Tag Archive | classical rhetoric
Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition
This text prompts three directions of inquiry – first as a comparative study of Mencius’s conception of mind or psychology; second as an examination of either the perspective of Richards, his rhetorical methods for articulating the ideas in this work, or both; and third as a proposition for a comparative methodology. For Mencius, human psychology […]
Adversaries and Authorities
Purely uncritical moment: This was an amazing book. I appreciate how Lloyd enacts his comparison between Chinese and Greek science by addressing what are surface or “apparent” differences and then complicating that with details that may go against the common assumptions. It reminded me of the argument by Hall and Ames in Anticipating China, as […]
The Glib, the Eloquent, and the Appropriate
There are many ways that I could approach The Analects of Confucius but given that we have been speaking of rhetorics cross-culturally and that I have read different analyses of this text as either supporting or condemning (at least some definitions of) rhetoric, I found myself paying particular attention to aspects of this text that […]
Notes from Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics
Chapter 3: “The Gendering of Prophetic Discourse: Women and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East.” (Roberta Brinkley) In this chapter, Brinkley discusses the tradition of prophetic discourse by women in the ancient near east, largely overlooked by scholars because of “the stigma of superstition” within current Western culture that privileges the rational/logos and thus may […]
Kennedy’s Comparative Rhetoric
The basic function of rhetorical communication is defensive and conservative…the major function of rhetoric throughout most of human history in most of the world has been to preserve things as they are or to try to recover an idealized happier past” (Kennedy 216). While there are several of Kennedy’s claims that I could choose to […]
Confucius, Eloquence, and Rhetoric
Verbal eloquence was not valorized by classical Chinese thinkers, and on the contrary the views found in their texts reveal a general mistrust of it, a sentiment common to almost all major school of thought despite their fundamental philosophical differences, but it is most conspicuously and extensively reflected in Confucian texts (Xu 115). Though all […]
Memory and Delivery
The five canons of rhetoric, articulated for so many centuries, included the canons of memory and delivery along with invention, arrangement, and style. However, it is often noted that with the advent of written discourse and a move away from oral culture, memory and delivery have been largely ignored and no longer have a place […]
Peter Ramus: Iste Primus Inimicus Mei
I have nothing good to say about Peter Ramus – it is all I can do to keep from scribbling invectives in the margins of my book every time I read his work. Though “in the Renaissance distinctions between oratory and poetry, speech and writing, talk and texts, persuasion and representation were rarely rigid” (Abbot […]
Giving Beothius a little Ars dictiminus
We send you greetings, Boethius, born of fine Roman heritage and bless’d by Peter, John, and Mary (et. al) and beseech you to reconsider your position on the subordination of rhetoric to dialectic. Further, we urge you to examine your not fully developed (nor perhaps transcribed…?) treatment of Cicero’s three purposes of rhetoric, for though […]
Perspicuity (<<— Note the concision of my title)
Perspicuity — The art of speaking clearly and concisely in a manner that is easy to understand is, according to Quintilian, “the chief virtue of eloquence” (368). His belief in the merits of clarity in speaking comes through in his writing style, which though highly descriptive, avoids long, confusing passages, obscure language, or difficult to […]
Rhetorical Issues 