langage» antique et païen. Le repérage des traits caractéristiques de Vhistoria ecelesiastica dans le texte de Benoît (pp. 26-43 et pp. 58-66), genre codifié par Eusèbe de Césarée à la suite et sur le modèle des Écritures, est sur ce plan précis un apport essentiel de l'étude: Benoît s'approprie concrètement un modèle bien repérable d'écriture de l'histoire des Reviews 459 hommes, consacré selon Karl Ferdinand Werner ou Martin Heinzelmann à la démonstration de l'économie du Salut dans les événements de l'histoire des hommes. Il intègre ainsi le «récit des origines» au début de son texte en langue vernaculaire (p. 63), comme Orose ou Raoul Glaber avant lui. En ce sens, Yestoire de Benoît est l'occasion d'une nouvelle captation de marques garanties d'autorité: celles de l'histoire écrite de manière autorisée et autoritaire par les hommes de Dieu, mais plus précisément en cette période de «réforme» , par les hommes de l'Église institutionnelle. Françoise Laurent propose d'ailleurs, à la suite d'Emmanuèle Baumgartner, d'adopter pour le texte de Benoît le titre d'Histoire des dues de Normandie, délaissant ainsi le terme contestable de «chronique» . Ce travail ample et riche ne manque pas d'ouvrir des problém­ atiques nouvelles. Si l'on prend pour repère les deux traditions repérées par Françoise Laurent dans ['Histoire, il est peut-être per­ mis de penser que ['Histoire de Benoît est aussi bien traversée de forces centrifuges créatrices d'un certain «écart». Ainsi, par rap­ port à la rhétorique gréco-latine que manipule si brillamment Benoît, Françoise Laurent montre la manière dont, comme indissolublement, ce langage «emprunté» véhicule dans les «lieux» de l'éloge et dans les arguments des discours une «peinture de l'homme» qui «offre un principe fondamental d'explication de l'histoire» (p. 319) et un«déterminisme humain» (p. 330). Dès lors, dans les portraits et les discours, Benoît semble contester la problématique même de Yhistoria ecclesiastica et sa causalité, fondée au contraire sur la «recherche constante d'une interprétation supra terrestre» (p. 341). De même, le livre de Françoise Laurent met en lumière le rapport essentiel et complexe entre l'historiographe et son roi, dont l'opposition fron­ tale à l'Église réformatrice est bien connue. Or, là encore, c'est une problématique essentielle de Yhistoria ecclesiastica qui est en ques­ tion: celle de la soumission du personnage royal et de ses actes à la volonté de Dieu et à l'interprétation, traditionnellement auxiliarisante , de son historiographe ecclésiastique, qui fait de la fonction guerrière des princes la «part cadette» de l'histoire3 . Au fond, dans YHistoire des ducs de Normandie, Benoît accaparerait les marques de Yhistoria ecclesiastica mais il remplacerait le personnel ecclésiastique, seul véritable acteur des historiae latines, par son roi et sa lignée nor­ mande, n'hésitant pas à qualifier Richard Ier de «sainz» et dotant certains ducs-rois de compétences théologiques. Sans doute sous le 3G. Duby, Les trois ordres ou l'imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 343, 460 RHETORICA regard approbateur du Plantagenêt: Wace, rejeté, ne qualifie jamais ainsi Richard Ier... C'est donc, dans YHistoire des ducs de Normandie, s le roi qui fait l'histoire avec Dieu et qui dirige l'Eglise, qu'il recons­ truit et à laquelle il explique le fonctionnement social, comme l'a bien montré Georges Duby. Dans un contexte marqué par un conflit âpre avec le sacerdotium, Benoît serait en lutte contre une conception grégorienne, auxiliarisée, de la royauté, mais il utiliserait pour cela les mêmes armes qu'elle: on peut penser peut-être à la lecture du travail de Françoise Laurent que la rhétorique chrétienne et classique de l'histoire est la plus prestigieuse et la plus efficace. Et que le fait d'y replacer Dieu à côté du roi, sans médiation cléricale, est un acte intéressant de subversion de l'histoire des genres. S'il s'agit bien du même Benoît, il n'en serait pas à son premier coup d'essai: Fran­ cine Mora n'a-t-elle pas découvert le dossier d'une sévère «réaction cléricale» aux audaces du Roman de Troie4? Dès lors, les choix bien différents de Wace posent question: ne serait-il pas le seul des deux historiens à être resté fidèle à toutes les règles du jeu, rhétoriques et idéologiques, de Yhistoria ecclesiastica ? Le travail de Françoise Laurent invite ainsi à redécouvrir un texte important et à lui poser des questions renouvelées. Ce n'est pas là le moindre des mérites d'un ouvrage de recherche... Eléonore Andrieu, Université Bordeaux III, Michel-de-Montaigne 4«UYlias de Joseph d'Exeter: une réaction cléricale au Roman de Troie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure, » Progrès, réaction, décadence dans l'Occident médiéval, éd. E. Baumçartner, L. Harf-Lancner, (Genève: Droz, 2003), pp. 199-213. ...

Reviews Michael S. Kochin. Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Univer­ sity Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-291-03455-3 The selections in this hook are best read as a series of loosely connected essays, situated within political science, informed bv scholarship in the rhetoric of Greek and Roman antiquity They build, in a leisurely way, toward a theory of rhetoric as an art of persuasive speech especially suited to the task of the politician—the construction of political advice. In his introduction, Michael Kochin proposes to use the diffusion of ideas in scientific communities as a model of political persuasion: "the politician seeks an understanding of policy through his or her operations within political institutions, just as the scientist seeks understanding through his or her operation wdthin political institutions. Scientific knowledge is thus created and distributed throughout the netw'ork: it is not merely diffused through it from center to periphery. I appeal to this clear case to explain the unclear case of public life: because the social structure of science is well studied, the rhetorical concepts I want to explicate are more clearly visible in it" (11). That w'ould have been an interesting book, but it is not the one Kochin ended up writing. Five Chapters forgets all about scientific communication for chapters on end, and the ideas that it develops about political communication are a very mixed bag. It is, for all that, an engaging and stimulating book. Kochin offers fix e topics for the investigation of political persuasion: character (or ethos), action (or stasis), things (the creation of facts), nothing (communication that maintains relationships) and art (specifically rhetoric as a means of understanding artful speech). Issues of argument and affect are dismissed in the introduction: political persuasion, according to Kochin, depends on the credibility of the speaker and the telling power of facts, and emotion is "a junk category" (15). Both the topics that Kochin has chosen and those he has left aside offer a reader fair warning that the ride ahead will not be a trot through familiar territories. The chapters on character, action, things, and nothing approach issues of political persuasion from different directions. Character takes up the Aristotelean traits of knowledge, benevolence, and virtue, treated here under the topics of competence, identification, and empathy. The chapter also Khetorica, Vol. XXXI, issue 4, pp. 445-464, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . T2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.4.445. 446 RHETORICA discusses the ways in which political leaders "empty" their personalities of idiosyncracies, the better to reflect common values (40). He critiques theories of ethos that see it as artificial, connecting Aristotle's rhetorical ethos to his political ethos. And he introduces a theme that will connect these four chapters: any program that favors "measures, not men" as the focus of political discourse fails to take into account the public's need to judge measures by the men who advocate them. The chapter on action is an extended reading of Demosthenes' "On the Crown," taken as a model for political advocacy in its orientation to the future, and to the possible. Kochin insists that the Athenian audience's approval of the speech is an extension of its judgment of Demosthenes as a competent, benevolent counselor who represents the collective interests of the Athenians. Judgments based on motives or on the results of actions are necessarily flawed, incomplete, or irrelevant. Kochin illustrates this analysis with examples from American political discourse, including the first of many positive citations of Calvin Coolidge, a president I do not ordinarily associate with rhetorical skill. The chapter on things is one of the strongest in the book. Kochin de­ velops an account of enargeia in a discussion of political speeches that deploy facts, statistics, vivid narratives, and images. The range of examples, from Begin to Coolidge (again!) is impressive; Kochin connects the persuasive force of...

450 RHETORICA The Pennsylvania State University Nathan Crick, Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. 225 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-876-1 Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming foreshadows its full trajectory in the quote from Dewey that opens the book: "The end of democracy is a radical end.... It is radical because it requires great change in existing social institutions, economic, legal and cultural" (p. 1). Dewey's identification of genuine democracy as a radical ideal has a contemporary resonance in the light of resurgent progressive protest here and around the world. His call is directed at "the inequities and tragedies of life that mark the present system," just as grass-roots movements have advanced systemic critiques of systemic injustice (p. 1). But it becomes immediately clear that Dewey's invocation of radicality is in part a provocative rhetorical gesture, because he immediately qualifies it. Those who espouse radical ends must not indulge the desire "for the overthrow of the existing system by any means whatever," but work within the democratic process (p. 1). The concept of the radical is disciplined by the stipulation that there is "nothing more radical than insistence upon democratic methods" (p. 1). Dewey's quote ends by asserting that victory against systemic inequity can only come "from a living faith in our common human nature and in the power of voluntary action based on collective intelligence" (p. 1). The radical is thus put in tension with itself by Dewey's effort to find congruence between means and ends. An analogous split within the concept of the radical underlies Nathan Crick's effort to bring Dewey to the discipline of rhetoric. As the book title suggests, Dewey can help in the contemporary revision of rhetoric as an ontological project. That is surely a radical appeal given the reductive instrumentalism that has so often diminished rhetoric as a techne even within the discipline. But Crick accepts Dewey's constraint on the radical by giving presumption to faith in a common human nature, voluntary action, and collective intelligence. Within the critical rhetoric community in the United States these three presuppositions have been in play for some time, given the suspicion introduced to notions of transparent agency, the autonomy of the will, and faith in the Enlightenment project. The distinction between the two forms of radicality - one that attempts to undermine, and one that attempts to reaffirm the hopeful possibility of a unitary deliberative community through persuasion - is crucial for a grasp of the orientation of Crick's effort, since academic rhetoric in the United States is pulled between the two tendencies. The opposite case was made by Ronald Greene, who attributes to Dewey "the tendencv to translate communication into an aesthetic-moral theory of eloquent citizenship [that] Reviews 451 puts argumentation studies to work for, rather than against, new forms of bio-political control."1 The greatest service of Crick's book may be that it brings this debate to prominence. It should be said that Crick does make efforts to incorporate radical structural thinking in his rapprochement. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Stewart Hall, Thomas Kuhn, Bruno Latour, Richard Rorty and others weave in and out of Crick's widely cast net. But does Crick adequately wrestle with Dewey's faith in the public sphere, and does he address the challenge posed by a system of discursive display that, at least at the national level, seems to have subsumed public communication into a facade of consensus? That seems to me to be the real test of his assertion of radicality. Crick does address Greene's argument early on (Greene is er­ roneously excluded from the bibliography), arguing that Dewey's radicality had a material dimension, quoting Dewey to this effect: "Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political" (p. 6). Crick asserts that Dewey provides a "third alternative" to, on the one hand, a naive faith in the reformist power of the public sphere, and on the other hand, an impotent posture of critique against the insurmountable Leviathon (p...

