Despite the contemporary revival of interest in topical invention among rhetoricians and informal logicians, the ‘commonplaces’ (loci communes) of classical rhetoric have received little attention. When considered at all, they are typically dismissed as sterile or mechanistic substitutes for genuine argumentative invention. A fresh examination of the texts of Cicero and Quintilian, however, suggests that these authors believe that the commonplaces have an important heuristic function, and an effort to understand this function is a matter of interest to (...) contemporary students of argumentation. (shrink)

In recent years, historians of science have increasingly turned their attention to the “print culture” of early modern science. These studies have revealed that printing, as both a technology and a social and economic system, structured the forms and meanings of natural knowledge. Yet in early modern Europe, naturalists, including John Aubrey, John Evelyn, and John Ray, whose work is discussed in this paper, often shared and read scientific texts in manuscript either before or in lieu of printing. Scribal exchange, (...) exemplified in the circulation of writings like commonplace books, marginalia, manuscript treatises, and correspondence, was the primary means by which communities of naturalists constructed scientific knowledge. Print and manuscript were necessary partners. Manuscript fostered close collaboration, and could be circulated relatively cheaply; but, unlike print, it could not reliably secure priority or survival for posterity. Naturalists approached scribal and print communication strategically, choosing the medium that best suited their goals at any given moment. As a result, print and scribal modes of disseminating information, constructing natural knowledge, and organizing communities developed in tandem. Practices typically associated with print culture manifested themselves in scribal texts and exchanges, and vice versa. “Print culture” cannot be hived off from “scribal culture.” Rather, in their daily jottings and exchanges, naturalists inhabited, and produced, one common culture of communication. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a ground-breaking study of the way educated people were trained to think in Renaissance Europe. As Ann Moss demonstrates, the commonplace-book of quotations which every schoolboy of the period was taught to use opens a window on to the manner in which attitudes were structured, a moral consensus was established, and styles of writing evolved. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought is much more than an account of humanist classroom practice: it is a major work of (...) cultural history. (shrink)

Mr. Danto argues that recent developments in the artworld, in particular the production of works of art that cannot be told from ordinary things, make urgent the need for a new theory of art and make plain the factors such a theory can and cannot involve. In the course of constructing such a theory, he seeks to demonstrate the relationship between philosophy and art, as well as the connections that hold between art and social institutions and art history. The book (...) distinguishes what belongs to artistic theory from what has traditionally been confused with it, namely aesthetic theory and offers as well a systematic account of metaphor, expression, and style, together with an original account 0f artistic representation. A wealth of examples, drawn especially from recent and contemporary art, illuminate the argument. (shrink)

Ramism was the most controversial pedagogical movement to sweep through the Protestant world in the latter sixteenth century. This book, the first contextualized study of this rich tradition, has wide-ranging implications for the intellectual, cultural, and social histories not only of the Holy Roman Empire but also of the entire Protestant world in the crucial decades immediately preceding the advent of the "new philosophy" in the mid-seventeenth century.

The drama of life rarely unfolds in majestic settings. Instead, nondescript spaces are more often the stage upon which one's life is lived. What Christine Welch sees as these sometimes modest, sometimes sterile, sometimes pretentious rooms are often dismissed or overlooked by their occupants, even when transformative encounters and events occur within their walls. Commonplace, a powerful new work of photography, provokes greater appreciation for these common spaces of everyday American life, as it captures their quiet power and subtle beauty (...) in evocative images. Whether she photographs the food-stained living room of a fraternity house, the dimly lit booth in a local café, or the cool sleekness of a corporate boardroom, Welch captures the poignancy of common spaces and the meaning they hold in our contemporary society. The unpopulated images in her book are blank canvases on to which readers can project the particulars of their own experiences. Commonplace helps us redefine and rediscover those spaces too common for preservationists to save, yet too vital to the emotional fabric of American life to pass over. (shrink)

Recognizing the contingent entanglement between historiography's social and political roles and the conception of the discipline as purely factual, this essay provides a detailed analysis of "revision" and its connection to "revisionism." This analysis uses a philosophical approach that begins with the commonplaces of our understanding as expressed in dictionaries, which are compared and contrasted to display relevant confusions. The essay then turns to examining the questions posed by History and Theory's Call for Papers announcing its Theme Issue on (...) Revision in History, and, where philosophically relevant, answers them. The issue of paradigm change proved to be quite significant and required particular attention. A "paradigm" is analyzed in terms of Quine's "web of belief," and that web is itself explained as an ongoing process of revision, in analogy with Rawls's concept of pure procedural justice. Adopting this approach helps clarify the entanglement between politics and historiographical revision. (shrink)

This volume explores the many dimensions of the work of Joseph P. Fell. Drawing from continental sources such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as North American thinkers such as John William Miller, Fell has secured a place as an enduring and important thinker within the tradition of phenomenological thought. Fell’s critical development of these strands of philosophy has resulted in a provocative and original challenge to complacent dualism and persistent problems of skepticism, alienation, and nihilism.

