There is little to nothing rhetoric can teach us about Donald J. Trump. That’s fake news. Don’t get me wrong. Rhetoric has a lot to teach us about many things. Indeed, I am a teacher of rhetoric my...

The next decade will be one of the most decisive periods in human history. We currently face the reality of a coming climate catastrophe brought about by centuries of industrial resource extraction...

In the late 1430s, a collection of letters began to circulate among humanists in Venice that displayed a mastery of Ciceronian Latin and expressed the highest virtues; but what most caused a sensat...

Book Review| March 01 2018 Kant’s Philosophy of Communication Kant’s Philosophy of Communication. By Gina L. Ercolini. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2016; pp. viii + 251; $30 paper. Nathan Crick Nathan Crick Texas A&M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 186–189. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0186 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nathan Crick; Kant’s Philosophy of Communication. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 186–189. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0186 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In order to highlight the genuinely radical nature of John Dewey’s educational and democratic vision this essay articulates a vision of contemporary rhetorical education that is grounded in a pragmatic rereading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “will to power.” Drawing from Dewey’s treatment of the will to power in Human Nature and Conduct, I argue that rhetorical pedagogy seeks to arouse, channel, and finally compose the impulses of students through the activity of intelligence in such a way that reflects and advocates for students’ interests within a democratic ethic of advocacy, criticism, and deliberation.

The Evolving Citizen: American Youth and the Changing Norms of Democratic Engagement, by Jay P. Childers. University Park: Penn State UP, 2012. 220 pp. $56.95 (cloth).After the Public Turn: Composi...

When Alan Gross published The Rhetoric of Science in 1990, he helped initiate a productive controversy concerning the place of rhetoric in science studies while arguing for the continued importance of the classical rhetorical tradition. However, in his 2006 revision, Starring the Text, Gross significantly draws back the classical emphasis while making more central the place of the American analytic philosophical tradition stemming from the foundational logical writings of W.V.O Quine. This essay interrogates this shift in Gross’s writings in order to find the working definition of rhetoric that threads throughout his work. This definition, I argue, turns out to be grounded more in Quine’s holistic theory of epistemology than in any sophistical or even Aristotelian conception of language as a vehicle for advocating judgment in times of deliberation and crisis. I argue that a return to the classical emphasis on situated practice can enrich the study of the rhetoric of science and build on the significant accomplishments of Gross’s work.

The lesson of Homer’s Iliad is that eloquence arises out of a confrontation with death. Perhaps the most dramatic of these confrontations is the death of Patroclus, an event that elicits epideictic speech by three parties: immortal horses, Xanthos and Balios; an immortal god, Zeus; and a mortal human, Patroclus. However, although the reaction of the horses and of Zeus reflect the pathos and logos of eloquence, respectively, this essay argues that true eloquence grows out of an experience of a divided self that heroically judges its own life meaningful—thereby constituting ethos through speech—in the face of death.

Abstract Rhetoric is an art that finds its habitation in events. Rhetoric emerges within growing points of opposition and struggle, using language to constitute facts that stand out from situations in order to give to an audience the burden of judgment. This article seeks to provide a framework for articulating the relationship between rhetoric and events through the writings of John Dewey and his collaborator Arthur Bentley, who found in the term “event” a way of advancing their transactional perspective on human action that they believed could function as a corrective to pervasive social pathologies. Using their vocabulary, it advances a definition of rhetoric as an art that reacts to events by constituting meaningful situations in which judgments of character are possible. But it also claims that the ethics of transaction requires a more subtle and long-term effort to show how our own characters as “individuals” are themselves formed in transaction with rhetoric and events.

