In The New Rhetoric, Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca challenged the Cartesian understanding of the reasonable within philosophy with an expanded understanding based on types of agreements linked to types of audiences. They brought this same perspective to an analysis of values and value judgments in an attempt to respond to the logical empiricists' critique. While scholars have examined the first of these goals, they have not attended to their analysis of values. This article addresses that neglect. It proposes that the way to understand Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca's reevaluation of value judgment is to place The New Rhetoric in the context of the nineteenth-century discourse on values within philosophy. While rejecting the a priori ontology that characterizes most axiology, Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca nonetheless employ the concepts and technical vocabulary of the philosophers' paradigm to transform the axiologists' logic of values into their rhetoric of the preferable.
Against the backdrop of globalization, the increasing diversity of languages and cultures has underscored the pressing need for cross-cultural comprehension and effective communication. This article stands at the junction of argumentation theory and translation studies, exploring their interrelationship. Using the "Hao Bridge Debate" as a case study, the article adopts a rhetorical perspective to explore the challenges of conveying ideas across linguistic and cultural barriers. By analyzing varied translations and interpretations of the debate, considering source language expressions within their historical and cultural contexts, this article discusses the multifaceted challenges faced by translators in bridging linguistic and cultural gaps and emphasizes the inherent deviations in translations. Moreover, this article examines the impact of cultural elements, such as metaphor interpretation and utilization in argumentation, influencing argument transmission and comprehension. This research also illustrates the importance of rhetoric to translation in the study of argumentation, which has further implications for understanding cross-cultural argumentation.
Pinto notes, in effect, that for your change of mind induced by a use of an argument to count as being persuaded by the argument, you must perform the inference that is invited. How is it determined what inference is invited by one's use of an argument advanced to persuade someone of the conclusion? This essay uses the notion of an inference claim. It highlights how invitations to inference count as meta-argumentation, drawing on Aikin and Casey. Also, the essay shows how an invited inference accords with Mercier and Sperber's notion of inference featured in their account of argumentative reasoning.
The article distinguishes between "anthropomorphism" and the "anthropomorphism accusation," a term coined to describe the value-laden assumption that using so-called human terms to talk about nonhumans is always inaccurate and always to be avoided. Analyses of scientific papers and op-eds in botany, evolutionary biology, and microbial science reveal an almost pathological avoidance of anthropomorphism as well as the deeply political foundation of the avoidance-that is, while critiques of anthropomorphism are couched in concerns for accuracy, the critics themselves generally give up a measure of accuracy and instead make a morality case. Analyses of posthumanist rhetoric and science studies texts reveal a tendency to deflect the anthropomorphism accusation without consideration for the conceptual ground that is being ceded in the deflection. The article calls for posthumanist writers not to deflect, but rather to accept the accusation in order to begin making space to deploy the affinity-seeking moves that get called anthropomorphism.
Revered and feared during his lifetime, Richard McKeon left a rich and ambiguous intellectual legacy. The architect and practitioner of a cosmopolitan and expansive, historically and philosophically self-reflexive interdisciplinarity who reimagined liberal arts education for an era of transformation delighted in transcending boundaries and destabilizing assumptions and in demonstrating the relativity of every foundation to a particular constellation of ideas and methods. This essay explores the uncanny legacy of McKeon's simultaneously visionary and old-fashioned style of thought, meditating on the timeliness, at this moment of crisis in and beyond the university, of a philosophical pluralism that embraces multiplicity, ambiguity, and difference without abandoning the commitment to critique.
On closely reading the Aristotelian-Ciceronian-Kantian-inflected essay "The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts," Richard McKeon's 1970 Wingspread Conference address presciently sketches a new rhetoric that is no longer about the approval of an already formed opinion, the steering of public beliefs, or political influence, but rather about dealing with new problems. Showing the "art of discovery, invention and creativity" in action, his inimitable combination of ethos (trust), pathos (emotion), and logos (structure) opens the way to the perception of new facts and previously unnoticed structures and processes, particularly when read in conjunction with the vicissitudes of the relation between words and numbers, the verbal and the numeral across a historically changing trajectory that culminated in the constituted and constitutive force of all pervasive AI digitality. Considering its "inhuman" expansion, the article's focus on the logos of techne opens a path toward a historical assessment of humankind's digitally framed existence.
For Richard McKeon (1975), the relationships between Greek dialectics and dialogue and rhetoric involve the "fruitful interplay of controversy and agreement," and he judges this interplay to be the contribution that Greek dialectic makes to Western history and thought. Thus, he promises to enrich ongoing challenges of diversity, involving his own ideas on pluralism. This article reflects on and furthers that thinking, connecting early Greek insights on the concepts here identified with the post-McKeon debate on deep disagreement in argumentation.