Aimed at a wide audience, this book in the general area of practical ethics consists of seven independent and humorous philosophical analyses of common moral situations, occurrences, and confrontations. The introduction discusses the idea of moralising; Cohen explains what it is, why moral philosophers tend to avoid it, and why it seems a particularly worthwhile enterprise for the book. Throughout its discussions, the book is accessible to readers at any stage of philosophic interest. The author distinguishes between moral encounters and (...) more mundane concerns, an aspect that separates this book from other practical ethics works. Contents: Introduction; Too Busy: A Note on Wasting Time; The Derogatory Erstwhile Fact, or Calling a Spade a Spade; Justification/Explanation and Treatment, or Putting the Shoe on the Other Foot; Vicarious Pride; 'Women's' Gymnastics; Vocations and Vocations; The Last Word. (shrink)

The Aesthetic Commonplace is a study of the everyday as a region of overlooked value in the work of William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Romantic poet, the realist novelist, and the modern philosopher are each separately associated with a commitment to the common, the ordinary, and the everyday as a vital resource for reflection on language, on feeling, on ethical insight, and social attunement. The Aesthetic Commonplace is the first study to draw substantive lines of connection between (...) Wittgenstein and the cultural and literary history of nineteenth century England. Tracing conceptual and formal affinities between the poet, the novelist, and the philosopher, the book brings to light significant links between the intellectual history of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, making the case for a continuous cultural commitment to the aesthetic as a distinctive mode of investigating thought, feeling, and the everyday language upon which we depend for their articulation. Addressed to both literary studies and to philosophy, The Aesthetic Commonplace makes a compelling case for the interdependence of form, concept, and emotion in the history and interpretive practices of both disciplines. (shrink)

While much has been written on the cultural and intellectual antecedents that gave rise to Carolus Linnaeus?s herbarium and his Systema Naturae, the tools that he used to transform his raw observations into nomenclatural terms and categories have been neglected. Focusing on the Philosophia Botanica, the popular classification handbook that he published in 1751, it can be shown that Linnaeus cleverly ordered and reordered the work by employing commonplacing techniques that had been part of print culture since the Renaissance. Indeed, (...) the functional adaptability of commonplace heads allowed him to split and combine the book?s chapters and tables and played a notable conceptual role in the way in which he spatialized words and, to a certain extent, specimens. (shrink)

The commonplaces, all grammatically confused, are that ?conditionals? are ternary in structure, have ?antecedents? and conform to the traditional taxonomy. It is maintained en route that ?The bough will not break? is consistent with ?If the bough breaks ??, that there is no logical difference between ?future indicatives? and ?subjunctives?, and that there is a difference between the logic of propositions (e.g. ?The bough broke?) and that of judgments (?The bough will/might/could/should/must/needn't break?).

Despite the bad press that revenge has received from moral philosophers and legal theorists, it can be a legitimate way to forge a link between wrongful behavior and penalties that karmic moral theories can only postulate. It can be especially effectual in commonplace cases that are under the radar of formal systems of justice. In such cases it can play a positive role in strengthening the moral foundations of a community. In those cases acts of revenge can provide a morally (...) valuable antidote to the negative participant reactive attitudes of community members. They can be an expression of morality in and for itself while exorcizing such pent up emotions as resentment, hatred, indignation, anger, antipathy, annoyance, umbrage, and ire. I maintain that responding in morally appropriate ways to insults, derisions, disparagements, and other forms of perceived wrongful disrespect and ill will is elemental in sustaining equitable human relations. To reiterate and paraphrase a point Robert Nozick made, the only power that morality has to affect human affairs resides in the critical responses moral people feel obliged to make upon recognizing the wrongful quality of another person’s acts or will. In this paper I apply the four criteria I defended in the book The Virtues of Vengeance to rather mundane cases of perceived maltreatment, exploitation, oppression, and/or neglect, and I deal with the issue of regulating multiple avengers who are bent on dealing out revenge to offenders in such commonplace cases. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the question of how far Polybius fulfilled that part of an historian's duty which consists of acquiring information; it gives an instance, small in itself no doubt, where he definitely neglected to obtain good information which lay to his hand, and preferred to repeat a commonplace untruth of the literary hacks.

Abstract:Anticipating sixteenth-century trends in vernacular Aristotelianism, Machiavelli concealed his theoretical engagement with Aristotle behind a veil of examples. Scholars have established that in The Prince, Machiavelli employed topical dialectic to update ancient maxims for the modern era. I show how he used dialectic to occupy and transform Aristotelian commonplaces that justified Renaissance philosophers’ appeal to the ideal in political reasoning. These occupations reveal Machiavelli’s preference for particulars over generalities as a considered judgment about the suitability of philosophy for popular (...) readers. Machiavelli’s covert reading of Aristotle is, I submit, a signal episode in the history of humanism. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: “To Serve Man” “Will the Real Martian Please Stand up?” “The Eye of the Beholder” Conclusion Notes.

