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This article presents a response by Richard M. Zaner to the comments of Johnstone and Perelman about his article Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Critical Discussion. For Perelman all argumentation is rhetoric and philosophical discourse is a particular kind of argumentation, namely one which aims not to persuade but to convince. And, to convince means that particular kind of persuasion addressing itself to the universal audience--that is, it is an appeal to reason. Johnstone's criticisms are delightfully adroit but somewhat puzzling. I suppose I ought to feel a bit dizzy on finding myself dangling at the tip of his double-edged ad hominem sword. His effort to fence, however, is plainly evasive: I clearly do not say he has no right to use epistemic discourse; my charge is that he willy-nilly does and must do so--but cannot account for that on the ground of his own stance. The point may be made by reference to his subsequent remarks. He would have it that however much his discourse looks like it is epistemic, it really is not that at all: the issue is really moral. When he has a philosophical disagreement, this is really an inability to tolerate what I consider a perverted practice of the philosophical enterprise.

This article suggests that perception of the proper response to an unprecedented rhetorical situation grows not merely from the situation but also from antecedent rhetorical forms. For centuries the discipline of rhetoric anchored itself in the generic distinctions of Aristotle who classed rhetoric as deliberative, forensic, or epideictic. The Aristotelian taxonomy must strain to account for the sermon, however, and fractures when confronted by the data with which the contemporary critic must deal. New classificatory schemes are being generated to account for such phenomena as brainwashing, body rhetoric, the verbal tantrum and exhortative discourse. The struggle to sort rhetorical phenomena has temporarily, at least, drawn attention from attempts to delineate rhetoric from the poetic and the philosophic. But an historical account of the attempts to differentiate rhetoric from poetic generically could absorb pages. Instead of defining genre and exploring the by-products of generic classification, scholars in the field of Speech have tended to treat genre as a trusted friend whose identity is known, whose function is clear, and whose utility is established. Genre, a word borrowed from the French, signifies a distinct species, form, type, or kind. Isolation of genres implies that significantly similar characteristics inhere in works of the same type regardless of author and period of production.

This article focuses on the sorts of circumstances that have demanded elasticity from brief definitions of rhetoric. More important than those definitions are the sorts of circumstances in which we wish to use them. The stretching is not necessarily bad action, but not knowing why and for what we are stretching may be disabling. Three general arguments about defining or not defining rhetoric have been made. First, that any definition of rhetoric that is taken as once-and-for-all is apt to be gravely misleading. Any definition is best grounded in some sense of reality; thus the second point. The pertinent senses of reality tend to be of three sorts, but they could be seen otherwise. The point of view used to indicate levels of rhetoric is that of intersubjective reality. Thirdly, it has been argued that our environment is rhetorical and has been tried to indicate several concomitants of that statement. Among these is the position that any definition of rhetoric to be useful must point to several levels of experience. These have been designated as the strategic, the substantial, and the dynamic. But more important than these labels is the division of rhetoric into the old and the new. Our study of rhetoric will be more fruitful if we take these as different but not competing senses of rhetoric.

This article examines the impact of the analysis of the discursive means of obtaining the adherence of minds on the notion of philosophical knowledge. The New Rhetoric is predicated on the proposition that in philosophy, there are only arguments and no ultimate positions. The New Rhetoric attempts to be a Treatise on Argumentation. As such, it is a treatise considering the discursive means of obtaining the adherence of minds. It is an attempt to present modes of the means, and thus it is a logic of argumentation. Argumentation is conceived as a process, the objective of which is an increase of persuasion or adherence. It has its point of departure in a thesis and seeks to bring about the adherence of the mind to this thesis. A separation of data and constructs is not possible. Argumentation, as an activity of a philosopher, is more related to philosophizing than to philosophy as a rounded system. It is an initiation to rationality, and as such, it is again an activity and not a detached formulation of a systematic body of knowledge. Immanuel Kant's distinction between philosophy and philosophizing, along with his emphasis that only philosophizing can be taught, seems to be a possible historical presupposition of the view under consideration.

