Podcasts about new rhetoric

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Perelman made a category of arguments that he termed "quasi-logical." Quasi does not mean "fake" in this context, but just that they are similar to the arguments made in formal logic. Dr. Steven B. Katz joins us to discuss each of the arguments within this category, and how they rely on some of the most basic cognitive patterns that humans use to make sense of the world around us. Because we can perceive similarity, difference, and the relations of parts to the whole, we are able to use these as basis for arguments to move others. This episode builds on the episode "Chaim Perelman's Theory of Argumentation." 

[02:16] The 14 Grievances[05:56] Canberra's New Rhetoric[07:54] Self-Censorship[11:12] Decision Making Tightrope[13:00] Darwin Port Lease[14:00] Foreign Investment Review Board[18:00] AUKUS Announcement in Washington[20:13] Australia and the Quad[23:19] Within the Albanese Government[27:05] Australia on Taiwan[31:21] America's China Policy

During the Second World War, Chaim Perelman, a leader in the Jewish Belgian Resistance was writing a philosophical treatise on justice. Frustrated, he discovered that his training in analytic philosophy renedered him unable to make any arguments about why his cause was more just than that of the Nazis, because he had been trained to disregard arguments about values, preferences, or the probable. So Perelman began identifying everyday arguments humans use in newspapers and politics to discover how they work and what foundations they build upon, leading to his and Lucie Albrechts-Tyteca's masterpiece The New Rhetoric. Dr. Richard Enos joins us to discuss Perelman's theory of argumentation and how it provides a basis for making rational arguments and decisions about values. 

Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing (Utah State UP, 2020) approaches writing studies from the rhetorical flank, the flank which, for many, is the only flank the discipline has. However, at a time when universities are optimizing structurally and streamlining pedagogically, the book must plead the case for a university where character is formed. Now that writing studies has shouldered up to its other disciplinary and institutional neighbors, composition instructors need to begin asking themselves tough questions about administration, teaching, and assessment, and perhaps more importantly, composition instructors need to begin providing answers. Rosanne Carlo provides answers, answers which spring from the New Rhetoric, from the writings of Jim Corder, from ethos as a gathering place for community, from kairos, chora, and from many another well found and well placed theoretical tool turned to her overriding purpose of teaching writing and teaching rhetoric as a way of life. Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better. The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing (Utah State UP, 2020) approaches writing studies from the rhetorical flank, the flank which, for many, is the only flank the discipline has. However, at a time when universities are optimizing structurally and streamlining pedagogically, the book must plead the case for a university where character is formed. Now that writing studies has shouldered up to its other disciplinary and institutional neighbors, composition instructors need to begin asking themselves tough questions about administration, teaching, and assessment, and perhaps more importantly, composition instructors need to begin providing answers. Rosanne Carlo provides answers, answers which spring from the New Rhetoric, from the writings of Jim Corder, from ethos as a gathering place for community, from kairos, chora, and from many another well found and well placed theoretical tool turned to her overriding purpose of teaching writing and teaching rhetoric as a way of life. Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better. The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing (Utah State UP, 2020) approaches writing studies from the rhetorical flank, the flank which, for many, is the only flank the discipline has. However, at a time when universities are optimizing structurally and streamlining pedagogically, the book must plead the case for a university where character is formed. Now that writing studies has shouldered up to its other disciplinary and institutional neighbors, composition instructors need to begin asking themselves tough questions about administration, teaching, and assessment, and perhaps more importantly, composition instructors need to begin providing answers. Rosanne Carlo provides answers, answers which spring from the New Rhetoric, from the writings of Jim Corder, from ethos as a gathering place for community, from kairos, chora, and from many another well found and well placed theoretical tool turned to her overriding purpose of teaching writing and teaching rhetoric as a way of life. Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better. The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing (Utah State UP, 2020) approaches writing studies from the rhetorical flank, the flank which, for many, is the only flank the discipline has. However, at a time when universities are optimizing structurally and streamlining pedagogically, the book must plead the case for a university where character is formed. Now that writing studies has shouldered up to its other disciplinary and institutional neighbors, composition instructors need to begin asking themselves tough questions about administration, teaching, and assessment, and perhaps more importantly, composition instructors need to begin providing answers. Rosanne Carlo provides answers, answers which spring from the New Rhetoric, from the writings of Jim Corder, from ethos as a gathering place for community, from kairos, chora, and from many another well found and well placed theoretical tool turned to her overriding purpose of teaching writing and teaching rhetoric as a way of life. Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better. The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing (Utah State UP, 2020) approaches writing studies from the rhetorical flank, the flank which, for many, is the only flank the discipline has. However, at a time when universities are optimizing structurally and streamlining pedagogically, the book must plead the case for a university where character is formed. Now that writing studies has shouldered up to its other disciplinary and institutional neighbors, composition instructors need to begin asking themselves tough questions about administration, teaching, and assessment, and perhaps more importantly, composition instructors need to begin providing answers. Rosanne Carlo provides answers, answers which spring from the New Rhetoric, from the writings of Jim Corder, from ethos as a gathering place for community, from kairos, chora, and from many another well found and well placed theoretical tool turned to her overriding purpose of teaching writing and teaching rhetoric as a way of life. Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better. The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simon's live report for LBC's NewsHour with Iain Dale.

