Arthur E. Walzer

Octalog III: The Politics of Historiography in 2010

The field of rhetoric has historically been defined by competing visions of language and education—and by the conviction that these debates have significance for public life. James J. Murphy highlighted this point at the beginning of Octalog I (1988) when he noted the field’s consistent engagement with the idea that “what is at stake . . . ought to be discovered for the good of the community” (5). The Octalogs have provided a space for exploring varied notions concerning rhetoric’s role in serving a common good and assessing the contentious nature of that undertaking. These conversations have included a wide range of perspectives concerning rhetoric’s role in public and private life, methods of researching and writing rhetorical history, and the values that surround our work. They have suggested that our field’s notion of “truth” is multiplicitous and incomplete. Octalog I sparked new scholarship by asking us to uncover and recover histories that have been neglected or hidden. The panelists highlighted assumptions about power, knowledge, and struggle that are embedded in every construction of history. They discussed the importance of creative research methodologies, what constitutes evidence, who and what should be included in our histories, and how researchers’ positions and goals affect their interpretations. Octalog II (1997) extended these discussions by pointing us toward the importance of local, contested, and marginalized histories and rhetorical practices and encouraging us to listen for the silences that have been left out of well-known historical accounts. The discussions urged a continued awareness about how moving the margins to center revises our sense of rhetorical history.

The Challenger Disaster And The Revival Of Rhetoric In Organizational Life

Explanations of the cause of the Challenger disaster by the Presidential Commission and by communication scholars are flawed. These explanations are characterized by a common tendency to emphasize the technical and procedural aspects of organizational life at the expense of the cognitive and ethical. Rightly construed, the Challenger disaster illustrates both the need for a revived art of rhetoric and the importance of putting in place the political and social conditions that make this art efficacious in furthering cognitive understanding and ethical conduct.

The Ethics of False Implicature in Technical and Professional Writing Courses

In taking “existing practice” in the workplace as their standard, technical and professional writing courses risk leaving students with the impression that whatever is done and is rhetorically effective is right. One way of countering the sophistry of this tendency is to raise questions about the ethics of common but suspect rhetorical practices. This article examines the ethics of one such practice: fostering false inference. Out of H. Paul Grices analysis of how participants in a conversation correctly interpret what is only implied, it evolves a framework for judging the fostering of false inference. The article presents and discusses a hypothetical case in which a firms proposal seems intended to mislead, while actually stating nothing that is not literally true.

Parrēsia, Foucault, and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition

In his last seminars, Michel Foucault analyzed parrēsia (frank speech) in classical Greece and Rome, a subject also addressed by classical rhetoricians. Foucault regards parrēsia as an idealized modality of truth telling—unartful, sincere, courageous speech that tells an unwelcome truth to power. Aligning rhetoric with flattery, Foucault excludes rhetorical parrēsia from his history of thought. This essay offers an alternative analysis of parrēsia from the perspective of classical rhetoric. Drawing especially on the comprehensive description in the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, this essay identifies within the classical tradition a feigned parrēsia as well as a sincere one and a rhetorically artful parrēsia as well as the unartful, bold one that Foucault favors. Furthermore, the essay traces a genealogy that highlights changes in the practice of parrēsia as the term is conceptualized in the context of friendship, at which point parrēsia takes on an unmistakably rhetorical character.

QUINTILIAN'S "VIR BONUS" AND THE STOIC WISE MAN

Abstract Although scholars have acknowledged a Stoic influence on Quintilian, they have been reluctant to see Stoicism as providing the philosophical underpinnings of the Institutes. Against this scholarly hesitance, this essay argues that Stoic ideas are at the heart of Quintilians educational program. Quintilians ideal orator is the Stoic Wise Man with this difference: he is trained in Ciceronian eloquence. Furthermore, Quintilians definition of oratory is based on the Stoic view of rhetoric as an essential science that enables the orator to meet the social responsibilities inherent in the Stoic ideal of the virtuous life.

Logic and rhetoric in Malthus's essay on the principle of population, 1798

Robert Thomas Malthuss Essay on the Principle of Population, written to refute the optimistic predictions of the Marquis de Condor‐cet and William Godwin, was acknowledged by contemporaries to be one of the most powerful works of its age. This article reviews the historical circumstances that disposed Malthuss readers to his views and, especially, analyzes the rhetoric of the Essay itself in an effort to explain the causes of Malthuss decisive victory over his opponents and to locate the sources of the Essays enduring power.