This article discusses self-persuasion as a phenomenon similar to interpersonal rhetorical discourse. Arguments to persuade refer to situations where both logical and psychological appeals are used, whereas in arguments to convince, logical appeals are chiefly used. The distinction may best be thought of as one between attitude-establishing and knowledge-establishing characteristics of the argument. The rhetoric of persuading involves genuine argument and risk, the commitment of the self to the full implications of a philosophical dialectic. The rhetoric of persuading reveals the existential self, the self which includes not only all that is ordinarily meant by integrity but also the self willing to set aside all ego defenses in order to gain awareness from a reading by another, the self that is manifested with every one of the significant choices of life. Author Maurice Natanson emphasizes the importance of the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic. He suggests that traditional rhetorical theory has ignored the link between dialectic and rhetoric, that by itself rhetoric is blind, for it has not truth but combined dialectic and rhetoric that constitute an instrument for reapproaching the multiple problems of politics, ethics, linguistics and literary criticism.

The article examines whether the New England Transcendentalists' philosophical premises generated the pattern of their discourse. A promising approach to this problem is through the identification of strategies. Four strategies emerge from a careful reading of transcendentalist discourse: revelation, transcendence, salvation, and omission. Each strategy appears to have originated from an outlook their philosophical beliefs produced. The strategy of revelation was the process of displaying supposedly impregnable statements and offering them; in the form of epigrams or maxims. It was seduction by form. The strategy needed no conventional support because it was justified by the beauty and repeatability of the phrases. The most impressive strategy of the Transcendentalists was the strategy of transcendence, which depended on definition rather than on form, and which was particularly useful in declaring the merit of abstractions. The speaker began by defining two ideas, one which he wished to praise and a second which he used ultimately to magnify the merit of the first. The strategy of salvation was essentially a problem-solution sequence. The strategy was not easily recognized because the language employed in the discourse was highly emotional and the traditional types of supporting material were absent The discourse lacked apparent logical order; it was too loose, and therefore the obvious was obscured. A fourth strategy the Transcendentalists used to further their argumentative position was the strategy of omission. The entire early nineteenth century was odious to this generation of Transcendentalists. This strategy was possible because the Transcendentalists refused to allow thought of threatening doctrines to enter their minds, giving them a natural rhetorical advantage and an unfortunate disadvantage.

This article discusses six antistrophes of rhetoric: deliberation, evaluation, recollection, demonstration, dialectic, and rhetoric. But if anything has been gained from this inquiry it is not the recognition that rhetoric is different from the remaining arts; we knew this before we started. Rather it is the recognition that rhetoric is one of a family of arts with no apparent ancestry. To cast the Prior Analytics for the role and so to force analyses of speeches onto a syllogistic rack is clearly a mistake. The source of the mistake is the belief that the less complex is suited to be paradigm for the more complex; the roots of this belief in Platonism and before need not be discussed here. It is certainly the case that demonstration exhibits some features of the antistrophic arts in an especially clear way. It is for this very reason that it altogether fails to exhibit other features; it is not concerned with action; it is not concerned with opinion; it is not concerned with attitude; is it not concerned with things that may or may not come into being; it has no concerns beyond truths about the inclusion and exclusion of kinds; above all it is not concerned with time and other minds. It is therefore simple but not because it is a paradigm for rhetoric but because it omits what is of interest in rhetoric.

This article describes the rhetorics of three historical periods in terms broad enough to exhibit their essential characteristics as systems, and then to suggest certain practical uses of an analysis conducted at this level. It would be naive to suppose that in the characterizations offered, it will be easy to walk a line between the obvious on the one side and the disputable or false on the other. Nor is it expected that the formulations advanced or the inferences drawn will escape criticism. Because not all of the rhetorical treatises of a period fall into a mold, an attempt to treat that period as a system means that one must select from diverse possibilities the trends and emphases that are dominant. Because any one treatise, insofar as it pretends to completeness, is a complex construct, involving a delicate balance among ethical, aesthetic, semantic, and pragmatic elements, attempts to fit it into a pattern inevitably invite refutation by the citation of isolated passages. Whether in the long view all major systems of rhetoric tend to correct deficiencies in their predecessors and to pass beyond them is a complex question, and one which cannot be divorced from a careful consideration of the social and intellectual environment in which each system arises. It would seem, however, that through the ages, and despite occasional setbacks, rhetorics have constantly become both richer in content and more embracing in scope.

Language is defined as a set of rules governing discourse. The quest for professional cohesion in social work is frustrated by conflicts between three language systems: clinical, analytical, and ideological. The author proposes that the language of argumentation can point the way out of this rhetorical impasse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]