Some time ago, I was asked by listener Sarah Rumsey to do a podcast on composition theory. That’s a doozy of a topic, so I read a lot, I poked around, even pulled together a couple drafts, but couldn’t find the balance of breadth and depth to do this subject justice. So I gave up.   Ah, clever listener, you know I didn’t really give up, because this is Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history and I am Mary Hedengren and instead of trying to capture the entire depth of rhetorical theory thought I could just rip off someone who did.   Granted, the “did” in this case happened way back in 1982, when rhetoric and composition was still a young discipline, but the “someone” is James A Berlin, namesake of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Jim Berlin pub crawl. In addition to, I guess, being a man who could hold his liquor, Berlin was a composition historian and in 1982, he took stock of the current field of composition in an article titled “Contemporary Composition: the Major Pedagogical Theories.”   Now before I dive into this major theoretical typology, let me say that the article has been accused of being a little simplistic and a little...strawman-ish. Berlin himself acknowledges his bias in the article, stating, “My reasons for presenting this analysis are not altogether disinterested. I am convinced that the pedagogical approach of the New Rhetoricians is the most intelligent and most practical alternative available, serving in every way the best interests of our students” (766). Well, in that case, why even worry about other theories? And why should Sarah be taught all of these competing pedagogical theories in her composition classes? Why not just settle down with one intelligent and practical one without holding up competing theories? Won’t that just confuse would-be instructors and, worse, muddle students who must adapt from one instructor’s theory to another as they progress through their classes: freshman comp with a classicist and advanced writing with an expressionist?   Well, for starters, you might not agree with Berlin’s conclusions about which is best. And, even is so, Berlin fears that most people don’t think consciously about their overall theory of writing and learning at all “ many teachers,” he says, “(and I suspect most) look upon their vocations as the imparting of a largely mechanical skill, important only because it serves students in getting them through school and in advancing them in their professions. This essay will argue that writing teachers are perforce given a responsibility that far exceeds this merely instrumental task” (766).   Okay then, what are the theories Berlin posits for how “writer, reality, audience and language--are envisioned”(765)?   First are the Neo-Aristotelians or Classicists. You might suspect, they echo the philosophies of Aristotle, but Berlin claims that actually they are “opposed to his system in every sense” (767). Okay, then, what does Aristotle posit and what do these wannabes do? Aristotle, if you remember from that famous fresco by Rafael, is the one pointing down to the earth. Berlin describes Aristotle’s view that reality can be “known and communicated with language serving as the unproblematic medium os discourse. There is an uncomplicated correspondence between the sign and the thing” (767). Aristotle’s rhetorical writings are among the most complete we have from the ancient world and emphasize reasoning, but also acknowledge that sometimes it takes a little appeal to emotion, too, to get the job done.   Then Berlin says, in essence, okay, but what those so-called Neo-Aristotelians actually do is Current-traditional or Positivist. [For those keeping track at home, this means that there are two terms (Neo-Aristotleian or Classicist) to describe the general theory and then two (Current traditional and positivist) to describe the way that people botch it up and sometimes still call themselves NeoAristotlean.] So in what ways have Current traditionalists been mucking up Aristotle’s ideas on rhetoric?  Well, for starters they abandon deductive reasoning altogether and embrace exclusively induction, emphasizing only experiment and then they also “destroy” a distinction between dialective and rhetoric, “rhetoric becomes the study of all forms of communication: scientific, philosophical, historical, political, eval and even [gasp] poetic” (769). Additionally, “truth is to be discovered outside the rhetorical enterprise--through the method, usually the scientific method of the appropriate discipline, or as in poetry and oratory, through genious” (770). Instructors in this theory move beyond persuasive to “discourse that appeals to the understanding--exposition, narration, description and argumentation” and is “concerned solely with the communication of truth that is certain and empirically verifieable--in other words, not probablistic” (770).   The second band Berlin identifies are the neo-Platonists or expressivist. Let’s think back on that fresco by Rafael--Aristotle pointed to the ground and Plato pointed to the sky. If neo Aristotleans see themselves as focused on the empirical, the neo Platonists  head in the opposite direction “truth is not based on sensory experience since the material world is always in flux and thus unreliable. Truth is instead discovered through an internal apprehension, a private world that transcends” (771). Because of this, for our writing instructors, “truth can be learned by not taught” (771). The expressionists then “emphasizes writing as a ‘personal’ activity as an expression one’s unique voice” (772). Berlin objects that, like that neo-Aristotleans, these Expressionists have strayed far from Plato’s precepts--”Their conception of truth,” he says “can in no way be seen as comparable to Plato’s transcend world of ideas.” Non of them,” he objects “is a relativist...all believe in the existence of verifiable truths and find them, as does Plato, in private experience” (772). Further, although expressivists may encourage freewriting and journaling, they also emphasise workshopping and peer review, practices that, accord to Berlin will “get rid of what is untrue to the private vision of the writer” (773). This peer practice to purify private truths is not about communication to others, to expunge insincerities. There is a very Dead Poets Society vibe to the whole thing.   So, to summarize where we end up, the Current-traditionalists who think they are Aristotlean are dropping “personal and social concerns in the interests of the unobstructed perception of empirical reality” while the expressivist Neo-Platonists are finding reality only within and using an audience only as a “check to the false note of the inauthentic” and some lingering true NeoAristotleans or classicalists are emphasizing rational structures and only occasionally acknowledging things like “emotion”  (775).   Then there is New Rhetoric. You can almost feel Berlin heave a sigh of relief at finding something sensible. “In New Rhetoric the message arises out of the interactions of the writer, language, reality and the audience. Truths are operative only within a given universe of discourse, and this universe is shaped by all of these elements, including the audience” (775). In other words, if Rafeal were painting the school of Athens now, Aristotle might point towards the objective earth and Plato towards the transcendent heavens, but New Rhetoric (personified, let us say, by Berlin himself) would be pointing outwards towards you--towards the viewer and also towards the painter. The writer creates truth, doesn’t just discover it in the world or within herself, but actually creates it.   And what does that mean for composition? Everything, says Berlin. “In teaching writing we are not simply offering training in a useful technical skill that is meant as a simple complement to more important studies in other areas. We are teaching a way of experiences the world, a way of ordering and making sense of it” (776).   And that’s why learning theory is important. When you’re teaching students to write, are you teaching them to just “write down their observation” about the outside world as though it were uncomplicated? Are you asking them to just “write whatever comes into your mind” about a topic as sincerely and unrestrained as possible? Or are you asking them to create meaning with their audience and, in the same sense with language?   I confess that reading this article in 2019, I’m less twitterpated with the idea that people can make up whatever truths they want. Although no one would ever describe themselves as a Current Traditionalist, some of these ideas--writing in the disciplines, using mixed research methods, even including belleliteristic writing seem very comfortable to me. Things have changed since 1983, not least of which is composition theory.   And I guess this means that this ccan’t be my only podcast on theory. Ah, rats.  