In this paper, the four Judaic inference rules: qal wa- ḥ omer, gezerah š awah, heqe š, binyan 'av are considered from the logical point of view and the pragmatic limits of applying these rules are symbolic-logically explicated. According to the Talmudic sages, on the one hand, after applying some inference rules we cannot apply other inference rules. These rules are weak. On the other hand, there are rules after which we can apply any other. These rules are strong. This means that Judaic inference rules have different pragmatic meanings and this fact differs Judaic logic from other ones. The Judaic argumentation theory built up on Judaic logic also contains pragmatic limits for proofs as competitive communication when different Rabbis claim different opinions in respect to the same subject. In order to define these limits we build up a special kind of syllogistics, the so-called Judaic pragmatic-syllogistics, where it is defined whose opinion should be choosen in a dispute.

This essay explores how rules for handling testimonial evidence were developed in the contexts of the British jurisprudence, epistemology and theological debate over the course of the eighteenth century, and shows how Thomas Paine appropriated these rules in The Age of Reason, his deistic manifesto.

Distinct from prose essays as cultural expression, we use technical communication for functional purposes, addressing questions of how people learn as we craft our communications. Aristotle set out psychological principles of how people learn -- or are persuaded to change their minds -- when he laid down his foundational advice for rhetors to cultivate "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us." Building on this foundational principle, technical communicators since World War II have studied how to achieve persuasion (or change) by making information accessible, formatting documents, writing at designated reading levels, and setting out instruction steps clearly. Recently, we have also become interested in how, through the concept of rhetoric, oral and written language acquires poignant social, ethical and technical dimensions, situating Aristotle's "faculties" of persuasion within specific cultural and political contexts.

ABSTRACT Taking seriously Kenneth Burke's claim that identification follows property's logic discloses identification's rootedness not only in nonsymbolic motion but also in attitudinal sensation, that midway realm between sheer motion and symbolic action. Burke's key distinction is among three terms, not two—implying consubstantial (not antithetical) relations between pure persuasion and identification. Thus understood, these relations have implications for the New Rhetoric, in particular for how it frames the question of justice.

The contemporary American political landscape is littered with talk of apology. Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, both camps sparred over when, why, and to whom apologies should be made. The most striking clash occurred in July 2012. The Obama camp ran a series of campaign advertisements alleging that the then presumptive Republican nominee had in fact remained at Bain Capitol in a leadership role longer than he had claimed, bolstering their characterization of Romney as a businessman whose business was not good for America.1 When Romney's aide failed to quiet the critique by claiming that the candidate had “retired retroactively” (DeLong 2012), Romney himself took to the airwaves to speak to the situation. On Friday, 13 July, he appeared on five different networks to condemn these types of attacks and to call for a campaign centered on issues, sidestepping the question of his tenure at Bain. In an ABC interview, Romney emphatically stated, “He [Obama] sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). When asked, Obama and his team refused comment. The next day, however, a video advertisement posted on YouTube titled “Mitt Romney: Asking for Apologies”—attributed to the “Truth Team”—did respond in a manner that was read by pundits as a blatant refusal of Romney's demand for an apology. Interspersed with clips of Romney claiming that Obama does not understand freedom and that he should be apologizing to America rather than for it, appeared three simple blue screens that read: “Mitt Romney. He sure asks for a lot of apologies. When he's not busy launching attacks.”This exchange triggered almost predictable responses from political commentators. On the right, Obama's refusal to apologize was read as a white flag—an admission that he could say nothing without publicly acknowledging the lies he told for political gain. On the left, Romney's demand was read as an attempt to evade the questions raised by the advertisements, although some read it as even less than this, equating Romney's demand with “crying uncle” (Easley 2012). Had the back and forth of the commentary been even somewhat novel, it might have become exhausting. As it played out, however, it just lay there already dead in the water, waiting for the next wave of issues and predictable responses to wash over it.One might certainly read this scene with a sort of cynicism or even nostalgia for a time in our political life when things were otherwise—when the truth of speech mattered or apologies were read on a moral register. I think both attitudes, however, miss the larger point. The quickness with which we discount political speech, having seen for years what lies behind the curtain, and our obsession with memories of times that perhaps never were, keep us from investigating how this beastly creature, the “demand for apology,” operates. We say almost nothing about it, preferring to lament the state of political rhetoric more generally or reading it from and through established political stances. The rich body of literature produced by rhetorical theorists and critics about apology itself offers us important insights into the potential and limits of such speech acts. Yet these studies rarely include a sustained investigation of the demand for apology, and if they do, they make certain presumptions about the operations of demands that are suspect. In response, this essay highlights the need for a study of the rhetorical complexities of demands that examines the conditions through which these speech acts structure and invoke another's response, revealing how a demand for apology both constitutes and is conditioned by the scene in which this demand takes place. Implicitly then, this argument pushes us toward a renewed interrogation of rhetoric's scene of address.Demands for apology are curious in that apologies proffered in response sometimes fail to sufficiently resolve the demand. Such scenes are familiar to us. I demand an apology from you for something you have said or done, and you turn to say “sorry.” Your apology though, however uttered, does not fully satisfy me. Perhaps it is because I had to ask you to apologize in the first place, to point out that what you have said or done is wrong or injurious. Perhaps it is because, given the injury I incurred, your apology does not quite feel like enough. In any case, the anger or hurt that prompted my demand might in fact remain even after you apologize. Such emotions might be magnified in the context of apologies offered on behalf of a state to a specific group or population. It is easy to imagine how apologies might fail to “make up for” historical atrocities. “We're sorry” can hardly right involuntary internment, abuse of indigenous peoples, institutionalized racism, or genocide. But, to be fair, demands for apology rarely ask this much; that is, they do not ask for the situation to be “fixed” but rather addressed (ethically).That an apology conditions and performs an ethical address is worth noting only if we understand the complex ways in which language trips us up, causing the apology to stumble in the face of a demand. Sara Ahmed's work here is helpful. She argues that the difficulty of any apology is that its utterance cannot on its own perform the work that a demand demands. “Of course,” she explains, “the gap between saying sorry and being sorry cannot be filled, even by a ‘good performance’ of the utterance” (2004, 114). Felicitous or not, the performance of an apology—both what it says and how it is said—cannot effect, guarantee, or authenticate what Ahmed takes as the object of a demand for apology: feeling sorry. Thus into this scene of address—and Ahmed is clear that apology must be read as an interlocutionary scene—a problem of recognition appears that confounds the work of an apology. She explains: So the receiver has to judge whether the utterance is readable as an apology. So the following question becomes intelligible: Does “this” apology “apologise”? The action of the apology is curiously dependent on its reception. The apology may “do something” in the event that the other is willing to receive the utterance as an apology, a willingness, which will depend on the conditions in which the speech act was uttered. (2004, 115) The success of an apology depends then not on what is said or the emotion it conveys but on how this apology is “taken up” and read. Thus the one who demands an apology judges whether the apology meets the conditions of recognizability in the particular context.Paradoxically, however, the very terms that render an apology recognizable might effectively strip the demand for this apology of its force. In recent work, Adam Ellwanger suggests that apologies are only read as such when they perform metanoia, the subject's internal conversion or transformation. (I have apologized when I show you that I am a changed person.) Ellwanger demonstrates quite convincingly, however, that the performance of this metanoia in an apology negates or undermines the force of the demand. Understanding apologies as (speech) acts of public humiliation that ultimately bring the offender in line with public norms of civility (2012, 309), Ellwanger claims that in the apology, “the activity of confession itself becomes the punitive mechanism. This creates the illusion of self-censure, a phenomenon that is crucial to punitive apologetics” (2012, 310). The apology thus renders the demand that occasioned it at best irrelevant and at worst logically suspect. What makes it irrelevant is that the self-punishment enacted in the apology appears to be self-motivated; the confession evidences an internal transformation of a subject that, for Ellwanger, occurs “independently of his accusers' demands” (2012, 324). I see the error of my ways and find myself a changed person because of what I now know and understand. The demand is occluded because I am both the origin and the effect of this self-transformation. And what makes it logically suspect is that the demand for apology promises forgiveness in exchange for a form of punishment predicated on relationships that prohibit this forgiveness. As Ellwanger explains, “The covertly punitive goals of the call for apology ensure that the dialogue will be defined by agonism and antipathy on both sides—conditions that make forgiveness and reconciliation all but impossible” (2012, 326).That demands for apology end in paradox may lead to the conclusion that discourses of apology might have limited application in public arenas. Ellwanger himself argues that “a space that is more conducive to honest dialogue and negotiation” is possible if only we rethink the demand for apology as “the kategoria that initiates a conversation where the accused offender engages in a vocal defense of himself, while the accusers seek to prove his guilt” (2012, 326). For him, it is best not to force “a necessarily dubious metanoia” (2012, 326). Instead, we should understand apologetic speech as an antagonistic debate that allows “for the possibility that the offender does not want reconciliation” (2012, 326). In the end, Ellwanger claims that “minimizing the emphasis on forgiveness and admitting the conflict at the heart of public apologetic discourse might temper our expectations for its outcomes” (2012, 326).Although Ellwanger is right to caution against an understanding of apology as an act that brings about a total reconciliation or transformation, it is hard to imagine how the demand for apology can bring about anything but stasis. If, for instance, we read our original scene through Ellwanger, we see how Romney's demand for an apology becomes the occasion for a conversation in which both parties might state their case without seeking to reconcile their positions. Romney levels an accusation that the Obama team is telling lies for political gain rather than engaging the issues; the “Truth Team” opts for a preschooler's response of “he did it first” rather than explains why Obama will not or should not apologize for the claims made in the advertisement. In this example, the call of the demand and the response of the (non)apology become unhinged. The advertisement for Obama does not address the complaints Romney levels. Instead, it takes the occasion of the demand to address the American people, suggesting that we are in on the joke that is the demand. Romney is no worse for wear, though, given that his demand for apology never turned on Obama's response (or nonresponse, as the case may be). That Romney issued the demand allows him to stake a claim to a moral position within the political scene. The content of the demand is to some extent irrelevant because it is the act of demanding itself that is meant to accomplish his goals. These goals are revealed in what he says immediately after he issues his demand for apology. Romney comments that the president's allegations are “very disappointing” given his promises in the first campaign (Shear 2012). Romney thereby claims the high ground, a position from which he takes authority to pass judgment on Obama's speech and actions. What is so interesting in this overly familiar political strategy is that it renders any response inconsequential. This demand does not call for a response or invoke an other.2 It is instead a performance of the place (and the power) the speaker claims by virtue of the demand. All are called here to witness this spectacle but certainly not to engage it or question it. So the “conversation” begun by the demand ends with it as well, revealing a stasis that might be honest at the cost of truth.This is not, as some rhetorical scholars would have us believe, the necessary result of a political life constituted in and through agonistic debate. It gestures to a larger set of questions about the rhetorical-ethical contours of the demand for apology for which current scholarship fails to fully account. How does the demand invoke the other or bind another in an address? How does this invocation place the interlocutors in relation to each other? What are the conditions in which this relation functions ethically? The complexity of these questions confound us when we take for granted the conditions of the demand's recognizability. Considerations of the demand for apology (which may be treated as supplemental to the exploration of apology itself) often proceed from the premise that the terms of a demand merely represent or narrate some previous injury, suggesting an ontologically and temporally prior recognition of a particular history of injury or violence. When demands for apology are made, that is, we presume that they seek redress for historical acts that have already been deemed and recognized as morally wrong. Ahmed, for instance, claims that a demand for apology “exposes the history of violence to others, who are now called upon to bear witness to the injustice” (2004, 119). As an expository act, all the demand seemingly does, then, is carry forward a history that it itself does not constitute or color. Interlocutors in this scene are asked to “bear witness” to this history or respond to it through an apology, accounting for their role in this history. Because we do not account for the history itself—its constitution and the rhetorical conditions in which it is addressed to an audience—we lose a sense of the very thing that marks a demand as a demand: risk. As Alexander García Düttmann explains: One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because every demand requires uncertainty as the medium in which it is raised. One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because nothing ensures that a response will ensue, whether the one who makes the demand encounters indifference or whether there is no one to hear the demand. Finally one can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because the seriousness of a demand (for recognition) cannot be guaranteed; on each occasion one must decide anew whether another person's demand (for recognition) is feigned or whether it is meant seriously. (2000, 10–11) Risk attends the demand not only because we cannot predict or guarantee a response but also because the demand itself seeks recognition as a demand. In the case of a demand for apology, the history revealed in the demand is an uncertain history because it needs recognition for both the content of the history (is this what happened?) and the telling of the story (is this telling an act of laying bare history or is it the premise of a joke?).Theorists of demands for apology also seem to presume a kind of standing for the subject of the demand. We are, as we must be, always already on the scene when we give an account of a demand for an apology. To speak of or theorize this demand and its effect, that is, one presumes that there is an already established relationship between the one who demands and the addressee of that demand. We might argue that this relationship is inaugurated in and through the injury and therefore has been structured prior to this demand. Is it the case, however, that if our account of the demand precedes from an already inhabited scene, then it must follow that the demand had no influence on setting this scene? In other words, how might the demand change the structure of address? To answer these questions, we turn for a moment to a consideration of the scene itself. In Ellwanger's work we are met with a claim that demands for apology operate as a kategoria—an accusation made in a court of law that calls for a defense. Linking contemporary demands for apology to the kategoria of antiquity, Ellwanger argues that rethinking demands as the beginning of a conversation can help us understand the role of apology in creating productive debate. Yet what Ellwanger, like many others, ignores is that the kategoria binds the other in conversation because it invokes the authority and the conventions of the legal scene. The accusation calls on the other to respond because it speaks in the name of law. Here is where the Burkean understanding of a scene fails us. The scene is not merely a “container” for the speech act, a place or landscape in which a demand is made. The force of the demand comes from and constitutes the scene in which it operates. As Judith Butler reminds us, “In order to have that relation of responsiveness, one needs already to be in a relationship to a set of others in which one can be addressed or can be appealed to in some way. In other words, one needs to be disposed to hearing, one needs to be in the scene of interlocution, one needs first to establish such a scene in order to be responsive” (Murray 2007, 418–19). We are called then to understand the ways that demands for apology are conditioned by and structure scenes of address. To do so illustrates how the demand places the speaker at risk. One can demand recognition only if one is dislocated by it. I demand an apology not as the subject who was injured but as the subject whose standing—the right and authority to speak before the other—is in jeopardy. To make a demand places me in a tenuous position. Against a history of violence or injury that almost always revokes my authority to speak, I demand “as if” I already inhabit a place in the scene of address that authorizes my speech and obligates you to respond, aware that it might establish the very conditions under which I suffered injury.To examine a demand for apology rhetorically is thus to read for how language mediates the risk of subjects and histories as it constitutes the scene of address in which it operates. With this insight, we return to our beginning. Romney's demand for apology, when examined closely, shows itself to be simply obscene. The language of his demand carries and covers over a history that authorizes Romney's standing in the scene. “He sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). This might be the “folksy” language of George Bush or Sarah Palin to which we've become accustomed. But it also harkens back to a 1950s suburban vernacular in which Romney's standing to demand an apology would have gone unquestioned. While conjuring a scene that confirms his own authority to make the demand in the terms that he does, Romney's language mitigates the risk associated with claiming a place in the scene of address by sealing off this scene and placing it against (and the contemporary political it against the scene. Romney's demand is not issued to Obama out for a the demand invokes no one in particular even as it to witness the attacks that are the of his The risk is because the scene of the demand is with the the perhaps more with the contemporary political scene at demand is thus offered from an that can be seen but not addressed or in the As a his demand offers the a of the and place by a different As an act that the scene of though, the demand speech, the that speak within and to it. In the place of speech, we are only with a of that of truth to the very of political

