Download Free Rhetorical Minds Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Rhetorical Minds and write the review.

Minds are rhetorical. From the moment we are born others are shaping our capacity for mental agency. As a meditation on the nature of human thought and action, this book starts with the proposition that human thinking is inherently and irreducibly social, and that the long rhetorical tradition in the West has been a neglected source for thinking about cognition. Each chapter reflects on a different dimension of human thought based on the fundamental proposition that our rhetoric thinks and acts with and through others.
Rhetoric, Embodiment, and the Ethos of Surveillance: Student Bodies in the American High School investigates the rhetorical tension between controlling student bodies and educating student minds. The book is a rhetorical analysis of the policies and procedures that govern life in contemporary American high schools; it also discusses the rhetorical effects of high-security, high-surveillance school buildings. It uncovers various metaphors that emerge from a close reading of the system, such as students’ claims that “school is a prison.” Jennifer Young concludes that many of the policies governing contemporary American high schools have come to rhetorically operate as a “discourse of default” that works against the highest aims of education, and she offers a method of effecting a cultural shift for going forward. Specifically, Young calls for an explicit application of intentional rhetoric to match discourse to audience and suggests that the development of empathy as a core value within the high school might be more effective in keeping students safe than the architectural and technological approaches we currently employ.
Philosophy and rhetoric are both old enemies and old friends. In The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy, Donald Phillip Verene sets out to shift our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric from that of separation to one of close association. He outlines how ancient rhetors focused on the impact of language regardless of truth, ancient philosophers utilized language to test truth; and ultimately, this separation of right reasoning from rhetoric has remained intact throughout history. It is time, Verene argues, to reassess this ancient and misunderstood relationship. Verene traces his argument utilizing the writing of ancient and modern authors from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Kant; he also explores the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, as well as the nature of speculative philosophy. Verene's argument culminates in a unique analysis of the frontispiece as a rhetorical device in the works of Hobbes, Vico, and Rousseau. Verene bridges the stubborn gap between these two fields, arguing that rhetorical speech both brings philosophical speech into existence and allows it to endure and be understood. The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy depicts the inevitable intersection between philosophy and rhetoric, powerfully illuminating how a rhetorical sense of philosophy is an attitude of mind that does not separate philosophy from its own use of language.
"In a book that will change the way we read Renaissance rhetoric, Wayne A. Rebhorn shows that the issues at stake are not dialogue and debate but power and control. Looking closely at what rhetoricians themselves said about their art, Rebhorn explores the profound engagement of rhetoric with some of the major cultural concerns of the time, including political authority, social mobility, gender relations, and attitudes toward the body." "As he reads texts by Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Carew, Tirso de Molina, Machiavelli, Rabelais, and Moliere, among others, Rebhorn offers a new model for the rhetorical reading of literature. Renaissance literature, he maintains, subjects rhetorical discourse to examination and evaluation and in the process exposes its many contradictions and evasions." "According to Rebhorn, rhetoricians imagine orators ambiguously, both as absolutist rulers who employ rhetoric to help maintain the status quo, and as base-born outsiders who use it to promote their own social advancement or even to resist authority. Renaissance rhetoric is equally ambiguous when it confronts issues of gender, for it identifies itself as simultaneously male and female, both "masculine" in its power and "feminine" in its procreativity and adornment. Finally, Renaissance rhetoric conveys a contradictory vision of the body, for although it is most typically aligned with the body image associated with elites, it simultaneously identities itself with the ethically suspect, grotesque body linked with the lower classes."--BOOK JACKET
This volume explores the constitutive role of rhetoric in socio-cultural relations, where discursive persuasion is so important, and contains both theoretical chapters as well as fascinating examples of the ambiguities and effects of rhetoric used (un)consciously in social praxis. The elements of power, competition and political persuasion figure prominently. It is an accessible collection of studies, speaking to common issues and problems in social life, and shows the heuristic and often explanatory value of the rhetorical perspective.