Arguably few playgoers today are aware that Act 4 of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet ends with musicians engaging in badinage with a clown. Treated generally as superfluous or insignificant, the Peter and the Musicians scene is now cut more often than not. Yet Shakespeare must have had some larger dramatic purpose for it in mind, as the same musicians appear as spectators in the preceding "false lamentations" scene, where key characters mistakenly mourn Juliet's putative death. Too dramatically crucial to obliterate, this section too has nonetheless been redacted heavily and roundly criticized over the years, usually for the effusive, stilted, and formalized nature of its rhetoric. From an interdisciplinary perspective this paper reexamines these scenes as well as other moments in the play that feature musical allusions. It posits that Shakespeare used the musicians and other characters he thrust unawares into the act of "false lamentation" to portray the rhetorical trope of catachresis and that his model was O that most rare breast, a polyphonic song by the Elizabethan composer William Byrd. After purportedly composing O that for the funeral of the famous military hero and English sonneteer Sir Philip Sidney, Byrd used literary methods of sequential arrangement to develop an elaborate interdisciplinary tribute to his subject in his first published collection of English texted music. It was Byrd's venture into literary structures, via the rhetorical method of eristic imitation, I argue, that drew Shakespeare toward the song as he developed his hitherto unnoticed catachrestic conceit in Act 4 scene 5. Romeo and Juliet has long been associated with music. Byrd was the premier musician of Shakespeare's day and recent studies of Elizabethan rhetoric have been markedly interdisciplinary. This paper, nonetheless, will be the first to contend that Byrd and Shakespeare had any direct influence on one another. Shakespeare, it has long been argued, was so focused on the "lowly" popular ballad and the "lofty" theories of musica mundana that he took little interest in Byrd's specialty in "pricksong" (art song). Byrd's reputation, in turn, has long suffered from the idea that he was "unliterary." Recent studies, however, point a way out of this quagmire. Students of the so-called New Rhetoric have exposed ways in which Byrd might have approached the literature of his time that have not been considered or have been disregarded as Music and Shakespeare revisionists Joseph M. Ortiz, Erin Minear, and Andrew Mattison have opened new paths for interaction across disciplines in their findings that Shakespeare might "silence ... music" or provide "contexts that pull songs away from their musical status." From an interdisciplinary perspective gleaned from these approaches it will be shown not only that the scenes in Romeo and Juliet involving music were carefully integrated into the dramatic action, but also that they were integral to one of the play's larger purposes, which was to encourage an end to the enmity surrounding religious divisions of the time.

When last we left our intrepid hero, Chaim Perelman was describing universal audiences with his collaborater Lucie Obretch-Tycteta and setting up what he called the new Rhetoric. Today, we’ll talk about his solo text, The Realm of Rhetoric and critical responses to his philosophies.   The first thing you’ll notice about the Realm of Rhetoric is that is it around a fourth of the size of the New Rhetoric. I think that’s probably a function of having writing a ground-breaking magnum opus and then following it up.   Let’s start with the spoilers. What is the realm of rhetoric? It is“communication tr[ying] to influence one or more person, to orient their thinking, to excite or calm their emotions, to guide their actions” of which dialectic is one part (162). In another place, Perelman says “Argumentation is intended to act upon an audience to modify an audience’s convictions or dispositions through discourse, and it tries to gain a meeting of minds instead of imposing its will through constraint or conditioning” (11). Some of this sounds a little Burke-y, doesn’t it? All this talk about how talk isn’t about force, even psychological force.   Perelman’s words here state that, “the new rhetoric is concerned with discourse addressed to any sort of audience” (5) not just a specific group of people hanging out in the marketplace listening to speakers.   The presence of controversy means that dialectical reasoning always involves audiences, and always involved received opinion. For instance, if I try to tell you that we should visit Italy for vacation this year, I’m relying on opinions that say that Italy is a good place for vacations, that traveling for vacation is a good idea, etc. Perelman says that dialectical reasoning is about justifiable opinion and it isn’t invalid because it deals with opinion, but just different. And different disciplines require different types of argument: “It is as inappropriate,” he writes “to be satisfied with merely reasonable arguments from a mathematician as it would be to require scientific proofs from an orator” (3).   So the realm of rhetoric is different: “A argument is never capable of procuring self-evidence, and there is no way of arguing against what is self-evident… argumentation… can intervene only where self-evidence is contested” (6).   That isn’t to say that there are constraints in this realm of rhetoric. Even if you decide to make every argument to support a proposition, so that it can reach all audiences, there are “psychological, social and economic limits that prevent a thoughtless amplification of the discourse” (139). And if we have to limit the arguments we make, we have to think about making the best ones, the ones that have efficacy and validity in various forms. Efficacy is mercenary: does it work for that audience? Does it, to use PErelman’s term, persuade?The other option is validity, which is linked to convincing, to the universal audience “above and beyond reference to the audience to which it is presented” (140).   Perelman ultimately accepts a big version of rhetoric “As soon as a communication tries to influence one or more persons, to orient their thinking, to excite or calm their emotions, to guide their actions, it belongs to the realm of rhetoric” and get this “Dialectic, the technique of controversy, is included as one part of this larger realm” (162). Dialectical reasoning needs to get off its high horse, Perelman suggests because “We can immediately see that dialectical reasoning begins from theses that are generally accepted, with the purpose of gaining the acceptance of other theses which could be or are controversial” in other words “it aims either to persuade or convince” (2). So yeah, what’s the realm of rhetoric? Everything.