Campbell on the passions: A rereading of the philosophy of rhetoric

Campbells reputation has suffered from modem conceptions that assume Aristotles Rhetoric as the paradigm for rhetorical theory and from modern commitments to epistemic and dialogic rhetorics. A focus on the place of the passions and emotional appeal in Campbells Philosophy of Rhetoric (POR) brings his achievement more clearly into view. The “sentiments, passions, dispositions,” three key terms in Campbells definition of the “grand art of communication,” are an index to his consideration of non‐rational response, a consideration informed by a discussion of “the passions” in the moral psychology of the period and that culminates in Book II of Humes Treatise on Human Nature. What emerges when POR is seen from this perspective has significance for our understanding of the relationship between reason and passion in persuasion and for our appreciation of POR, which is arguably the most coherent conception of rhetoric that we have.

Rhetoric of Counsel in Thomas Elyot's Pasquil the Playne

Pasquil the Playne , a dialogue written by the English Humanist Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), was inspired by Elyot9s unsuccessful experience as a counselor to Henry VIII. Seizing on this biographical context, historians have read the dialogue as a product of Elyot9s disillusionment, identifying Elyot with the blunt, truth-telling Pasquil. In contrast this paper reads Pasquil the Playne as a multi-voiced Lucianic dialogue, which gives expression to several perspectives on the rhetoric of counsel. This reading problematizes questions of appropriateness ( prepon ) and right timing (kairos) in giving advice to a prince. Moreover, Elyot exploits the open-ended spirit of the Lucianic dialogue to attempt to develop in the reader the prudential reasoning ( phronesis ) essential to wise counsel.

Forum on Arthur Walzer's “Parrēsia, Foucault, and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition”

How many different senses of parrēsia existed between the fifth century BCE and the fifth century CE? This question is no less daunting or problematic than tracing the many different senses of rhetoric over that time. The words parrēsia and rhetoric were highly mobile and have appeared across texts in Western civilization from the ancient Greeks forward. Both words carry multiple connotations over time and within a given time. Both retain their transliterated Greek form in Latin and English texts, even while also translated. Thus, to ask whether parrēsia is a type of rhetoric or rhetoric encompasses parrēsia implies two questions: ‘‘which parrēsia?’’ and ‘‘which rhetoric?’’ Working from the fifth century BCE plays of Euripedes and the speech of the Old Oligarch, as well as fourth century BCE texts by Isocrates, Aristotle, and others, Michel Foucault contrasted the civic parrēsia in those texts with the Platonic schools of the fourth century BCE and later, which advocated a more spiritual and pedagogical parrēsia. Foucault recognized that at least by the Roman era we find, ‘‘some signs of the incorporation of parrēsia within the field of rhetoric,’’ most specifically in Quintilian (Fearless 21). Foucault noted that among the Roman orators, parrēsia, as rhetorical figure, was structured as a zero-figure, a kind of figure that would appear to be without figure, but nonetheless a dimension of rhetoric artfully deployed (or feigned, if you prefer). So we know that Foucault saw parrēsia as multiple and changing over the ancient world, yet, across the four years of transcribed lectures (never intended for publication) that make up Foucault’s work-in-progress on parrēsia, he seems ambivalent on the status and qualities of rhetoric. Such ambivalence likely follows from his deliberate focus on the Platonic tradition of dividing rhetoric from parrēsia. After all, Foucault was exploring the changes in the position of philosopher as truth-teller, and in almost every place where he wrote ‘‘parrēsia is . . .’’ or ‘‘parrēsia is not . . .’’ he wrote in relation to a thinker or school of thought. His subject was not every sense and use of parrēsia in the ancient world, but a particular philosophical parrēsia that emerged in the fourth century BCE in distinction from civic parrēsia and became the model for the philosopher at least up through Hypatia. The Rhetoric Society Quarterly Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 355–381

Who Wrote the Rhetoric? A Response to Brad McAdon

In several recent essays, Brad McAdon has argued that Aristotles Rhetoric is such a fractured, inconsistent text that it is reasonable to conclude it is not the work of a single author, “Aristotle,” but the work of an editor who combined sections of treatises by several authors. This article challenges McAdons thesis by reexamining the historical transmission of the Rhetoric and analyzing a central passage in the work—namely Rhetoric 1.4–14 (on the idia or special topics)—that McAdon believes Aristotle could not have written.