Allan Megill

The Rhetoric of the human sciences : language and argument in scholarship and public affairs

Opening with an overview of the renewal of interest in rhetoric for inquiries of all kinds, this volume addresses rhetoric in individual disciplines - mathematics, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, political science and history. Drawing from recent literary theory, it suggests the contribution of the humanities to the rhetoric of inquiry and explores communications beyond the academy, particulary in womens issues, religion and law. The final essays speak from the field of communication studies, where the study of rhetoric usually makes its home.

Rhetoric of inquiry: Projects and prospects

This essay reports the historical and philosophical reasoning behind the rhetoric of inquiry, an interdisciplinary enterprise designed to enhance the relations among the arts and sciences and clarify the actual practice of scholarship.

Globalization and the History of Ideas

The history of ideas is an interdisciplinary field that began as an offshoot of the history of philosophy and was transformed by notions of perspective and cultural context drawn from the tradition of historical studies. The result is the practice of intellectual history, which has been carried out between the poles of inquiry commonly known as internalist and externalist, corresponding to mental phenomena and collective behavior in cultural surroundings. These are not opposed but rather complementary methods, and intellectual history may be seen as the inside of cultural history and cultural history as the outside of intellectual history, the intellectual historians task being to bring the two into alliance.

Why Was There a Crisis of Historicism

Book reviewed in this article: Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism By Charles R. Bambach

Foucault, ambiguity, and the rhetoric of historiography

Colin Gordon’s essay on Foucault’s Histoire de la folie reminds us once again how enigmatic and seductive a writer Foucault was (Gordon, 1990). One has the impression that at any given moment Foucault knew precisely what he wanted. Yet his directness often found manifestation in prose of a quite astonishing ambiguity. The combination has much to do with the appeal that Foucault’s writings had, and continue to have. To be sure, some readers cannot abide the style (Weightman, 1989). But others take to it with passion, for the directness suggests that important insights are being conveyed, while the ambiguity allows the text to be received, and used, in a variety of ways. Foucault’s mode of writing deserves our attention. I shall here focus on several

Questions on the history of ideas and its neighbours

The authors discuss the history and current orientation of intellectual history, the history of ideas, and related fields, primarily focusing on the USA. Two past phases are identified: an early phase, ca. 1940 to the 1960s, which emphasised the analysis of past ‘articulate ideas’, or theories, with varying degrees of contextualisation, and a reorientation in the 1970s–1980s toward a focus on ‘culture’, ‘meaning’, and ‘discourse’, accompanied by a reaction within the historical discipline against the study of what many regarded as elite discourses. More recently, the analysis of past ‘articulate’ thought has returned, but with a greater emphasis on current implications.

Five questions on intellectual history

Responding to questions posed by Mikkel Thorup (University of Aarhus), I recount how I was drawn to intellectual history by its breadth of concern and its relative epistemological modesty. I characterise it is as less a subfield of history than an interdisciplinary field aimed at clarifying problems and calling attention to limits. I reject the view that it ought to follow a single ‘proper’ approach: various approaches can be justified. I suggest that currently some important topics for intellectual historians to consider are religion, identity, problems of collective motivation, and our relations to the natural world.

“Big History” Old and New: Presuppositions, Limits, Alternatives

In recent years David Christian and others have promoted “Big History” as an innovative approach to the study of the past. The present paper juxtaposes to Big History an old Big History, namely, the tradition of “universal history” that flourished in Europe from the mid-sixteenth century until well into the nineteenth century. The claim to universality of works in that tradition depended on the assumed truth of Christianity, a fact that was fully acknowledged by the tradition’s adherents. The claim of the new Big History to universality likewise depends on prior assumptions. Simply stated, in its various manifestations the “new” Big History is rooted either in a continuing theology, or in a form of materialism that is assumed to be determinative of human history, or in a somewhat contradictory amalgam of the two. The present paper suggests that “largest-scale history” as exemplified in the old and new Big Histories is less a contribution to historical knowledge than it is a narrativization of one or another worldview. Distinguishing between largest-scale history and history that is “merely” large-scale, the paper also suggests that a better approach to meeting the desire for large scale in historical writing is through more modest endeavors, such as large-scale comparative history, network and exchange history, thematic history, and history of modernization.

Two Para–Historical Approaches to Atrocity

Books reviewed in this article: Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century Erna Paris, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History

Historicizing Nietzsche? Paradoxes and Lessons of a Hard Case

* This review article examines a selection of books on Nietzsche published in 1988 and after. The 1988 starting date is arbitrary, and the choice, from a much larger universe, of the following books for notice is at least partly so: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsches Moral and Political Thought (Cambridge, 1991); Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley, 1992); Ernst Behler, Confrontations: Derrida/Heidegger/Nietzsche, trans., with an afterword, by Steven Taubeneck (Stanford, Calif., 1991); Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1990); Adrian Del Caro, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic (Baton Rouge, La., 1989); Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago, 1990); Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong, eds., Nietzsches New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics (Chicago, 1988); Lester H. Hunt, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue (London, 1991); Joachim Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine verschliisselte Botschaft (Nordlingen, 1989); Clayton Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra (Albany, N.Y., 1990); Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsches Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (New York, 1993); Alistair Moles, Nietzsches Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology (New York, 1990); Ernst Nolte, Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus (Frankfurt, 1990); Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (New York, 1991); Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York, 1990), Gary Shapiro, Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women (Albany, N.Y., 1991); Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington, Ind., 1989); Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsches Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis, 1989); Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, eds., Reading Nietzsche (New York, 1988); Henry Staten, Nietzsches Voice (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990); Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheanism: The Politics of German Expressionism, 1910-1920 (Berlin, 1990); Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton, N.J., 1990); Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Alan White, Within Nietzsches Labyrinth (New York, 1990); and Julian Young, Nietzsches Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, 1992). Drafts of this article were read, in part or whole, by Alon Confino, Malachi Hacohen, John Holloran, Robert Holub, Janet Lungstrum, George Mosse, Kelly Mulroney, Richard Rorty, Richard Schacht, Alan Schrift, Spencer Smith, Walter Sokel, and Harwell Wells, among others. I thank my readers for their comments and regret my inability to solve all problems.