Welcome to MR, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements that have shaped rhetorical history. It’s a new year and a new semester here at the University of Texas, and it’s time for some new years resolutions. We got a lot of old episodes re-recorded last semester, and by golly I’m glad we did, but it’s time to get some fresh episodes out. So, thanks to the Humanities Media Project here at the University of Texas at Austin, we’re going to have some brand new episodes. Okay, we had like six new ones last semester, but this time I’m keeping a promise I made to a Belgian. Victor Ferry wrote in last august or something and when we talked about episodes, he said that he’d love to hear about the great Belgian rhetorician--Chiam Perleman. “Sure, Victor,” I said. “We’re doing some old episodes, but I promise, we’ll do Perleman this year.” So, in the name of keeping promises, we’re not only doing one episode on Chiam Perleman, but we’re doing two. That’s right, a Perelman two-parter. Today we’ll talk a little about Perleman’s life and his collaboration with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and their master work, The New Rhetoric,. Next week we’ll talk about Perleman’s solo career and the Rhelm of Rhetoric and some of the responses to the Perelman’s work.   Perelman almost wasn’t a Belgian rhetorician. He was born in Poland and moved to Belgium, as many Poles were wont to do in the late twenties and thirties. There, he could have been a lawyer, because he got a law degree, and then he went and got his doctorate in philosophy by looking at a mathematician. But while he thought big thoughts about law and ethics and philosophy, things really took off when he met a colleague named Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and they set about writing the massive book, the New Rhetoric.   The New Rhetoric is not a modest undertaking. what Perelman and Olbrechts Tyteca were undertaking was nothing less than the complete rehabilitation of ancient rhetoric into a modern resource for making ethical decisions. In this rehabilitation, audience is key: that’s what rhetoric really does best. As they say it, “For argument to develop, there must be some attention paide to it by those to whom it is directed” (think of your audience in other words.) They go on and say,  “argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it is addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be influenced” (1969, p. 19). The audience, though and “the audience” may be different things. There’s an audience which is the ideal, a universal audience that is perfectly understanding and wise and then there is the audience that one gets, like the hand one is dealt. The latter is called the particular audience. This changes how we talk about argument, too. So an argument may be persuasive if it appeals successfully to a particular audience, but it won’t be convincing unless it can “gain the adherence of every rational being” (28).   But let’s get a little deeper in the weeds about the universal audience. The universal audience, they write “consists of the whole of mankind, or at least, of all normal, adult persons,” and since we seldom find ourselves addressing the whole of mankind or even all normal adult persons, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca point out that “Each speaker’s universal audience can, indeed, from an external viewpoint, be regarded as a particular audience, but it non the less remains true that for each speaker at each moment, there exists an audience transcending all others, which cannot easily be forced within the bounds of a particular audience” (30). So it’s an election year, let’s talk about the problems of the particular audience. Say you’re a politician running for office in a region that’s been hit hard by industrial decline. You might address a crowd of people who are depressed by the high levels of unemployment, scared about continuing layoffs and stressed about the idea of trying to find a new job that may ask them to change their careers, and their homes in the middle of their lives. It might be tempting to tell these people that you will bring back industrial jobs, that the factories will run again, that they can stay in their own homes and careers. But then you might have to go directly to address another crowd, say a group of environmentally minded people who are thrilled that the factories are closed--after all, they’re the ones who lobbied to tax pollution in their town, and they petitioned for increased regulation, which cost the factories so much money that they couldn’t stay open. what are you going to say to this audience? If you promise the factories will be back, they’ll boo you out of the room.   Or, as Perelman and Olbretchs Tyteca say, “Argumentation aimed exclusively at a partciular audience has the drawback that the speaker, by the very fact of adapting to the views of his listeners, might rely on arguments that are foreign or even directly opposed to what is acceptable to persons other than those he is presently addressing” (31).   Instead imagine what the universal audience would approve of, what both the groups you want to address care about: they want their communitity to have plenty of jobs and economic success, and they want to live in a place where the air and water are clean and pure. This is a small example of the ideal, the “agreement of the universal audience,” which may be generalizable, even hypothetical.   “Philosophers,” Perekman and Ol-ty say, “always claim to be adressing such an audience, not because they hope to obtain the effective assent of all men--they know very well that only a small minority will ever read their works--but because they think that all who understand the reaons they give will have to accept their conclusions,” or, in other words “The agreement of a universal audience is thus a matter, not of fact, but of right” (31).   But where can one hope to find a universal audience? I know where to find unemployed factory workers and environmentalists, but how do I know how the universal audience polls? Frankly, P and Olbretchs-Tyceta say, you have to make them up as you go. “Everyone constitutes the universal audience from what he knows of his fellow men, in such a way as to transcend the few oppositions he is aware of. Each individual, each culture, has thus its own conception of the universal audience. The study of these variations would be very instructive, as we would learn from it what men, at different times in history, have regarded as real, true and objectively valid” (33). So if you’re speaking to that group of unemployed factory workers, you have to think about what arguments they (and the environmentalists) would find valid. If you suggest that the community can pivot into clean industry and environmental tourism, you have to wonder whether your communities believes that it’s true that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” or that anyone can change and the American spirit is about growth and adaptation. What is your culture’s conception of what is real and true? It takes some work to figure out what’s valid in your community and what’s universally accepted. the universal audience is a kind of invisible standards committee, detirmining what will fly for everyone. But the committee is hard to pin down, even for the scholars arguing for it in The New Rhetoric. As the authors put it,  “it is the undefined universal audience that is invoked to pass judgment on what is the concept of the universal audience appropriate to such a concrete audience, to examine, simultaneously the manner in which it was composed, which are the individuals who comprise it, according to the adopted criterion, and whether this criterion is legitimate. It can be said that audiences pass judgment on one another” (35). Agreement in the community yields a fact. Facts are not immutable and once it is no longer accepted, it becomes a conclusion, rather than a starting premise (68).  