Abstract

Recent scholarship on Kant and rhetoric suggests an inclusive relation between affectivity and cognitive judgment, but that position runs counter to a traditional philosophical opposition between sensibility and rationality. A way to overcome this opposition comes into view when three significant areas of Kantian judgment and Aristotelian rhetoric are seen to overlap. First, each allows that communicative capacities operate within the way a perceptual object or scene appears in the first place. Secondly, each significantly broadens such communicative capacities so as to include the entire conceptual form of one’s disposition or orientation to the world as a whole. Thirdly, each links those broad mental dispositions to specifically affective states of mind. Taken together, the areas of overlap between Kantian judgment and Aristotelian rhetoric adumbrate an integrated picture of the affective sensibilities and cognitive capacities largely missing from the contemporary landscape.