The acknowledgments preceding The State of Speech illuminate much about the subtext of the book and the very real-world problems to which the author hoped to find a solution in writing it. The problem: the disjunction in post-9/11 America “between the daily practices of citizenship and the exercise of political power” (xi). Joy Connolly's solution: Cicero's ideal orator. Here Connolly's goal is not simply to provide a clearer explanation of Cicero's entwined political and rhetorical theory as read through his ideal orator but also to extract from Cicero's works a rival to current republican thought entrenched in “individual liberty” (1). For Connolly, as for Cicero, this model is based in rhetorical practices.Ultimately, accepting Connolly's argument depends first on the reader's acceptance that Ciceronian theory provides a model that values personal experience (including nonelite experience), that the orator is positioned through civility or decorum to recognize others' experiences, and finally that the orator prioritizes the common good of all (Roman) people. This requires that Connolly reconcile the Roman masses with the oratorical practices of the elite in the Roman republic and de-essentialize gender and class as the basis of full, participatory citizenship. These topics are the frequent focuses of the early chapters of the book and by far the most controversial lines of argument. Second, the reader must accept that the Ciceronian model can extend beyond the theoretical to actual political practice, presumably, in post-9/11America. While the success of Connolly's argument may hinge on the acceptance of these claims, the success of the book, a theoretically dense reading of republican rhetorical and political theory, primarily, though not exclusively, through the works of Cicero, does not. It is much of the work necessary to underpin the major arguments of the book that holds the greatest value for readers interested in oratorical performance, citizenship, gender, class, and rhetorical theory in ancient Rome.The introduction of the book begins to establish the major lines of argument and to build the claim that “Roman rhetoric makes a major contribution to the way that the western tradition thinks about politics” (262). In support of this claim, Connolly moves between Roman and early American and even contemporary rhetorical and political theory (Habermas, Marx, Mouffe, Arendt, Benhabib, Gramsci, and Žižek among others are all frequently cited). The introduction emphasizes the significance of the Roman republic in American political theory by detailing how republicanism has served to mediate between “radical and liberal approaches” to American history (7–10).The first chapter, “Founding the State of Speech,” is an exploration of two key questions in republican Rome, the relation between the orator and the masses—how the Roman populace was taken up, represented, ruled, formed, and guided by the speech act—and the basis of authority for the speaker. Connolly's examination of these issues leads to the major claim of the chapter—that for the orator of the Roman republic authority was performative and firmly rooted in the charismatic, elite body. That is, until the shift in the early first century and the influx of Greek rhetorical theory represented in the handbooks of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's own De inventione.This shift, according to Connolly, was a move to, as the title of section header makes clear, “rationalize the republic,” in that handbooks were able to “put rhetoric forward as a model of rational and rationalized public discourse,” which “constrain[ed] expressions of authority” inasmuch as the orator was no longer “relying on ancestry or wealth, but [instead] recouping elite charisma in a logical discourse of style” (67–68). For Connolly, this shift transferred authority from the bodies of Rome's elite and conflicts among them to a “learnable code” (69). The role of the people, who Connolly argues were once “moral judges,” also shifts, through the genre of judicial oratory, to deliberation about what is “just and honorable” with the jury functioning as “a microcosm of the just city” (70). According to Connolly, these shifts moved Rome from conflict to consensus by grounding conflict in law, judicial rhetoric, and deliberation and reconciled Hellenistic rhetorical theory, namely status (or stasis) theory, with the oratorical practices of the Roman republic (73–75).Chapter 2, “Naturalized Citizens” begins with a discussion of the origins of Roman civil society using myth, specifically Virgil's Aeneid, to frame the tensions between nature and culture before moving to a similar and, Connolly argues, related tension in discussions of eloquence as resulting from nature or art in the prefaces of Cicero's De oratore. This chapter establishes two major arguments. First, that Roman citizenship underwent a transformation, necessitated by expansion of the Roman empire in the first century BCE, from an Aristotelian model of “a virtuous, homogeneous citizenry intimately linked by geographic proximity and the shared experience of living together” to a more flexible Ciceronian model that sought “to represent civic bonds as rooted in nature but activated and reinforced through human acts and their memorialization in text” (88, 89).Second, and much more significant to the remainder of the book (and scholars of rhetorical history), Connolly makes the case that Cicero's concept of republican citizenship can be unearthed from the nature/art debate regarding rhetorical training in De oratore. This reading leads to the claim that the shift in “eloquence's status as an art to its identity as a product of nature” is not “a matter of wholesale transformation” as much as “a hybridization of the categories ars and natura” (103). Interestingly, Connolly argues that those who need the art are, in Roman rhetorical treatises, “demasculinized” and not “eligible for full citizenship” (104). Because experience (apprenticeships, practice in the forum) is privileged by Cicero (and his Antonius), rhetorical training is unnecessary: “Naturalization of rhetoric amounts to a claim of natural domination in terms of class and ethnicity … [by the] male, well-educated, and wealthy” Roman citizen (111). However, Connolly argues that ultimately Cicero's characters are concealing rather than naturalizing rhetorical training, an obscuration that is symptomatic of “eloquence as stability born of instability” and “Cicero's view of the res publica.” This conflict leads Connolly to clearly articulate her reading of Cicero's ideal orator: “As Cicero closes the gap between eloquence and virtue, the orator's speaking body becomes the virtuous body of the citizen and, by extension, a microcosm of the virtuous body politic: eloquence emerges as a performative ethics that embodies and enacts the common good for the instruction and pleasure of the republic” (113). Perhaps surprisingly, there is very little consideration of Cicero's own position as a new man, though there is a brief suggestion that Cicero might be guilty of a “tactical misreading” of the bounds of Roman citizenship (90).Chapter 3, “The Body Politic,” builds on a conclusion of the previous chapter, that Cicero's ideal orator is “embodied proof of republican virtue,” by developing the implications of Cicero's philosophy of rhetoric as fundamentally performative. The chapter makes two theoretical claims about republican practices based on Cicero's ideal orator. First, while the orators of De oratore are all upper-class men, Cicero's rhetorical theory manages to “encompass a more generous circle,” his “universalizing language” broadening civic identity (125). She develops this idea, returning to the relationship between the people and the orator from the first chapter, by arguing that Cicero's orator is meant to offer a “mirror of the good life” that the audience can accept (or reject) and that in doing so the orator opens himself to the judgment of the people. Connolly's second major claim of this chapter, which follows from the first, is that Cicero's focus on the body is a largely a response to Plato's arguments against rhetoric as found mainly in the Gorgias. Here, Connolly puts forward Cicero's model as a “historic ally for theoretical work” that seeks to problematize the mind/body dualism that has connected men to logic and women to the body, arguing that Cicero's model of “rhetoric opens up a view of subjectification that is usually overlooked in examinations of the Western tradition; the positive moments of subject construction, as opposed to purely negative practices of subjection” (150–51).The arguments leading to this claim center on the body of the orator. First, Plato's questioning of the epistemic function of rhetoric is answered, according to Connolly (building on Habermas), because the orator's “beliefs and practices are not fully his own.” Rather they are a combination of history and perception, and his “virtue is constructed through interactions with others” that break down public and private communication, as the orator's “self” “emerges in the context of communal belief and practice” (144, 151). “Communal observation and supervision,” then, function as a check on the potentially unchecked power of the orator (147). This positioning of the orator is rather precarious both physically and psychologically, with the “orator's body … embedded in republican networks that anchor communicative practices … serving as site of connection for elite and mass” (154). Though Connolly does not elaborate on this claim, the potential vulnerability of the body (and mind) of the orator becomes a recurring theme in the book (152–56).Chapter 4, “The Aesthetics of Virtue,” begins with a discussion of two Roman concepts: libertas, which, although similar to the contemporary concept of negative liberty, is here positioned as free as opposed to slave, and the related dignitas, that is, the freedom not only of speech but the “accrual of standing” to see one's ideas put in place (160). These two terms open a discussion of the tension between tyranny, both of the senatorial class and of the self-interested elite, and the common good of the lawful republic. “Oratorical training and performance,” then, according to Connolly, offer a means of “self-mastery” by which to balance these polarities, in part because the orator, whether in public or private performances, seeks the “label of vir bonus” (161). “Republican patriotism,” a term coined by Connolly, is defined as the process of training the self through “self-love,” repeated performance, and the display of emotion, which, for Cicero, “brings relations of power into the realm of aesthetics” (162). Connolly develops these ideas through several sections. First, she ties together the role of passion in political speech and the idea of “civic love” or “natural sociability.” She makes the case that Cicero regards decorum as the virtue that allows the orator to control his passions (165–66, 169), a virtue similar to the Greek sophrosune, which, Connolly claims, essentializes class. She goes on to address Cicero's “paradoxical solution,” which roots “aesthetic sensibility” in nature, and finally turns to Catullus, who Connolly claims balances decorum and passion (169–85).Returning to notions of libertas through the ideal of self-control and performativity, Connolly stresses that because law played a limited role in constraining domination by the elite and the will to power, “the social conventions that regulated ethics, behavior, and deportment played a correspondingly important role” (187). This section then follows up on the risks of such self-mastery, such as that it might lead to the desire to “exploit the spectacularity of the self” or a dangerous “contempt for others” that forces one to withdrawal from civic life or self-destruction (189). Continuing with the idea of the destabilizing power of the passions, Connolly turns to the role of the passions in contemporary political thought to address the issues of “widespread civic disengagement” and “fragmentation,” particularly as articulated by Iris Marion Young, who is concerned that in using “historical polities that privileged public discourse as models” we risk excluding people based on bodily difference (192–93).1 Connolly offers a slightly different model of a “deliberating republic, one that is a constant repetitive performance…. Communal acts and witnessing of character are pivotal in the constant self-reminding of identity and sentiment that citizens must perform in order to strengthen and reconstitute civic ties” (196). Connolly's “argument in this chapter is intended to suggest that the Roman rhetorical tradition provides a model. What that tradition tells us, above all, is that speech is married to the learned, learnable techniques of emotion control” (193).Chapter 5, “Republican Theater,” begins with the anxieties about the orator as an actor who can perform virtuosity without living virtuously. The first part of the chapter explores the nature of the oratorical performance in relation to stage acting and its role in Ciceronian thought. Connolly argues that while in Cicero's model the orator must be virtuous, a certain duplicity is necessary in republican life, and ultimately the orator's training, which teaches him to pass his performance off as natural, constrains him by demanding that he conceal his education both by not discussing it and not revealing it when speaking (202–6). Connolly argues, “The student of such a curriculum was in a position to learn that the authority granted by eloquence is not the manifestation of free men's natural superiority, and that its tactics are identical to those of actors and women, who exist outside the charmed circle of the political class” (206). While this anxiety over the tension between authenticity and artifice is often expressed in language reflecting gender panic, Connolly argues that the anxiety is more complex, in that, it “emerge[s] out of a recognition precisely that the republic exists in the act, the show, the display of plausible authority, the theatrical presentation of ethos” (206). Here Connolly takes exception with John Dugan, who, according to Connolly, argues that “Cicero advocates a transgressive aesthetic that undermines conventional Roman notions of masculinity” (199n4).2 Connolly's own position has evolved from her earlier article “Mastering Corruption,” which considers gender as defining the “panic” discussed here rather than one factor among many. Though in the article she is primarily interested in Quintilian and declamation, Connolly suggests citizenship in Rome gender and class to a much than is in her discussion of Cicero's in State of “The two and were in a of that then as as the and social that them men, free to the practices of women and that they in the that the speech they was a the State of as in “Mastering Corruption,” Connolly Greek and Roman discussions of in rhetorical theory that or of with the Here, she her Cicero's anxiety is not about or discourse has the it does not because is and … but because civic of to a political what we In what Connolly the between her view that … is the in and by of gender that out what are civic and and that of others who establish “the nature of civic only its in of of this chapter shift to focus on and in and which Cicero power was Connolly's argument here is but She that as the republic Cicero moved beyond to the more and of Here Connolly as Cicero on oratorical in the law in an to to and in in order to a or that the audience not to as but to … the of the In the on particularly in Cicero's was meant to to the of the and, in doing to of an that the with one's citizens that was necessary for civil life chapter of State of Speech moves from Cicero to how the republican political on the performance of the orator, was forward into Rome in the of Here, Connolly focuses on the works of and argues that the were of the up by Ciceronian rhetorical discourse and its performative ethics of republican the that there in the first the of a in In to the significance of in terms of social and as a of to the new Connolly in several from earlier chapters here In chapters and for Connolly argues that because the orator's performance is based in experience and depends on emotion, he may his by in public This idea is connected to the of who even than the republican orator to Connolly also argues that the are symptomatic of social in their to his on and of She then suggests that with his on control of the body, represented a against the and a to the discussed in chapter According to Connolly, this rhetorical education served as a training for a of people, which ultimately Cicero's public orator. In as a way to establish social and control” brief discussion of in which Connolly scholars who Cicero is Marion and are “Cicero's on decorum lead him to that the public must his audience of citizens as in an of to be because he that they are his but because the of him to the of communal and to the decorum as the virtue, one that down the of class and Connolly the claim that to control to that and among his Cicero's ideal citizen is in a position to political before she with a for an view of claims that Cicero's orator requires and is performance are and provide a for Cicero's political to contemporary The of This of the of De oratore as Connolly with to of the the nature/art debate and the While he these very from Connolly, the debate as an an Aristotelian model of rhetoric, with Cicero down firmly on the of the he Connolly, that Cicero is a model of rhetoric that is based in as opposed to theoretical and that this is necessary in order to with the audience Perhaps the one difference between them that a is that Connolly's belief that “the debate is in terms of difference and in tension with the of (103). While this focus on difference allows Connolly to Cicero's of citizenship from it also the that Cicero, as argues, has a Greek model in Cicero's to the way in which rhetoric was Rome suggests all rhetorical training it is a Connolly's focus on Cicero's connection to contemporary political theory her from reading Cicero through so on Cicero Though Connolly that the Roman republic was by she claims that “Cicero's of civility is a place to the terms of social because it the tension of and social class, it is not by of class or what is Cicero the common but how he intended that good to be is, more than Connolly of ultimately Connolly's of the people into the performance of the values were and by rhetorical handbooks and oratorical in law as in the of the elite control of in the as the orator their and the masses to be in elite oratorical While this reading is for the role of the people in relation to in Rome, Connolly's reading is limited by the on the orator's bodily performance and his (and of the people. This the people must be for in the oratorical rhetorical their role as an and rhetorical practices that might more represent the Roman people. Connolly elite control of language as a of class to for the means by which to the masses into the oratorical Though Connolly the significance of political the “Roman to see positioning rhetoric as a art that the of among its before to Cicero's she does not or of the Roman people into oratorical practice as a model for contemporary Connolly's arguments about civic to of the for are In the what Cicero ideal orator, one who through his turns conflict into of as Connolly frequently a a response to unchecked that was the republic and, all Cicero's ideal orator and the resulting republic Connolly's reading of Cicero is by the need to Cicero a way to which scholars of the history of rhetoric will be as a model solution to contemporary political a that with the common While the arguments necessary to so may not be fully they are and lead to a consideration of gender and class in ancient Rome and work on the of the particularly those as a way to bodily charisma and as a means by which to the audience to consideration of and of the vulnerability of the orator's body and those stage and withdrawal from political life and the risk of to to audience are and of a there is in Connolly's recouping of Ciceronian theory, though it is not the it is its of negative has so the common good as to such a The The State of Speech was and the it was political in and though much of the rhetoric of the has one need no than the of control to public by to find that the disjunction that first Connolly has and a recognition of are a good place to and one than to to Cicero for of