We might all agree that factories pollute, or that pollution hurts the wild life. Build enough of a web of agreement, and you come up with truth. Maybe that truth for our community is that factories as currently constituted are antithetical to a clean, healthy environment. It relates the different facts that the universal audience agrees to. Move one step over from facts and you get values like patriotism, or health. Values are arranged in hierarchies. Is health more important than patriotism? Is the environment more important than jobs? And hierarchies are arranged in loci. General loci are the most absolute. For example, the value of human life might be an absolute loci in your community. You’d do whatever it took to protect it, even if Matt Damon was from your town and you had to rescue him from the Nazis or Mars or whatever. Specific loci are more specific to the situation for example, the value of Matt Damon’s life when he’s in danger might be the specific loci, or you might say, if you have to choose between Matt Damon and an extra, choose Matt Damon’s life. So taking all of these terms into account, the strength of the argument is (1) “intensity of the hearer/s adherence to the premises” and (2) “relevance of the arguments in the particular discussion” (461). Getting back to our politician, you might have a harder time convincing an unwilling audience of your argument, but arguments don’t need to be waterproof: “the essential thing is that they appear sufficiently secure to allow the unfolding of the argument” (261). the whole object of argumentation is “gaining the adherence of minds” within a “community of minds” (14). That’s all the time we have for today, but The New Rhetoric is a 562 page masterpeice that set the stage for much of the philosophical discussion about rhetoric and reason. Next time we’ll talk about some of the responses to The New Rhetoric as well as Perelman’s Realm of Rhetoric. In the meantime, if you have a favorite rhetorician you’d like to hear featured on the show or if you want to extract some promises, drop me a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you.

[guitar music]   Welcome to New Rhetoric the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, events, and ideas that have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren and today I actually get to respond to a listener who wrote in, named Greg Gibby. And Greg wrote in saying that he would love to know some sort of ranking system; some way to see who are some of the most important figures in rhetorical history and sort of how they might relate to each other. So because of Greg, for the next month, we are going to be counting down the villains of rhetoric. Not that there are any you know, mustache twirlers per say, but these are folks who sort of give rhetoric a bad name, and contributed to rhetoric becoming a pejorative.  So today, in honor of Greg, we are going to be start out our series. We are going to be starting with, Thomas Hobbes. Now, you probably remember Hobbes from your political science classes. He's the one that came up with the idea of the social contract. You remember this. You have a bunch of people all living together and life is nasty and terrible and brutish, and then they decide, "Hey if we all get in this together and make somebody in charge of us, we don't have to live like animals." So they create a contract.  "We will all obey the sovereign, and the sovereign will protect us."  Well, this is all very well and good until you include rhetoric. Hobbes kind of defines eloquence into two camps. One is philosophy, and the other is a passion.  He says, "The one is an elegant and clear expression of the conceptions of the mind, and riseth partly from the contemplation of the things themselves. Partly from the understanding of the words taken in their own proper and definite signification. The other is a commotion of the passions of the mind. And derives from metaphorical use of words fitted to the passions."  This is sort of going back to the old idea that you either have, sort of a philosophical understanding of what everything is, and you just sort of lay the words on top of it with one clear understanding. Or, you've tricky, tricky words which are going to create a commotion of passions of the mind, deriving a metaphorical use of words fitted to those passions. It's sort of a cold, contemplated way to sort of approach rhetoric, in this sense. So rhetoric is suspect, and in fact Hobbes is quite suspicious of the roll of rhetoric within, heaven forbid, a democracy.  He says, "In a democracy, look at how many demagogues, that is how many powerful orators there are with the people." And he says, "In a popular dominion there may be as many Nero's as there are orators who sooth the people." It's kind of a scary idea for him that people will be able to speak, and have such a big influence. He goes even deeper with this when he talks about why there are so many demagogues, so many orators trying to grasp for power through the words that they use.  He says, "Another reason why a great assembly is not so fit for consultation is because everyone who delivers his opinion holds it necessary to make a long tongued speech, and to gain more esteem from his auditors, he polishes and adorns it with the best and smoothest language. Now the nature of eloquence is to make good and evil profitable and unprofitable, honest and dishonesty. Appear to be more or less than indeed they are. And to make that seem just which is unjust. According as it shall best suit with his end that speaketh. For this is to persuade, and though they reason, yet they, not from their rise form true principles but from vulgar received opinions." Now this is actually Hobbes getting at sort of a philosophy of rhetoric that has been around for a long time. The idea that received opinions are a way to reason. In ancient rhetorical theory this was kind of okay. It was called the common places, and you could argue from a common place. We talked about this a little bit in the podcast about the cannons, and a little bit of the [inaudible]. Well you could say, "Well everyone knows that a stitch in time, saves nine." And that would count as good evidence. But for Hobbes, he says that becomes dangerous because of vulgar received opinions. Now, these orators, he also criticizes by saying, "there is no reason why every man should not naturally mind his own praise, rather than the public business, but that here he sees a means to declare his eloquence, whereby he may gain the reputation of being ingenious and wise. Rejoice and triumph in the applause of his dexterous behavior." So he says that all these orators that are going in for public speech; they don't really care about the public in general. In fact, they should probably just mind their own business, but the only reason they are going into it is so that people will think that they are smart, and clever. Now that's not to say that there is zero space for conversation within Hobbes ideas. At the beginning of chapter 14 of Laws and Trespass, Hobbes does make a somewhat passing remark about the role of council. He says that those who confuse law and council are like those who, "think it is the duty of the monarch, not only to give ear for their counselors, but also to obey them, as if it were in vain to take council unless it were also followed." What? Hobbes! Did you just say that Monarchy could be influenced by something outside of the sovereign, but politically impactful? Let's take a look at the page again. "Council is directed to his end that receives it. Council is given to none but the willing." Council, then, according to Hobbes, doesn't necessarily persuade the sovereign as we might understand in rhetoric, but provides another pillar of reasoning for the Monarch to consider. In fact, such council looks a lot like that philosophical eloquence that Hobbes describes above. A clear, grounded, rationalist contemplation and divorced from emotional appeals. This kind of reminds me of Tacitus who was similarly enamored of the principatus, and his concern about demagogues' rhetorical sway. But he was, nonetheless, willing to admit that the sovereign could benefit from hearing what advisers have to say. So in the end, Hobbes is generally not in favor of rhetoric. Not for the masses, not for the people speaking of their own, not sort of even in assemblies, but he does have a tiny smidgen of space where a counselor could say something to a sovereign, that the sovereign -- moving forward from his own wisdom and not from anyone else's admission can take into account of make his own decision. So there you have it Hobbes; number four on our list of the villains of rhetoric. Next week we will continue on with our villains of rhetoric series by talking about Ramus. Until then, try not to let the demagogues bring you down. And always pay attention to what your sovereign has to offer.  [guitar music]    