Book Review| June 01 2014 The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy: How Deliberative Ideals Undermine Democratic Politics The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy: How Deliberative Ideals Undermine Democratic Politics. By Scott Welsh. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013; pp. 206. $65.00 cloth. Liz Sills; Liz Sills Louisiana State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nathan Crick Nathan Crick Texas A&M University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2014) 17 (2): 352–355. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.2.0352 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Liz Sills, Nathan Crick; The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy: How Deliberative Ideals Undermine Democratic Politics. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2014; 17 (2): 352–355. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.2.0352 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract In Aristotle's biological treatise, On the Parts of Animals, one finds a rare and unexpected burst of rhetorical eloquence. While justifying the study of “less valued animals,” he erupts into praise for the study of all natural phenomena and condemns the small-mindedness of those who trivialize its worth. Without equal in Aristotle's remaining works for its rhetorical quality, it reveals the otherwise coolheaded researcher as a passionate seeker of truth and an unabashed lover of natural beauty. For Aristotle, rhetoric not only discloses the truth (aletheia) of appearances by refuting counterarguments and defending one's claims within agonistic forums; rhetoric also defends and advances whole fields of study on the promise on wonder (thaumazein). By examining Aristotle's example in practice, this article seeks to elucidate a notion of the rhetoric for inquiry that calls lovers of wisdom to the empirical study of nature.

The vibrancy and health of political culture in democratic societies increasingly depends on the publicity and resolution of public scientific controversies. However, creating a framework for analysis that avoids reductive categorization remains a difficult task. This essay proposes a Habermasian framework of analysis for public scientific controversies and draws out its rhetorical implications. We argue that the roots of public scientific controversies are found in moments of urgency that call forth contested scientific theories into the public realm. These controversies embed epistemological disputes over knowledge-claims within pragmatic contexts, thus forcing interested parties to achieve some level of intersubjective consensus on the legitimacy of broad-based policies that fuse politics, ethics, and science. These controversies thus provide the situational grounds that make possible, if not always actual, the interaction among citizens, scientists, and legislators through rhetorical forums that feature the discursive interplay among epistemological concerns, aesthetic experience, moral valuation, and practical judgment.

Democracy is often described in terms of the aesthetics of multiplicity in uniformity, which celebrates the feeling of community of individuals coming together in difference. However, a more reliable mark of a healthy democratic society is the periodic presence of rhetorical singularities that challenge shared conventions and risk rhetorical failure for the sake of inspiring excellence in character. Like the prose of Emerson and Nietzsche, rhetorical singularities employ tragic ideals to expose the comic limitations of culture in order to transvaluate values and dare creative individuals to strive past limits and so advance society beyond the bounds of convention.

Robert Danisch's book, Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric, brings together the traditions of rhetoric, as it was practiced and theorized in Classical Greece, and pragmatism, as it...

Research Article| January 01 2006 Rhetoric, Philosophy, and the Public Intellectual Nathan Crick Nathan Crick Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2006) 39 (2): 127–139. https://doi.org/10.2307/20697141 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nathan Crick; Rhetoric, Philosophy, and the Public Intellectual. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2006; 39 (2): 127–139. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20697141 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University2006The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Although the Bartholomae/Elbow debate is often framed as a modern conflict between the advocates of academic and personal writing, it is more appropriately viewed as the most recent manifestation of the historical clash between expressivism and constructivism. However, both sides of this conflict, which split over whether to see writing as a product of the mind or of an external discourse, rest upon a dualist assumption that the primary task of language is to provide linguistic representations of a transcendental ego. This essay first draws from the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey in order to critique the dualist legacy of the expressivist/constructivist debate and then explicates Dewey's views on mind, language, and experience in order to reconstruct a pragmatic philosophy of communication and a progressive composition pedagogy.

Although the Bartholomae/Elbow debate is often framed as a modern conflict between the advocates of “academic” and “personal” writing, it is more appropriately viewed as the most recent manifestation of the historical clash between expressivism and constructivism. However, both sides of this conflict, which split over whether to see writing as a product of the mind or of an external discourse, rest upon a dualist assumption that the primary task of language is to provide linguistic representations of a transcendental ego. This essay first draws from the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey in order to critique the dualist legacy of the expressivist/constructivist debate and then explicates Dewey’s views on mind, language, and experience in order to reconstruct a pragmatic philosophy of communication and a progressive composition pedagogy.