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.

Stalin's government received information about the political and economic situation in the countryside through the reports prepared by the security service VChK-OGPU-NKVD. This article reveals that these reports ( svodkas in Russian) strain to rhetorically construct a social classification of the peasantry by dividing it into the kulaks (wealthy peasants hostile to Soviet power), the bednyaks (poor peasants supporting Soviet power), and the serednyaks (peasants of average means with uncertain attitudes to the regime). The svodkas persuaded their audience—the secret police and the governments—of the reality of this tripartite classification. This persuasion derived from their massiveness, secretiveness, and mixture of ideological and technical language. Since these conditions inhere in modern governmental, technical, and scientific discourse, the writers for these fields should be aware that when they engage in constructing order through classification, they face temptations of what Kenneth Burke calls rhetoric of hierarchy with its scapegoat principle.

Abstract This essay traces the origins of the five-paragraph essay to a form of theme-writing that has deep roots in English education and classical rhetoric, long before the current-traditional period that has been commonly assumed to be the origin. The five-paragraph essay's history and evolution can inform our understanding of its role in writing instruction and why it has persisted for so long. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Lynée Gaillet and Janice Lauer Rice for their helpful recommendations. I am also indebted to Mara Holt for her help and encouragement, as well as Carol Mattingly, Amanda Hayes, Andrea Venn, Bryan Lutz, Matt Vetter, and Emily Nunes. 2Part I was published in 1851. 3Walker's textbook was first published in the United States in 1808. 4Walker did not create the term theme or the rules for writing them. While themes were used for writing in Latin, students probably also composed themes in English (the vulgar tongue) long before Walker. 5Many compositionists, seeing some classical roots to the five-paragraph essay, might assume that Aristotle's Rhetoric may have been an influence on the formation of the five-paragraph essay, perhaps citing the five canons of rhetoric (which he does not explicitly outline) and his treatment of argumentation and arrangement. However, there is no evidence that indicates that Aristotle's Rhetoric had any direct influence on the five-paragraph essay's formation.

We propose “instructional chaining” as an analytic method for capturing and describing key instructional episodes enacted by expert writing teachers to foster the recontextualization over time of the social practices of argumentative writing through process-oriented instructional approaches. The article locates instructional chaining within a sociocultural framework and argues for conceptualizing learning to write as the recontextualization of social practices of writing in classroom settings. To illustrate the use of instructional chaining to study the effects of teaching on learning argumentative writing, we describe the processes employed to construct an instructional chain for a unit of literary argumentation in a 12th grade English language arts classroom. We conclude with a discussion of two potential uses of instructional chains as units of analysis for both quantitative and qualitative analyses to study patterns of teaching and learning across many classrooms.

This essay explores how rules for handling testimonial evidence were developed in the contexts of the British jurisprudence, epistemology and theological debate over the course of the eighteenth century, and shows how Thomas Paine appropriated these rules in The Age of Reason, his deistic manifesto.

Reviews 345 moindre éloge que l'on puisse décerner à ce volume que d'avoir contribué à rendre au sophiste la profondeui, 1 humanité et 1 actualité de son éloquence. Anne-Marie Favreau-Linder Clermont Ferrand Benjamin Kelly, Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt. (Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents), Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xix, 427. ISBN 9780199599615. $150.00. Benjamin Kelly's Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt (hereafter PLSCR) is an erudite, original, systematic, and clearly written study of how petitions functioned as instruments of social control in GraecoRoman Egypt from 30 BC to 284 AD. It is unique in surveying, and categoriz­ ing in appendices, the complete published corpus of 568 petitions and 227 proceedings reports from the period. As it is the best and most comprehen­ sive analysis of Graeco-Egyptian papyrus petitions and a landmark in juristic papyrology, as well as providing in-depth analysis of numerous individual petitions, it belongs in the personal libraries of rhetoricians researching late antiquity, and should be consulted by scholars interested in petitioning or forensic rhetoric in other periods. Although the hardcover price of $150 is somewhat daunting for scholars not working in the specific subfield, PLSCR is available via Oxford University Scholarship Online. PLSCR consists of nine chapters (333 pages), a glossary, maps, three appendices, a bibliography and indices. "Chapter 1: Introduction" (pp. 137 ) begins by discussing a small group of petitions concerning an ongoing feud between Satabous and Nestnephis, two Egyptian priests in a village in the Fayoum region. Close analysis of the specific petitions concerning this feud leads to more general discussion of what can legitimately be deduced from extant petitions and the limitations of petitions specifically, and papyri generally, as evidence. In a sense, PLSCR starts as a corpus of evidence in search of a theory. After discussing limitations of methodological frames such as criminality and dispute resolution, Kelly focuses on the theme of social control as a lens through which to analyze his corpus of petitions. Although primarily intended as background information, the lucid treatment of diachronic changes in administrative structure and terminology relevant to petitioning will be particularly valuable to non-papyrologists investigating Graeco-Egyptian rhetoric. The second chapter, "Petitions and Social Elistory" (pp. 38-74), analyzes the nature of petitions as evidence for social history. The treatment of peti­ tions as evidence is sensible and meticulous, addressing patterns of survival, the actual processes and contexts within which petitions were created, pre­ sented, archived, and answered, and the relationship of petitioning to the 346 RHETORICA court system. The description of the interplay of orality and literacy and petition and trial will be of particular interest to rhetoricians. In order to investigate social history through the medium of petition, Kelly, in essence, is trying to read through the petitions to the underlying realities. When he analyzes rhetorical formulae, it is to dismiss formulaic elements as irrele­ vant to determining the "innermost thoughts" of the petitioners and actual events. Thus the elements of petitioning which are of greatest interest to rhetoricians serve, as it were, as obstacles to social history, while the facts of the social historian would be the minimally relevant "atechnai pisteis" for the rhetorician, outside the art of rhetoric proper. "Chapter 3: Legal Control in Roman Egypt" (pp. 75-122) examines the efficacy of the petitioning system as a mechanism of social control. Kelly argues convincingly that Roman administrators' ethos of efficiency and justice was grounded in reality, but that the complexity of the system, with unclear jurisdictions, multiple levels of hierarchy, and limited staffing, made petitioning of limited effectiveness as a formal method of social control, albeit more useful as an informal one. For rhetoricians, the most useful material will be the comprehensive treatment of administrative process, application of multiple simultaneous (i.e. Egyptian, Roman, Jewish, and Greek) systems of law, and the way that petitioners could manipulate the system. Although Kelly's focus is not rhetorical history, this material provides fertile ground for a revaluation of the importance of the translative or jurisdictional stasis, which is normally treated as somewhat of a trivial afterthought, but which appears far more substantial and useful in light...

Reviews 339 He shows the omnipresence of the antilogic of Protagoras in the essays— instability, uncertainty, relativity yield a multiplicity of possibilities. Fortune, or Kairos, dictates the answers. MacPhail deserves great praise for the strength and originality of his arguments, but perhaps some blame as well for a few weaknesses in his study. The book is far too short. In addition to the neglect of the discipline of rhetoric mentioned above, treatment of the relation of antilogic—the hallmark of sophistry—to the practice of classical dialectic is missing, a subject Aristotle treated at length in the Topics. Such a discussion in the first part of the book would have enriched treatment of the principle of non-contradiction and that of the decay of dialectic in the second half. Finally, translations should have been routinely provided for non English quotations. The practice varies. Greek quotations are never translated; Latin often, but not always. Since the author at times points out the centrality of a quotation to his argument, consistently expressing it in English would have secured the point for a wider audience. Despite these caveats, MacPhail has made a significant contribution to classical, neo-Latin and Renaissance studies. Whether he has also shown that the sophists did ultimately effect a relativist revolution among renaissance humanists, as he has argued, may be a subject worthy of future debate, dialogue, or irresolution. Jean Dietz Moss The Catholic University ofAmerica Dino Piovan, Memoria e ohlio della guerra civile: strategie giudiziarie e racconto del passato in Lisia. Studi e testi di storia antica, 19. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2011. Pp. 356. ISBN 9788846728258. 22.00 (pb). A partiré dalle parole chiave del titolo, il libro di D.P. illustra attraverso l'oratoria di Lisia le tensioni tra memoria collettiva e coinvolgimento degli individui nelle vicende drammatiche dell'Atene del biennio 405-03, dalla sconfitta finale di Egospotami, alia resa e alTinstaurazione del regime dei Trenta e poi alia sua caduta: anni di sventure, symphorai che divengono pa­ radigma per Timmaginario collettivo e che nel tempo della restaurazione democrática sono da superare attraverso una complessa elaborazione della memoria e deli'oblio: in particolare a confronto col principio del me mnesikakein in funzione della convivenza civile nella ricostituita unitá della polis ateniese, con tutte le difficoltá che ció necessariamente dovette comportare da una parte e dalTaltra tra democratici e oligarchici. Se gli eventi furono problematici, cosí fu il loro peso nella coscienza collettiva. D.P. analizza in dettaglio fatti e memoria cívica attraverso una acuta indagine delle orazioni lisiane che richiamano gli eventi di questo periodo negli anni immediatamente successivi (in particolare le orazioni 12,13, 25, alie quali sono dedicati 340 RHETORICA i primi tre capitoli, ma anche Lys. 31, 16, 26, 30, 18 e 2, che sono discusse più sintéticamente nel quarto capitolo). Ampio è il confronto delle diverse fonti a disposizione, in particolare Senofonte, la Athenaion politeia, Isocrate, Diodoro, le testimonianze epigrafiche, etc., e approfondita è la discussione sulla vasta bibliografía, dai problemi di datazione alie questioni testuali che hanno rilevanza per le questioni trattate (vd. pp. 313-43): il volume si avvale della nuova edizione lisiana di Ch. Carey e del nuovo commento di S. Todd (Oxford 2007). Dell'analisi di D.P. si possono fare qui due esempi relativi alla ricostruzione lisiana, per certi versi contraddittoria, tratti dalle orazioni forensi, e un terzo esempio dalEEpitafio, per il diverso contesto e la sua funzione pubblica. L'orazione Contro Eratostene (Lys. 12), discussa nel cap. 1, è costruita dal punto di vista ideológico come un diretto atto di accusa contro il governo dei Trenta (e in particolare contro uno dei suoi rappresentanti), con una prospettiva certo più ampia rispetto all'uccisione del fratello Polemarco: Li­ sia vi formula la tesi della 'cospirazione oligarchica' che ha condotto Atene alla rovina e ai lutti della guerra civile, un vero e proprio tradimento nei confront! della polis. Una demonizzazione utile, o meglio necessaria per il contesto e per gli obiettivi. Particolare rilievo per il problema della memoria riveste Pinsistenza di Lisia sulla kakia di Teramene e sul suo trasformismo. Le fonti successive muteranno orientamento, ma in Lisia, quando gli eventi sono ancora vicini, non v...

Formal dialogue systems model rule-based interaction between agents and as such have multiple applications in multi-agent systems and AI more generally. Their conceptual roots are in formal theories of natural argumentation, of which Hamblin’s formal systems of argumentation in Hamblin (Fallacies. Methuen, London, 1970, Theoria 37:130–135, 1971) are some of the earliest examples. Hamblin cites the medieval theory of obligationes as inspiration for his development of formal argumentation. In an obligatio, two agents, the Opponent and the Respondent, engage in an alternating-move dialogue, where the Respondent’s actions are governed by certain rules, and the goal of the dialogue is establishing the consistency of a proposition. We implement obligationes in the formal dialogue system framework of Prakken (Knowl Eng Rev 21(2):163–188, 2006) using Dynamic Epistemic Logic (van Ditmarsch et al. in Dynamic epistemic logic, Synthese Library Series. Springer, Berlin, 2007). The result is a new type of inter-agent dialogue, for consistency-checking, and analyzing obligationes in this way also sheds light on interpretational and historical questions concerning their use and purpose in medieval academia.