Remember when you were a freshman and you took first year critical reasoning? Or in high school, when you took the AP thinking exam?   Of course not, because we don’t really teach philosophy or critical thinking. What we do teach is writing.   [intro]   Welcome to MR the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, movements and people who have shaped rhetorical history. today we’ll be talking about the mid nineties text “Rhetoric of Reason,” winner of the 1997 MLA Mina Shannassy book prize.   Titles one chapter “The end of Philosophy and the Resurgence of Rhetoric” Provocative idea. but can rhetoric and writing classes take over the millenia of philosophy and logic instruction that have long been cornerstones of a liberal education?   Crosswhite conceives his own book to be “a challenge to teachers of writing… to become much more philosophical about the teaching and theory of argumentation” (8).Motivated by “a social hope that people will be able to reason together” (17) in a civil responsibly taught in FYC classes the nation over.  Because “The teaching of writing is nothing less than the teaching of reasoning” (4). Purpose of university education is to write reasoned argumentation, “about conflicts that are matters of concerns to many different kinds of people, to fellow citizens who may not share their specialized knowledge” (296).   Rhetoric is philosophy without absolutes (“including negative absolutism”) (35).  If there is an end of philosophy in the 1990s as the influence of deconstructionists like Derrida is splashing over departments of English, can writing and rhetoric fill the gap in teaching the new good reasoning?As one review put it, “Crosswhite clearly moves away from the static view of formal logic in which propositions are measured against internally consistent rules rather than the more complex and shifty criteria articulated by live audiences” (Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Reed Way Dasenbrock, Andreea Deciu, Christopher Diller & Colleen Connolly).   In this, he is highly indebted to the work of new rhetorics like the kind you’ll find in Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric, which I promise we’ll talk about one of these days. For our purposes the key thing Crosswhite adopts is the idea of a universal audience. The term “universal” can be misleading. Crosswhite points out that “Unviersiality … depvelops along different lines; there are different and sometimes incompatiable ways of achieveing more universal standpoints. Universality is an achievement of particular people at particular times for particular purposes” (215). But another way, he says “Even if argumentation is a relatively universal practice, the occasions on which one argues, what one argues about, the requency with which one argues, the people with whom one argues, how explicitly one argues, how far one carries and argument--all these things may vary strongly from culture to culture” (218). It sounds a lot like rhetoric, doesn’t it, all this considering the audience and kairos and stases? Rhetorically specific communities, though, all will detirmine what is good reasoning and reflect that back to their interlocutors.Reasoning “is dependant on a background of deep competences, moods, abilities, assumptions, beliefs, ways of being and understanding” (254). “Argumentation is a “relatively universal practice” but how, where, why and for what of argumentation “may vary strongly from culture to culture” (218). Fundamentally, “People can argue only concerning those things about which they are willing to learn, and change their minds” (283).   Imagine an audience that is broadly conceived yet culturally dependant. An audience of good reasoners.With such an audience, good reasoning is “a matter not simply of what is true, but of the measure of the truth yielded by argumentation" (153). Audiences are crucial, because “there are those occasion on which an audience repsonds in ways we had not anticipated and in fact goes beyond our own reasoning and our own ideas. sometimes, and audience evaluates our reasoning  and in ways we could not have foreseen--but which we nevertheless recognize as legitimate” (152). Contradiction is important, becoming “powerful enablers of discovery” (263) and as such “contradictions should be cherished, nurtured developed” (264)   Other key influences come from philosophy, notably Levinas and Cavell, because the ordinary, the acknowledgement of other people are important, builds”mutual trust and respect [to] make possible rather extraordinary uses of the ordinary possibilities of communication” (31).                                                 Mutual respect does not, though, mean consensus. In fact, Crosswhite is  bullish on dissent in general "Where there is no conflict of any kind,” he says, “there is no reason" (72). “We don’t need courses in ‘critical thinking’ nearly as much as we need course in suspending critical thought in order to read deeper understandings” (201), focusing more on questions than consensus (199). This proves a problem when looking at a significant third of traditoinal rhetoric: the epideictic. As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and co-authors observe, this “view, however, forces Crosswhite to quickly pass over how both aesthetic discourse (he cites fiction, poetry, and plays) and, less quickly, how epideictic rhetoric complicate the way that rationality and argumentation be- come embodied and therefore persuasive.” Instead, the epideictic for crosswhite “seems to lack the connectio with social conflict and looks more like a struggle with nature” (104) and the only way is to “try to show how epideictic, too, is a form of social conflict” (105)--a proposition he invokes but doesn’t develop.   But let’s get back to what he does get to, which is surprisingly pragmatic for a book that cites so much Gadamer and Heidegger. He says That students simply “need more familiaryt with more diverse and more universal audience, with audiences which demand more explicit reasoning” (273) Crosswhite gives an extended example of what this looks like in his own classes.   Here’s the useful, wheels-on-the-road stuff: “ writing courses and textbooks often lack focus and purpose; they simply try to cover too much” (189); and he recommends more workshops with student-to-student audiences because “writers need real interlocutors and audiences—a real rhetorical community” (281). Crosswhite’s writtena  pretty brainy and philosophical text here, but he’s also made an argument for bringing questions of reasoning and philosophy into the writing class as key to what we do and key to what philosophy should do. What do you think? Should we be responsible for teaching reasoning in the university? How do we fit it in when we have so much to cover? Drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com and let me know. Should first year composition be retitled first-year reasoning and writing?  