Richard McKeon was a unique and brilliant thinker. But he was also a difficult writer, which has made it hard for readers to acquaint themselves with his system of thought. This article details the author's close reading of a single essay by McKeon. By reconstructing its argument, the author intends to indicate something of the nature of McKeon's larger philosophical project. The essay, titled "The Individual in Law and in Legal Philosophy in the West," was published in 1968. It presents a history of Western political thought from ancient Greece to the twentieth century. If it were simply a work of historical scholarship, this essay would still be an important document, ranking alongside other more famous grand narratives of Western political thought written in the twentieth century. But this essay also offers a useful window into McKeon's larger project to reorient philosophy and reorder the human quest for knowledge.
This article concerns itself with the displacement and silencing of style in McKeon's collegiate editions of Aristotle's Rhetoric. It is divided into two parts: The first proposes unactual elements on style; the second deals with McKeon's promotion of taxis over style in his editions of Aristotle's Rhetoric. The article concludes with a brief proposal on the uses and abuses of Pericles's Funeral Oration.
Ever since Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, philosophical "pluralism," a concept barely a hundred years old, has emerged across all the academic disciplines in many different forms as a possible response to variants of skepticism, relativism, and dogmatism. What makes Richard McKeon's meta-philosophical pluralism distinct from all others is both his focus on philosophical first principles and his rhetorical method of coordinating their possibilities for theoretical development and practical application. Yet McKeon's lifelong intellectual project remains largely unknown even among philosophers and rhetoricians, a situation the present essay modestly hopes to ameliorate.
What is the problem of democratic persuasion today? Looking at the complex cases of what Robert Fogelin calls "deep disagreement," this essay brings Hannah Arendt and Ludwig Wittgenstein into a critical dialogue about the possibilities for persuasive speech. Questioning the received reading of "form of life" and "worldview" as the hard limit on such speech, it argues for a world-opening approach to persuasion where shared premises are missing. By contrast with those who reduce persuading to convincing based on such premises, Wittgenstein and Arendt show how to create them. Persuasion involves not convincing an interlocutor to adopt one's point of view but learning to see from different points of view: a practice that Arendt calls "seeing politically" and Wittgenstein calls "seeing an aspect."
Drawing on Hannah Arendt, this article sketches out the field in which the potential effectivity of a claim to free speech-its power-may play out. The article combines Arendt's thoughts on free speech and its (in)effectivity with a rather odd-sounding word that she reinserted into the German translations of her texts from the original English: "Schwindel." This word translates at once to "fibbing" and "lying," "fraud" and "scam," as well as to "dizziness" and "vertigo." Attention to the complex range of connotations of the German word in its English translations unexpectedly discloses how debates around free speech connect with three aspects of contemporary political life: the social opportunism of a lifestyle centered around "hustling," the unavailability of truth in politics, and a dysfunctional social economy.
The aim of this article is to consider the issue of how we conceive of others when engaging in the activity of perspective taking. Are we supposed to think from the standpoint of abstract and generalized others? Or should we strive to engage with concrete, particular others? The article suggests that what matters is that we encounter the other in their particularity rather than their generality-and that this distinction cuts across the more frequently invoked, modal distinction between possibility and actuality. In other words, what is relevant is not whether the other exists or not, but whether we encounter them in all their individuality and uniqueness.
Hannah Arendt insisted that people who share a society should talk to each other in order to inhabit as far as possible the views of fellow citizens. While for Arendt, the aim of such thinking is to consider other citizens' views when evaluating issues, this article suggests another purpose that is more readily available in highly polarized contexts. In such settings, "representative thinking" may be best equipped to reveal the conceptions of the good that motivate views with which one disagrees. In antagonistic contexts such as the contemporary United States in which many people doubt that others' opinions are premised on any sense of the good, this recognition can provide the groundwork for better relations between citizens, by cultivating acknowledgment of those with whom one deeply disagrees as legitimate cocreators of democratic society.
According to Simone de Beauvoir, realizing ourselves and genuinely understanding ourselves and others are conditioned by speaking with each other. The task of this article is to present the relevant mode of mutual communication, explain why it is required, and briefly gauge if it may propose a challenge to Arendt's view of "enlarged mentality." For Beauvoir, self-realization and understanding people require a mode of mutual communication, which (i) is second-personal (involving mutual claims on each other's responsiveness) and (2) affirms, rather than denies, the fundamental separateness between us. Such a mode of communication is required by virtue of the free yet situated nature of the human self. Beauvoir's approach is a challenge to Arendt's picture of thinking with each other representatively if this picture recommends that we imaginatively inhabit others' perspectives from our own first-person perspective.
This article identifies a tension between two forms of respect: respect for others' agency and respect for their rationality. This tension emerges, the article argues, when one person presents another with a nuanced argument on an important topic, thereby complimenting their rationality, but draining their agential resources by demanding their attention. Giving someone an argument can therefore generate a structurally similar double bind to giving them a puppy as a present: Refusing is normatively uncomfortable, but accepting requires a significant sacrifice. The article concludes by considering how certain factors can weaken the double bid, including rhetoric.