Book Review| May 01 2013 Review: Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, by Carruthers, Mary Carruthers, Mary, ed., Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. Alastair Minnis). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 316 pp. ISBN 9780521515306. Rhetorica (2013) 31 (2): 220–223. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2013.31.2.220 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, by Carruthers, Mary. Rhetorica 1 May 2013; 31 (2): 220–223. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2013.31.2.220 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In A Rhetoric of Motives Kenneth Burke revises the traditional understanding of rhetoric as persuasion.He introduces the concept of identification to define persuasion dialectically by locating it in a formal opposition to identification. The ultimate motives that drive this dialectical tension are love and strife. As dialectical creatures, human are drawn toward each other and seek to distinguish themselves from one another. For a world threatened by its own misunderstanding of ambition and its unreflective acceptance of historical identities, Burke's philosophy of rhetoric offers a way to understand what itmeans to be a dialectical being at a particular point of history, and it does so because it has the practical objective of making the world more just.

Over 2,500 years, philosophers in India refined a truth-centered and rhetorically egalitarian method of analogical debate: Nyāya vāda, and its five-part expression, the “Nyāya method.” According to Indian tradition, its practices emerged in the context of inter-scholar debates. However, most historical examples of Indian debate occur in mythical/religious dialogues between teacher and student, and currently Nyāya's scholars focus on theory, neglecting social practice. While Indologists describe the “what” of Nyāya, their bias toward theory leaves its conversational uses unexplored. Comparative rhetoricians describe Indian rhetoric with Greek terminologies as points of reference, and miss Nyāya's theoretical and practical debate tradition. This essay addresses this lack of social context and paucity of representation of Nyāya. It shows how informal debates in ancient literary/historical dialogues presage Nyāya's formulation and traces Nyāya's use in contemporary public examples, illustrating its rhetorical journey from discussions of scholars and kings, to academic formulization, to popular dialogic expression. Nyāya offers a clear alternative to Western confrontational rhetoric, and the presence of Indian “rhetorical” practice and theory undermines assumptions about “rhetoric” being uniquely Greek in origin, underscoring the need for comparative rhetorics.

We argue that the rhetoric of science occupies an important niche in contemporary science studies. Although we are pluralistic about how different rhetoricians of science can and do conduct their inquiries, we assert that their disciplinarily distinctive approach is to treat argumentation as a constituent of context. From this perspective, we observe various interacting forms of rationality at work in the controversies that constitute science in society. We argue that modes of discovery and modes of proof are mutually engaged in the process of rhetorical invention. We identify a variety of topics or commonplaces that show invention as we conceive it at work. We take a pro-science attitude toward the role of science in finding the truth and in sustaining democratic institutions.

Thirty years before the beginning of the still ongoing cognitive revolution, Kenneth Burke articulated a universalist program of verbal resources that falls into close synch with many of the findings and principles of that revolution. In this paper, I connect Burke’s program to the insights of Jeanne Fahnestock in her work on figuration and argumentation and argue that cognitive rhetoric in this mode can undergird rhetoric of science.

As usability experts describe the appropriate models for writing in digital, they consistently express the need to write in a user-centric format. While I agree with the importance of efficient navigation in Web content, I suggest that user-centric writing only applies to part of the content we find in a website. Other styles of writing are almost always required. Two additional styles are persuasion-centric and quality-centric writing. These two styles are required by almost all marketing writing and especially marketing writing for the prosumer community. In this article I extend the ideas found in user centered design to include user-centric, persuasion-centric, and quality-centric writing (which combination I call ReaderCentric writing ). I believe this impacts information architecture in a number of important ways, perhaps most notably in the way the various writing styles impact the mindset of the information architect. I will explain why these writing models are important and demonstrate what happens when the models are ignored or not understood, plus how they may be successfully applied to marketing documents on the Internet. Finally, I will speculate on how information architecture may be adjusted to meet the needs of the content, writer, and reader.

ἔστω δὴ ἡ ῥητορικὴ δύναμις περὶ ἕκαστον τοῦ θεωρῆσαι τὸἐνδεχόμενον πιθανόν.(Estō dē hē rhētorikē dunamis peri hekaston tou theōrēsai to endekhomenon pithanon.)Let us define rhetoric to be “A faculty of considering all the possible means of persuasion on every subject.” (Hobbes translation)Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever. (Freese translation)Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. (Rhys Roberts translation)Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion. (Kennedy translation) The question of rhetoric's potential continues to provoke. What appears in Aristotle's attempt to name rhetoric—and to name it as a dunamis? What appearances do such a name endeavor to keep? Infused with a contingency that seems to double and perhaps even double again, the opening line of the Rhetoric's second chapter seems to defy understanding, let alone explanation. Form and substance blur. Is this a definition? A proposition? An article of faith? A prayer? Questions of translation circle and then spiral. Questions of context loom and fade away, and then loom again. As Aristotle pronounced it, rhetoric's (im)potentiality seems to promise and thwart (its own) recognizability. It remains otherwise—a suspicion of thought's necessary corruption, an opening to a discovery without grounds, an aporia with protreptic power. Whatever it might become, however becoming it might be, rhetoric's art is not (yet) altogether here. This may signal a deficit. It may sound a shared calling. In the name of letting rhetoric be, Aristotle bequeaths us a question that, perhaps tragically, we cannot let alone.The subtle and thoughtful essays that compose this forum require little introduction, not least as they thematize and reflect variously on the multifaceted question of beginning that inheres in Aristotle's famous pronouncement at 1355b. Concerned that dunamis is far from a “neutral human capacity,” Ekatrina Haskins considers the impracticality of Aristotle's attempt to name rhetoric and how this founding gesture “erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy” that supports a teleology, a vision of progress in which rhetoric—as civic discourse—disciplines if not deters its performance. Starting with the insistent desire to understand the source of rhetoric, Megan Foley turns the table on Socrates—rhetoric emerges, for Aristotle, not from “some genus of ontically existing things but from the incipiently existing domain of the possible.” Existing potentially, existing as potentiality, rhetoric begins before its first (practical) move, a beginning that begins with the question of its contingent ground. In his meditation on the “rhetoricity” that may abide in Aristotle's concern to “let rhetoric be,” Christian Lundberg reflects carefully on this question of ground as a problem of context, that is, the ways in which rhetoric—as a discourse—operates “in advance of any context” and how the understandable need to define rhetoric does not relieve us of the need to think the movement between trope and persuasion, a movement in which rhetoric's potentiality begins—and perhaps ends—in a nomadic existence.These nuanced inquiries are timely. Individually and together, they show how the city—whether Aristotle's or our own—cannot contain rhetoric. Rhetoric's potential sets it in motion and moves it beyond the walls, beyond the law, beyond the law of (its) language. In this way, very quietly but very firmly, the essays here trouble and expand the tradition of rhetorical theory as such. They do so from a beginning, from Aristotle's naming of rhetoric as an (im)potentiality, that marks a tear between the apophantic and nonapophantic modes of expression. As it refuses to disavow its own antiphasis—and here, it is well worth recalling Aristotle's dedicated interest in the ways in which self-unraveling assertion participates in the work of coming to be and passing away—rhetoric's “defining” (im)potentiality testifies to an unsettling experience of (its) language, a moment of letting go, of letting a controlling interest in language give way to letting the word be. As Walter Benjamin saw it, this gesture is an ethical hinge. It is a moment to hear the lament of language in the wake of its overnaming, a human impulse that submits speech to the fate of tragedy at the cost of recognizing its power—for now. Such a gesture may also be urgent, at least in a moment when the need to advocate (for rhetoric) feels nothing less than pressing.

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.