Journalist Michael Brull discusses what has changed and what hasn't as a result of the government's new rhetoric around Islam and terrorism, in the wake of the Parramatta shooting. For more on this, see Michael Brull's article 'The Parramatta Shooting: New Rhetoric, Same Old Problem?': https://newmatilda.com/2015/10/07/parramatta-shooting-new-rhetoric-same-old-problem/ You can view more of Brull's work here: https://newmatilda.com/users/michaelbrull This interview was played on the 12th of October 2015 episode of RTR92.1FM Indymedia. You can listen to this episode at this link (just select 12th October episode on the little calendar on the left): rtrfm.com.au/shows/indymedia/

  “Today,” I.A. Richards begins his 1936 lectures, rhetoric “is the dreariest and least profitable part of the waste that the unfortunate travel through in Freshman English! So low has Rhetoric sunk that we would do better just to dismiss it to Limbo than to trouble ourselves with it--unless we can find reason for believing that it can become a study that will minister successfully to important needs” (3). this is just what Richards sets out to do in a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr that eventually became the thin book The Philosophy of Rhetoric.   For Richards, a literary scholar by training and one of the founders of the Close REading and New Criticism, rhetoric had been for too long about disputes and argumentation. Instead he proposes that rhetoric should be “a study of misunderstanding and its remedies” and investigation in “How much and in how many ways may good communication differ from bad?” To this end, the proposes a sort of philological rhetoric, one where there is to be “persistent, systematic, detailed inquiry into how words work that will take the place of the discredited subjuect which goes by the name Rhetoric” (23). This description may rankle contemporary rhetoricicans. We like argumentation, and resist the idea that what we should be doing sounds like the very work schoolmarmn sentence diagramming, but Richards recognized that the way words work cannot be divorced from society.   But Ricahrds also broadened the idea of what rhetoric could be--not just strict argumentation, but an exporation of all language. “Perausion is just one of the aims of discourse” he writes. “It poaches on others.” This opens up rhetoric to more than argumentation, and Richards’ focus on words, words, words does not come at the expense of thinking about meaning.   In fact, he derides what he calls the Proper Meaning Superstitution, the fallacious ida that “a word has a meaning of its own (ideally, only one) independent of and controlling its use and purpose for which it should be uttered” (11). Instead “What a word means is the missing parts of the contexts from which it draws its delegated efficacy” (35). It’s all context.   In order to illustrate the importance of context, Richards gives the example of the metaphor, one of the four master tropes. He separates the metaphor into its two parts: the tenor and vehicle. the tenor is the thing behind the metaphor and the vehicle is the means of conveying it. So if I said love is a battlefield, love is the tenor and battlefield is the vehicle. That girl is a firework. girl is tenor, firework is the vehicle. So far so good? So metaphors, Richards says, “may work admirably without our being able with any confidence to say how ti works or what is the ground of the shift.” Richards gives his own, slightly outdated example “If we call some one a pig or a duck, for example, it si little use looking for some actual resemblance toa  pig or a duck as the ground. We do not call someone a duck ro imply that she has a bill and paddles or is good to eat” (117). Little venture into canniblistic imagry there, I.A., but, of course, we call someone a duck becuase they are “charming and delightful”--or we could call someone a duck if we were a little more british. But the duck example highlights that while some metaphors work because of a “direct remblance” between the tenor and the vehicle and sometimes because of a similar attitutude to both--love is like a battlefield because there are similar feelings to being at war and being in love. This all sounds like a lot of poetics, but it demonstrates Richards concern for the very small elements of communication.   Words are vitally important, down to the detail, for Richards. “Words are the meeting points at which regions of experience which can never combine in sensation or intuition, come together. They are the occasion and the means of that growth which is the mind's endless endeavor to order itself. That is why we have language. It is no mere signalling system. It is the instrument of all our distinctively human development, of everything in which we go beyond the other animals." (131)   Ultimately, he envisions a philosophical restructuring of rhetoric were “we may in time learn so much about words that they will tell us how our minds work” (136). Further, he goes on “It seems modest and reasonable to combine these dreams and hope that a patient persistence with the problems of Rhetoric may, while exposing the causes and modes of the misinterpretation  of words, also throw light upon and suggest a remdial discipline for deeper and more grievous disorders; that, as the mall and local errors in our everday misunderstandings with language are models in miniature of the greater errors which disturb the development of our personalities, their study may also show us more about how these large scale disasters may be avoided (136-7). The man who pioneered New Criticism proposes a New Rhetoric beyond argumentation.   for all that, you won’t read much rhetorical scholarship pulling on Richards. Back in 1997, Stuart C Brown pointed out that while most rhetoric students read the Philosophy of Rhetoric, or at least excerpts of it, rhetorical scholars don’t really pay much attention to Richards. Maybe they have a word or two of “faint praise” and ackowledge him as part of our tradition, but they don’t spend much time on him. Brown thinks this is a mistake and that Ricahrds “ established the basic argument for establishing a truly new rhetoric” (219) By acknowledging the multiplicity of meanings, the instabliity of langauge, Richards opens up space for rhetorical interpretation. Brown makes an indepth defense of the value of Richards’ work. But still, 1997 was a long time ago and Richards still hasn’t come to the forefront as a rhetorical influence.   that being said, we’ll get to spend a little more time with Richards, because next week we’re going to talk about Richard’s other major work--the Meaning of Meaning--so get ready to get hipster about your rhetorical theoretians next time on Mere Rhetoric.