In recent accounts of rhetoric's storied productivity, commentators have implied, along systematically Kantian lines, albeit with the occasional protestation, that agency must be coextensive with subjectivity. But is that all there is (to 2,500 years' worth of hypothesizing about the ways in which communication might promote social change)? Les Belikian's answer, drawing not only on traditional and contemporary rhetorical studies but also on Deleuzean thinking, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontology, takes the form of a quadruply contrarian thesis: Rhetorical agency inheres, irreducibly so, in subjectivity, in conventionality, in transcendence, and in materiality, all of which are themselves under production. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Chapter 1: Productivity as a Context for Theorizing Rhetorical Transaction - A Miscellaneously Self-Effacing Rhetorical Agency? - Rhetoricity Bound, Unbounded, and Both - Variegation (Not Conglomeration) - Chapter 2: A Four-Folded Rhetorical Agency - Tetradic Due Diligence - Disaggregating a Constitution - A Willfully Productive Rhetorical Agency - Assemblage-Theoretical Resources - Triangulation - An Investigative Itinerary - Chapter 3: Subjectivity in the Social-Structural Landscape - Co-Constructing Constraint - Can the Speaker Speak? - An Ineffectual Agency - Subtracting from Rhetorical Practice - What Else Is Wrong with This Paradigm? - A Chimerical Agency for a Colossal Agent - Chapter 4: Conventionality in the Rhetorical-Humanistic Landscape - De-Leviathanizing the Normative - From Normativity to Shared Values - A Tribe of Equals - Keeping Shared Values between the Ceiling and the Seat - Staying the Same by Doing Something Differently - Maximizing Assent by Minimizing Recalcitrance - Still Missing So Far - Chapter 5: Transcendence in the Existential-Transversal Landscape - Existence, Transcendence, and Transversality - Philosophizing for the Living by Getting Rid of Their Materiality - The Two Styles of Transcendence - The Fideistic Appeal - Correcting Forgetfulness through a Material Phenomenology - Rhetorical Agency and the Existential Self - On Pivoting, Transcendence, and Emergence - The Rhetorical Agent and the Original Body - A Re-Corporealized Transversality - Chapter 6: Materiality in the Material-Semiotic Landscape - A Parable of Materiality-and-Relationality - Assemblaging, Stratification, and Circulating Reference - Entering at Biblical Precept - Crossing over to Race - From Race to Gender - Rescaling the Envoy - And A'n't We a Meshwork? - Chapter 7: Agency in the Rhetorical-Theoretical World - No More Homogenization Now! - On Keeping Difference Different - A Fluctuating Rhetorical Agent
Rhetorical Touch argues for an understanding of touch as a rhetorical art by approaching the sense of touch through the kinds of bodies and minds that rhetorical history and theory have tended to exclude. In resistance to a rhetorical tradition focused on shaping able bodies and neurotypical minds, Shannon Walters explores how people with various disabilities—psychological, cognitive, and physical—employ touch to establish themselves as communicators and to connect with disabled and nondisabled audiences. In doing so, she argues for a theory of rhetoric that understands and values touch as rhetorical. Essential to her argument is a redefinition of key concepts and terms—the rhetorical situation, rhetorical identification, and the appeals of ethos (character), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic or message). By connecting Empedoclean and sophistic theories to Aristotelian rhetoric and Burkean approaches, Walters's methods mobilize a wide range of key figures in rhetorical history and theory in response to the context of disability. Using Empedocles' tactile approach to logos, Walters shows how the iterative writing processes of people with psychological disabilities shape crucial spaces for identification based on touch in online and real life spaces. Mobilizing the touch-based properties of the rhetorical practice of mētis, Walters demonstrates how rhetors with autism approach the crafting of ethos in generative and embodied ways. Rereading the rhetorical practice of kairos in relation to the proximity between bodies, Walters demonstrates how writers with physical disabilities move beyond approaches of pathos based on pity and inspiration. The volume also includes a classroom-based exploration of the discourses and assumptions regarding bodies in relation to haptic, or touch-based, technologies. Because the sense of touch is the most persistent of the senses, Walters argues that in contexts of disability and in situations in which people with and without disabilities interact, touch can be a particularly vital instrument for creating meaning, connection, and partial identification. She contends that a rhetoric thus reshaped stretches contemporary rhetoric and composition studies to respond to the contributions of disabled rhetors and transforms the traditional rhetorical appeals and canons. Ultimately, Walters argues, a rhetoric of touch allows for a richer understanding of the communication processes of a wide range of rhetors who use embodied strategies.
The first full-color rhetorical reader with an integrated CD-ROM, FRAMES OF MIND: A RHETORICAL READER WITH OCCASIONS FOR WRITING treats the traditional rhetorical patterns not only as methods for effective writing, but as frames for critical thinking.
Immanuel Kant is rarely connected to rhetoric by those who study philosophy or the rhetorical tradition. If anything, Kant is said to see rhetoric as mere manipulation and as not worthy of attention. In Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric, Scott Stroud presents a first-of-its-kind reappraisal of Kant and the role he gives rhetorical practices in his philosophy. By examining the range of terms that Kant employs to discuss various forms of communication, Stroud argues that the general thesis that Kant disparaged rhetoric is untenable. Instead, he offers a more nuanced view of Kant on rhetoric and its relation to moral cultivation. For Kant, certain rhetorical practices in education, religious settings, and public argument become vital tools to move humans toward moral improvement without infringing on their individual autonomy. Through the use of rhetorical means such as examples, religious narratives, symbols, group prayer, and fallibilistic public argument, individuals can persuade other agents to move toward more cultivated states of inner and outer autonomy. For the Kant recovered in this book, rhetoric becomes another part of human activity that can be animated by the value of humanity, and it can serve as a powerful tool to convince agents to embark on the arduous task of moral self-cultivation.