The term dunamis, by which Aristotle defines rhetoric in the first chapter of The Art of Rhetoric, is a “power” term, as its various meanings in Aristotle's corpus—from vernacular ones like “political influence” to strictly philosophical ones like “potentiality”—attest.1 In the Rhetoric, however, dunamis is usually translated as “ability” or “faculty,” a designation that, compared to other terms that describe persuasion in ancient Greek poetics and rhetoric (such as “bia” [“force”] or “eros” [“seduction”]), marks rhetoric as a neutral human capacity rather than the use of language entangled in the vagaries of violence and desire.2 John Kirby calls Aristotle's definition “one of the boldest moves in the history of the philosophy of language: to redefine rhetoric, not as the use of peitho but as the study of peitho” (1990, 227). The presumption of rhetoric's ethical neutrality implied by dunamis has indeed become commonplace in interpretations of Aristotle's treatise itself and of rhetoric as a social phenomenon. As George Kennedy puts it in his authoritative translation of the Rhetoric, “Aristotle was the first person to recognize clearly that rhetoric as an art of communication was morally neutral, that it could be used either for good or ill” (1991, ix). In this article, I would like to probe another, perhaps not so reassuring, implication of dunamis as a term for rhetoric—that as “an ability to see all available means of persuasion,” it does not need to become (or emulate) practical oratory. In what follows, I suggest that Aristotle's terminology, however neutral it may appear, constitutes an intellectually and politically motivated act of naming that severs rhetorical knowledge from historically specific rhetorical practices and thereby erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy.Defined as a capacity, rhetoric occupies a peculiar position with regard to existing practices of oratory and rhetorical instruction. In Metaphysics 9, dunamis describes “potentiality” of substances and nonrational animals and “ability” of humans. Among human dunameis, some are innate (such as the senses), some come by practice (such as flute playing), some are acquired through learning (such as the capacities of the crafts, technai) (see 1047b 33–35). Art “comes into being when out of many notions from experience we form one universal belief concerning similar facts,” and while experienced persons “know the fact but not the why of it,” those who possess a techne “know the why of it or the cause” (Aristotle 1979, 13). Accordingly, master craftsmen “are considered wiser not in virtue of their ability to do something but in virtue of having the theory and knowing the causes” (Aristotle 1979, 13). We see a similar logic at work in the opening chapter of the Rhetoric. As a rational capacity, rhetoric seems to be present among the general population, since most people are able to engage in verbal self-defense or attack. But their ability is often the result of random chance or habit rather than of a systematic art (Rhetoric 1354a). While one is unlikely to gain rhetorical dunamis through sheer experience, Aristotle insinuates that studying other currently available arts of rhetoric is even less preferable, for these arts give disproportionate attention to “matters outside the subject” (“ta exō tou pragmatos”) (Aristotle 1991a, 5, 7, 11). By offering a systematic investigation of “available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991a, 13) and stressing proofs (pisteis) and arguments (logoi), Aristotle sets up his version of the art above those purveyed by writers of rhetorical handbooks and other master teachers.Admittedly, the text of the Rhetoric disavows the first chapter's attack on other technai's treatment of emotions and matters “outside the subject” as it proceeds to furnish an extensive discussion of human emotions in book 2 and addresses style and delivery in book 3.3 However, the manner in which it presents rhetorical proofs and stylistic devices is detached from practices of oratory. Whether Aristotle considers rhetorical genres or emotions, his method of exposition is characterized by “surgical detachment and description” (Dubois 1993, 125). So, for example, he investigates the causes of anger without actually examining how this passion was stirred by a particular orator. According to Kennedy, the Rhetoric is one of Aristotle's “most Athenian works,” “for only in Athens did rhetoric fully function in the way he describes” (1996, 418), but the treatise contains little evidence of its author's direct contact with rhetorical practices of Athenian democracy. As J. C. Trevett has shown, “Aristotle fails … to quote from or allude to the text of a single deliberative or forensic speech” and instead “attributes statements or arguments to a particular speaker” or draws on various poetic genres such as epic, tragedy, and lyric (1996, 371, 372, 375). At the same time, Aristotle quotes extensively from epideictic compositions, including those written by Isocrates, for whom Aristotle reserves a minor place in the context of his discussion of style. This curiously inconsistent use of citations can be explained, in part, by the relative ease of access to literary genres and the paucity of deliberative and forensic texts, on the one hand, and Aristotle's lack of firsthand experience of oral practices of Athenian democracy due to his status as a resident alien, on the other.Yet Aristotle's many disparaging remarks about pandering orators and easily excitable and ignorant audiences indicate an entrenched suspicion toward the power of performed speech, the very power his rhetoric as dunamis is designed to guard against. The Rhetoric is indeed “the most Athenian” of Aristotle's works in the sense that in it the philosopher responds to an ideology that he regards as inimical to philosophical life and civic education.4 Aristotle is unequivocal that rhetoric would be of little use in a well-ordered state, since in such a state legislation limits the role of judges to a minimum and judges, in turn, are drawn from the ranks of prudent citizens. By contrast, in a corrupt regime such as Athenian democracy, judges are assigned their roles by lot and their decision making is often obscured by passion and self-interest (Rhetoric 1354a32–1354b12). It is the fickle and corrupt disposition of the demos that calls for the use of style and delivery that Aristotle considers vulgar and superfluous to proper argumentation (Rhetoric 1404a). Eager to meet their audience's expectations, orators worry more about securing the hearers' approval than about demonstrating the truth of their position. Aristotle observes the same deplorable state of affairs both in dramatic competitions and political contests, where a skillful performance, not the integrity of a tragic plot or a logically compelling demonstration, wins applause (Rhetoric 1403b).5 Not only does the audience influence the form and content of drama and oratory—it corrupts the very character of performers. Aristotle's association of performance in drama and oratory with pandering to a corrupt set of listeners is thus consonant with the conceptualization of rhetoric as a dunamis, a rational capacity that does not require imitation or practice.The status of rhetoric as a dunamis and a techne secures its position as a form of philosophically legitimate knowledge, for it allows its students to understand the “why” of persuasion without committing them to a morally precarious life of political performance in a corrupt regime. At the same time, rhetoric does not stand on its own as a “theory of civic discourse,” as the subtitle of Kennedy's translation (1991) of the Rhetoric calls it. Although the treatise's language, preoccupation with abstract categorization, and apparent detachment from the particulars of oratory might qualify it as a “theory” in our contemporary sense, for Aristotle rhetoric is a productive art, not to be confused with theoria, the highest form of philosophical knowledge that rules over practical and productive arts.6 In Aristotle's hierarchy of knowledge, rhetoric is subordinated to politike, the “master art” in the sphere of praxis, which comprises ethics and politics (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b). As complementary parts of politike, ethics and politics investigate the principles that guide the attainment of virtue and practical wisdom and the forms of political organization most congenial to this pursuit.Aristotle would likely be surprised by our inclination to read the Rhetoric as a theory of civic discourse, since he explicitly disapproves of those who, “partly from ignorance, partly from boastfulness, and partly from other human weaknesses,” take the appearance of rhetoric as an “offshoot” of politike to mean that the two are the same art (Aristotle 1991a, 19). He points out that rhetoric, though it “slips under the garb” of politike, is but a dunamis of furnishing arguments (tou porisai logous), not an art of good life and good government (Aristotle 1991a, 19). Here he doesn't seem to be criticizing handbook writers; rather this objection is likely a reference to Isocrates, whose logon paideia was in Aristotle's sights when he lectured on rhetoric at the Academy and Lyceum. Isocrates regards discourse (logos) as an artificer of civic institutions and embraces the performative and politically constitutive character of traditional Greek education (paideia) by making character and political identity dependent on recurrent performance addressed to the polis. Despite his elitism, Isocrates accepts the norms of his rhetorical culture and tries to adapt them to a literary medium. On the contrary, Aristotle aspires to protect the practical rationality and virtue of a properly habituated student from being corrupted by these very cultural norms. It could be argued that Aristotle's effort to split the traditional link between eloquence (eu legein) and virtuous action (eu prattein) by making them subjects of different arts (rhetorike and politike, respectively) is a response to Isocrates' “boastful” incorporation of the two under the name philosophia.7By conceiving of rhetoric as a dunamis, Aristotle distances the art from practical oratory and reduces it to a faculty in the service of substantive intellectual disciplines. Why, then, are we (academic students of rhetoric) so beholden to this treatise? The text's current prestige is hardly the consequence of the way the rhetorical tradition has viewed it. As Carol Poster summarizes the history of its transmission and interpretation: Hellenistic rhetoricians didn't know it; neoplatonic commentators overlooked it; the Byzantines didn't understand it; the early Middle Ages didn't have it; the late middle ages and Renaissance scholars were puzzled by it; and not until the prejudice against Aristotle due to its association with scholasticism died away was the Rhetorica revived alongside Ciceronian rhetoric in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (1998, 332)The rise of the Rhetoric to its position of dominance in the twentieth century has many possible explanations. One of them, undoubtedly, is the name of Aristotle, whose historical authority is recognized across the university and, as such, allows scholars from less prestigious and less well-funded fields (such as rhetoric and composition) to gain at least some measure of respectability by sheer association with the Philosopher.8 Another reason is the ascendance of theory among the humanities and social sciences due to the increasing stress on research over teaching in modern universities. Perhaps because the Rhetoric looks so much more like “theory” than the fragmented record of the sophists and the writings of Isocrates, it has come to be regarded as a high point of rhetoric's evolution as an intellectual discipline in the fourth century BCE and a solid point of departure for contemporary students.9 This teleological view has not gone unchallenged, of course, but the recovery and interpretation of what Aristotle's conceptualization of rhetoric has marginalized or suppressed is an ongoing project.10 I would therefore like to conclude with a plea to young scholars to keep up questioning the beginnings of our discipline, including Aristotle's not-so-innocent definition of rhetoric.