Remember when you were a freshman and you took first year critical reasoning? Or in high school, when you took the AP thinking exam?   Of course not, because we don’t really teach philosophy or critical thinking. What we do teach is writing.   [intro]   Welcome to MR the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, movements and people who have shaped rhetorical history. today we’ll be talking about the mid nineties text “Rhetoric of Reason,” winner of the 1997 MLA Mina Shannassy book prize. Titles one chapter “The end of Philosophy and the Resurgence of Rhetoric” Provocative idea. but can rhetoric and writing classes take over the millenia of philosophy and logic instruction that have long been cornerstones of a liberal education?   Crosswhite conceives his own book to be “a challenge to teachers of writing… to become much more philosophical about the teaching and theory of argumentation” (8).Motivated by “a social hope that people will be able to reason together” (17) in a civil responsibly taught in FYC classes the nation over.  Because “The teaching of writing is nothing less than the teaching of reasoning” (4). Purpose of university education is to write reasoned argumentation, “about conflicts that are matters of concerns to many different kinds of people, to fellow citizens who may not share their specialized knowledge” (296). Rhetoric is philosophy without absolutes (“including negative absolutism”) (35).  If there is an end of philosophy in the 1990s as the influence of deconstructionists like Derrida is splashing over departments of English, can writing and rhetoric fill the gap in teaching the new good reasoning?As one review put it, “Crosswhite clearly moves away from the static view of formal logic in which propositions are measured against internally consistent rules rather than the more complex and shifty criteria articulated by live audiences” (Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Reed Way Dasenbrock, Andreea Deciu, Christopher Diller & Colleen Connolly).   In this, he is highly indebted to the work of new rhetorics like the kind you’ll find in Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric, which I promise we’ll talk about one of these days. For our purposes the key thing Crosswhite adopts is the idea of a universal audience. The term “universal” can be misleading. Crosswhite points out that “Unviersiality … depvelops along different lines; there are different and sometimes incompatiable ways of achieveing more universal standpoints. Universality is an achievement of particular people at particular times for particular purposes” (215). But another way, he says “Even if argumentation is a relatively universal practice, the occasions on which one argues, what one argues about, the requency with which one argues, the people with whom one argues, how explicitly one argues, how far one carries and argument--all these things may vary strongly from culture to culture” (218). It sounds a lot like rhetoric, doesn’t it, all this considering the audience and kairos and stases? Rhetorically specific communities, though, all will detirmine what is good reasoning and reflect that back to their interlocutors.Reasoning “is dependant on a background of deep competences, moods, abilities, assumptions, beliefs, ways of being and understanding” (254). “Argumentation is a “relatively universal practice” but how, where, why and for what of argumentation “may vary strongly from culture to culture” (218). Fundamentally, “People can argue only concerning those things about which they are willing to learn, and change their minds” (283).   Imagine an audience that is broadly conceived yet culturally dependant. An audience of good reasoners.With such an audience, good reasoning is “a matter not simply of what is true, but of the measure of the truth yielded by argumentation" (153). Audiences are crucial, because “there are those occasion on which an audience repsonds in ways we had not anticipated and in fact goes beyond our own reasoning and our own ideas. sometimes, and audience evaluates our reasoning  and in ways we could not have foreseen--but which we nevertheless recognize as legitimate” (152). Contradiction is important, becoming “powerful enablers of discovery” (263) and as such “contradictions should be cherished, nurtured developed” (264)   Other key influences come from philosophy, notably Levinas and Cavell, because the ordinary, the acknowledgement of other people are important, builds”mutual trust and respect [to] make possible rather extraordinary uses of the ordinary possibilities of communication” (31).                                                 Mutual respect does not, though, mean consensus. In fact, Crosswhite is  bullish on dissent in general "Where there is no conflict of any kind,” he says, “there is no reason" (72). “We don’t need courses in ‘critical thinking’ nearly as much as we need course in suspending critical thought in order to read deeper understandings” (201), focusing more on questions than consensus (199). This proves a problem when looking at a significant third of traditoinal rhetoric: the epideictic. As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and co-authors observe, this “view, however, forces Crosswhite to quickly pass over how both aesthetic discourse (he cites fiction, poetry, and plays) and, less quickly, how epideictic rhetoric complicate the way that rationality and argumentation be- come embodied and therefore persuasive.” Instead, the epideictic for crosswhite “seems to lack the connectio with social conflict and looks more like a struggle with nature” (104) and the only way is to “try to show how epideictic, too, is a form of social conflict” (105)--a proposition he invokes but doesn’t develop.   But let’s get back to what he does get to, which is surprisingly pragmatic for a book that cites so much Gadamer and Heidegger. He says That students simply “need more familiaryt with more diverse and more universal audience, with audiences which demand more explicit reasoning” (273) Crosswhite gives an extended example of what this looks like in his own classes.   Here’s the useful, wheels-on-the-road stuff: “ writing courses and textbooks often lack focus and purpose; they simply try to cover too much” (189); and he recommends more workshops with student-to-student audiences because “writers need real interlocutors and audiences—a real rhetorical community” (281). Crosswhite’s writtena  pretty brainy and philosophical text here, but he’s also made an argument for bringing questions of reasoning and philosophy into the writing class as key to what we do and key to what philosophy should do. What do you think? Should we be responsible for teaching reasoning in the university? How do we fit it in when we have so much to cover? Drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com and let me know. Should first year composition be retitled first-year reasoning and writing?