You, who call yourself a rhetorician, what is your art? With what particular thing is your skill concerned? Weaving is concerned with fabricating fabrics, music with making melodies; rhetorician, with what is your know-how concerned? This is the question that Socrates poses to Gorgias in Plato's notorious refutation of rhetoric: “Peri tēs rhētorikēs, peri ti tōn ontōn estin epistēmē?” (1925, 268). Socrates' question frames rhetoric in the genitive case—which, in this case, specifies the source or origin of one thing from another. To ask of rhetoric “peri ti tōn ontōn?” is to ask from whence rhetoric comes, from where rhetoric originates, from what rhetoric is generated. So Socrates' question—“peri ti tōn ontōn?”—asks about rhetoric's domain.Gorgias—or, to be fair, Plato's ventriloquized version of Gorgias—answers that rhetoric is concerned with speech: “Peri logous” (1925, 268). Gorgias reframes Socrates' genitive question, responding in the accusative case. While the genitive case identifies one thing as generated from another, the accusative case identifies something that is being acted on by another. The genitive case specifies a species of some genus; the accusative case addresses the direct object of some action. So Gorgias explains rhetoric's origin by pointing to its object. Gorgias' answer supplies the source of rhetoric's generation by delineating its object domain: “peri logous.” Rhetoric is about, is composed of, and comes from speech.But, Socrates responds, the same is true of many other technai: medicine, gymnastics, arithmetic, and geometry, for example. These, too, are concerned with speech: speech about bodily condition or speech about numbers. Pressed, Gorgias clarifies that rhetoric is the power to speak and also to persuade: “Legein kai peithein” (Plato 1925, 278). But, Socrates still asks, to speak and to persuade about what? He presses on, parroting, “Peri ti? Peri ti?” (Plato 1925, 272–274). What is rhetoric about? “Peri ti tōn ontōn?” What is rhetoric's ontic domain? To what class of objects does it belong? From what category of existing things does it emerge?While Plato's Gorgias plays along with this ontogenetic question, Aristotle's response to the Gorgias in the opening book of his Rhetoric questions the terms of that question. Plato's repeated question—“Peri ti, peri ti?”—contains a categorical error. Or, to be more precise, Plato's error is categorization itself. Plato's question, Aristotle suggests, mistakenly attempts to contain rhetoric within a particular genus. Instead, Aristotle argues that rhetoric is “ou peri ti genos idion” (1926, 14). It is not concerned with any particular genus; it is not proper to any genus; it has no genus of its own. Aristotle writes that “ouk estin oute henos tinos genous aphōrismenou hē rhētorikē” (1926, 12). Rhetoric does not come from one definite kind of stuff; its horizon is not delimited to a single genus of somethings.This, Aristotle explains, differentiates rhetoric from all those other technai like medicine, geometry, and arithmetic. Each of them are indeed able to persuade about their own particular area of study: “peri to autē hypokeimenon” (Aristotle 1926, 14). These technai are about what they lie underneath: “hypo-,” meaning “below,” and “-keimenon,” meaning “positioned.” They come from and are subordinate to a specific genus, category, or class of things: arithmetic about numbers (peri arithmōn) or medicine about health (peri hugieinōn) (Aristotle 1926, 14). While these other arts are “to hypokeimenon”—set underneath their specific domains, as a species to a genus—rhetoric is instead “tōn prokeimenōn”—set before, set forward, set forth (Aristotle 1926, 14). And rhetoric is set forth in advance—what it is set before is generation or beginning itself.Rather than hypokeimenon, rhetoric is hyparchonta (1926, 12)—not lying underneath some genus but below the archē: underneath a beginning, a prime mover, or a first principle. So ironically, Aristotle's archē-definition of rhetoric undermines rhetoric's archē. Rhetoric's domain is the hyparchonta: beneath the first principle, before the beginning, in advance of the first move. Its genus is not speech and persuasion, legein kai peithein, as Plato has Gorgias say. No, Aristotle writes, the function of rhetoric is not persuasion itself—ou to peisai ergon autēs—but rather to see the hyparchonta pithana—the probabilities, plausibilities, or persuadabilities that exist before the work of persuasion begins (1926, 12). Paradoxically, the hyparchonta pithana have a mode of existence before their existence. The hyparchonta is caught between the already and the not-yet. This paradox is reflected in the two seemingly incompatible definitions of the term “hyparchonta”: “preexisting, taken-for-granted,” on one hand, and “allowable, possible,” on the other. To see the hyparchonta pithana is to see preexisting possibilities.A few lines later, Aristotle restates this definition of rhetoric as the ability to see the hyparchonta pithana but replaces the word “hyparchonta” with the term “endechomenon,” instead calling rhetoric the ability to see the “endechomenon pithanon” (1926, 14). This substitution of “hyparchonta” with “endechomenon” fittingly highlights the parallelism between the terms: like “hyparchonta,” the term “endechomenon” points to possibilities. Rhetoric, Aristotle writes, is “peri tōn phainomenōn endechesthai amphoterōs exein” (1926, 22). That is, rhetoric emerges from phenomena capable of carrying more than one possibility. The phrase “endechomenon pithanon,” most commonly rendered in English as “the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991, 37), thus defines persuasion's availability in a very precise sense: not available in the sense of an extant substantive object that is already there to use but instead as an imminent and immanent possibility of which rhetoric may avail itself. Explaining rhetoric's availability as possibility, Aristotle returns to the genitive case: rhetoric emerges not peri tōn ontōn, as Plato would have it, but “peri tōn endechomenōn” (Aristotle 1926, 24).Aristotle resists the Platonic gambit by refusing to collapse rhetoric's genitive genus with an ontic object. Recognizing that rhetoric is ou peri ti genos idion, without any genus of its own, Aristotle sidesteps Plato's trick question, “Peri ti tōn ontōn?” Aristotle stipulates that rhetoric comes not from some genus of ontically existing things but from the incipiently existing domain of the possible. He thus refuses the ruse of defining rhetoric's becoming through “qualified genesis,” the genesis of one thing out of another (ek tinos kai ti) (1955, 184). Rather than emerging out of some genus of ontically existing objects (ek tinos), rhetoric comes-to-be ek mē ontos, from that which has no ontic status (Aristotle 1955, 184, 198). The mode of becoming that Aristotle describes in the Rhetoric thus corresponds to what he elsewhere calls “genesis haplē,” or “unqualified becoming” (1955, 184).This mode of becoming is unqualified in two senses. First, it is unqualified in the sense that it is without qualification. It is not delimited by or limited to any specific class of objects with any specific characteristics. Unqualified becoming is thus thoroughgoing and absolute, not partial or particular. Rhetoric, as unqualified becoming, does not come to be from something in particular; rather, it comes to be from nothing in particular. Although it is common to read Aristotle's famous definition of rhetoric as a statement of rhetoric's particularity—“an ability in each case [peri hekaston] to see the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991, 37)—“peri hekaston” may instead be read as an assertion of rhetoric's indefinite genitive source. “Peri hekaston” translates not merely as “in each” but moreover as “about each and every.” In this definitive but indefinite definition, rhetoric does not just come out of a given case but can emerge from any given case whatsoever. As John Henry Freese puts it in his translation, the art of rhetoric is “not applied to any particular definite class of things” (Aristotle 1926, 15). Rhetoric, as peri hekaston, is not particular but imparticular.But here appears the second sense in which rhetoric's mode of becoming seems unqualified: arising out of nothing in particular, it may seem to come from nothing at all. This seemingly ex nihilo emergence may appear “unqualified” in the sense that it does not meet some prerequisite qualification or condition. Indeed, Aristotle writes that the unqualified mode of becoming is not just a transformation of one thing into another; it is a transubstantiation from the immaterial to the material. It is more than an alteration of qualities; it is a conversion of substance. This genesis haplē is absolute genesis in the sense that it is not a mere change from something else; it is the radical appearance of something new. This genesis “out of non-existence” (“ek mē ontos”) is a possibility's passage out of the imperceptible or anaesthetic (ek anaisthētou) (Aristotle 1955, 198). More than just seeing what already exists out there, rhetoric envisions possibilities that have not yet materialized. It does not follow from a previous generation; it is generation itself—genesis without an archē in any genus.Yet this unqualified genesis does not simply come out of nowhere. It does not spring from complete nonexistence. Rather, Aristotle explains, it emerges from “dunamei on entelecheiai mē on,” from that which exists potentially (dunamei) but not actually (entelechiai) (1955, 186). Unlike an actuality that simply exists, potentiality (to dunaton) is simultaneously capable of both existing and not existing: “kai einai kai mē einai” (Aristotle 1933, 460). Paradoxically, potentiality is a mode of being that can either be or not be. That is, its existence is possible rather than certain. Aristotle writes: “To ara dunaton einai endechetai” (1933, 460). Here, Aristotle links potentiality and possibility, dunaton and endechomenon, that which can be and that which may be. This is how rhetoric can have a mode of existence before its existence: it already exists as a potentiality but does not yet exist as an actuality. Aristotle emphasizes that rhetoric exists as a potentiality, or dunamis: “Estō dē rhētorikē dunamis peri hekaston” (1926, 14). That is: “Let rhetoric be an ability in each case.” Rhetoric exists (estō) potentially (dunamis)—but not actually—in any given case whatsoever. Rhetoric's being is a potentiality inherent in each and every particularity. Let rhetoric be an imparticular potentiality.But if rhetoric exists as an imparticular potentiality, does that mean that its domain is all-encompassing? If rhetoric's genesis is absolute, does that mean its domain is universal? If rhetoric can come from anywhere and everywhere, does that mean that rhetoric is anything and everything? Not actually—rhetoric's “object” is not actually a thing at all. That is, although rhetoric addresses an accusative object in the grammatical sense—the endechomenon pithanon—that domain of rhetorical possibility is not an ontic object in the material sense. Yet while rhetoric is not limited to any genus of actual things, rhetoric's domain does have a limit. Aristotle writes that the domain of rhetoric is not all-encompassing—“ou peri hapanta”—but only includes that which may possibly come to be or not—“all' hosa endechetai kai genesthai kai mē.” (1926, 38). Rhetoric's domain, that space of possible becoming, is bounded by necessity on one side and impossibility on the other. That which either must or must not be is none of rhetoric's concern. Impossibility and necessity are beyond rhetoric's scope. So what is rhetoric about? It is about generative potentialities.Against Plato's attempt to show that rhetoric lacks a definition because it does not belong to any domain of ontically existing things, Aristotle defines rhetoric's domain as precisely that which has no ontic existence but which nevertheless has the potential to appear. Aristotle thus subverts Plato's question, “Peri ti?,” “What is rhetoric about?” He refuses to objectify rhetoric's domain with that insidious little pronoun “ti.” Rhetoric, he counters, comes not from a “ti,” not a thing or a what, but rather a maybe, an indefinite domain that is less than something yet more than nothing (1933, 430). Instead of being generated from some ontically given genus of objects, rhetoric generates the appearance of actualities out of the underdetermined, not-yet-actualized domain of an immaterial potentiality that can be or not be.

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.

This study traces Renaissance and post-Renaissance technical writers' use of classical rhetoric in English instruction manuals on the sport of falconry. A study of the period's five prominent falconry manuals written by four authors—George Turberville, Simon Latham, Edmund Bert, and Richard Blome—reveals these technical writers' conscious use of classical rhetoric as an important technique to persuade readers to accept these authors' authority and trust the information they were disseminating. These manuals employed several classical rhetorical techniques: invention by using ethos and several classical topics, classical arrangement, the plain style, and adaptation of the orator's duties. The explanation for this classical influence rests in the authors' own knowledge of classical rhetoric derived from sources such as Thomas Wilson, as well as the sources from whom these authors obtained their knowledge of falconry. The article ends by suggesting the origins through which these classical rhetorical techniques influenced the writing of the manuals.

Abstract Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has been a topic of suspicion and debate among Christian conservatives. Romney addressed the issue in a 2007 address titled "Faith in America." This article argues that Romney's use of paralipsis helps to explain the divergent popular and academic responses to the speech. Paralipsis may be used as more than a mere stylistic device; it may also be employed as a comprehensive rhetorical strategy in an increasingly polarized political culture. Notes 1I express gratitude for the supportive and diligent RR reviewers, Andrew King and David Timmerman, whose advice enriched the essay substantially. I also thank Theresa Enos, editor of Rhetoric Review, for her efficient management of the review process. 2Transcendence is a tactic identified by Ware and Linkugel as one of four common strategies of apologia. For reference, see "Apologia" in Jasinski's Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory (21). 3Article IV. "No religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." 4For a full study of such methods, see Mark Wilson's Complete Course in Magic (Chapters 1 and 2). 5See "Oath" in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Also see Margaret Sonmez's 2001 article, "Oaths, Exclamations and Selected Discourse Markers in Three Genres." 6For study on this subject, see Alexander's Mormonism in Transition, Gordon's The Mormon Question, and Aarington and Bitton's The Mormon Experience. Harold Bloom's chapters on Mormonism in The American Religion are also insightful. 7The paragraph numbers correspond to the text of the speech as published on Americanrhetoric.com. This version of the manuscript can be found at Americanrhetoric.com under "Mitt Romney." 8A text of the Oath of Allegiance can be found easily on the web (see, for example, Somerville). The similarities to which I refer here include the explicit swearing off of political allegiance from the Pope or any "authorities of the Church of the See of Rome" and the offering of it to "his Majesty" the king of England. Just like Romney, Catholics are a priori asked to shed the influence of their church and to offer explicit devotion to the nation. Also like Romney, they are asked to do this because their political leaders fear that the influence of a particular church will somehow weaken the nation and strengthen that church.

Research problem: A construct mediated in digital environments, information communication technology (ICT) literacy is operationally defined as the ability of individuals to participate effectively in transactions that invoke illocutionary action. This study investigates ICT literacy through a simulation designed to capture that construct, to deploy the construct model to measure participant improvement of ICT literacy under experimental conditions, and to estimate the potential for expanded model development. Research questions: How might a multidisciplinary literature review inform a model for ICT literacy? How might a simulation be designed that enables sufficient construct representation for modeling? How might prepost testing simulation be designed to investigate the potential for improved command of ICT literacy? How might a regression model account for variance within the model by the addition of affective elements to a cognitive model? Literature review: Existing conceptualizations of the ICT communication environment demonstrate the need for a new communication model that is sensitive to short text messaging demands in crisis communication settings. As a result of this prefect storm of limits requiring the communicator to rely on critical thinking, awareness of context, and information integration, we designed a cognitive-affective model informed by genre theory to capture the ICT construct: A sociocognitive ability that, at its most effective, facilitates illocutionary action—to confirm and warn, to advise and ask, and to thank and request—for specific audiences of emergency responders. Methodology: A prepost design with practitioner subjects <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$({N}=50)$</tex></formula> allowed investigation of performance improvement on tasks demanding illocutionary action after training on tasks of high, moderate, and low demand. Through a model based on the independent variables character count, wordcount, and decreased time on task <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$(X)$</tex></formula> as related to the dependent variable of an overall episode score <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$(Y)$</tex></formula> , we were able to examine the internal construct strength with and without the addition of affective independent variables. Results and discussion: Of the three prepost models used to study the impact of training, participants demonstrated statistically significant improvement on episodes of high demand on all cognitive model variables. The addition of affective variables, such as attitudes toward text messaging, allowed increased model strength on tasks of high and moderate complexity. These findings suggest that an empirical basis for the construct of ICT literacy is possible and that, under simulation conditions, practitioner improvement may be demonstrated. Practically, it appears that it is possible to train emergency responders to improve their command of ICT literacy so that those most in need of humanitarian response during a crisis may receive it. Future research focusing on communication in digital environments will undoubtedly extend these finding in terms of construct validation and deployment in crisis settings.