ABSTRACTThis paper draws on Ian Bogost’s argument that video games constitute a form of ‘procedural rhetoric’, in order to re-examine the representation of heroic madness First-Person-Shooter games. Rejecting the idea that games attempt to recreate the experience of madness to the player through linear representation, the paper instead identifies two persistent commonplace figures which appear within the genre: the monstrous double, and the reaching tentacle. While Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric allows analysis to move away from the more facile interpretations (...) of gameplay, the paper argues that these figures also demand an account of the commonplace itself – the rhetorical ‘topic’ – which links the technical structure of gaming procedures with the tropes and figures that enable them to make sense within their wider cultural context and tradition. While the figures of the double and the tentacle purposefully draw on existing tropes and processes associated with the cultural meanings of mental healt... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.4 (2004) 603-625 [Access article in PDF] Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain Lucia Dacome University College London Ae for "Adversariorum methodus." Be for "Beauty, Beneficience, Bread, Bleeding, Blemishes."1 By associating the first letter with the initial vowel of a word, generations of eighteenth-century readers, students, and observers diligently regulated access to information they reputed (...) worth retaining. Following this rule, they organized the notes they took on a certain subject, the thoughts and observations they believed were worth remembering, and the exemplary words of their favorite authors. The rule was devised by John Locke for his "new method of making commonplace-books," a method characterized by a particular system for indexing the entries of a notebook that became popular in the eighteenth century. Before Locke developed his new method readers had already familiarized themselves with the practice of keeping an account of their readings, excerpting passages of texts, and copying them in their notebooks under a relevant heading. Throughout the early modern period commonplace books provided repositories for arranging notes, excerpts, drawings, and objects.2 Regarded as aids to memory and storehouses of knowledge, they were part of a pedagogic tradition related to rhetoric and the art of memory that dated back to the classical period. Reducing vast amounts of knowledge to a [End Page 603] manageable form, they instantiated a special relationship between the accumulation of knowledge and the organization of space. At the turn of the eighteenth century Locke's new method promised to facilitate compilers' task by providing a new way of accumulating multum in parvo at a time of increasing concern for the uncontrollable growth of the "Stock of Knowledge."3 It did so by seeking to increase the amount of information one could annotate in the notebook, while also speeding up its retrieval. Many eighteenth-century compilers relied on it in order to reduce the volume of their notebooks and save time. Some were lured by the promise that this technique could also help them to order their minds and thus turn them into better people.Although commonplace books have dropped out of usage today, they were still mentioned in nineteenth-century educational manuals. As tools that lay at the intersection between practices of collecting, reading, classifying, learning, and the arts of rhetoric, they have come to the fore of historical discussion.4 In some cases, commonplace books have been regarded as capable of providing insights into compilers' reading patterns and as biographical sources casting light on compilers' personal idiosyncrasies and cataloguing manias.5 The intellectual and cultural significance of Locke's own new method of compiling has [End Page 604] accordingly been discussed in relation to Locke's own intellectual biography (and in particular his medical interests), in the context of shifting patterns of systematization of knowledge and in light of the dissemination of eighteenth-century encyclopedic projects.6 However, still little is known about the uses and the popularity of the Lockean method in the eighteenth century.What follows considers the spreading of Lockean commonplacing in the context of eighteenth-century discussions on the nature of the self. Locke himself contributed to these discussions when, in the second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694), he famously suggested that self-identity lay in the mind and resided in the continuity of memory and consciousness.7 Now a widely shared assumption of Western modernity, the view that self lies in the mind has long been dated back to the Age of Enlightenment. Yet early in this period Locke's proposal to make self-identity coextensive with memory and self-knowledge proved controversial. The debate that followed is now part of the canon of the history of philosophy and of the philosophical literature as a whole.8 In the course of the debate some of Locke's critics doubted that it was possible to found the self in conscious memory: they wondered about the destiny of the self during intervals... (shrink)

An explicit linking of the minutiae of everyday parenting practices and the good of society as a whole has been a feature of government policy. The state has taken responsibility for instilling the right parenting skills to deal with what is said to be the societal fall-out of contemporary and family change. ?Knowledge? about parenting is seen as a resource that parents must access in order to fulfil their moral duty as good parents. In this policy portrait, caring for children (...) is posed as a classless and gender-neutral activity. A key theme of this article is that parents from different social class groups are positioned and understand themselves in quite distinct ways in relation to parenting skills advice and expert intervention into their family and home lives. We take a ?relational? perspective to show how mothers and fathers from different social class groups see themselves, and are located by policy and practice, as clients or consumers, and as commonplace or pioneers, in relation to parenting support for themselves and the education system for their children. We identify the lived gendered and classed disparities of power, and associated moral worth, attached to particular parenting practices. (shrink)

Previous chapter Between 1900 and 1914, rhythm became a commonplace in aesthetics and art history. In addition to Riegl's and Schmarsow's general studies which embraced large sections of Near-Eastern and Western history, it spread in numerous specialized fields devoted to more limited periods. The time had come for an application of the concepts which had just been invented. Since the Vienna school was weakened by the sudden death of Riegl in 1905, most of this new works however were - Esthétique (...) – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Publicity for (and laterly increased economic stringency which makes more likely), failures of care in the NHS engender concern for care quality while its assurance remains the subject of a fragmented and unhelpful literature. A selective attempt is made to examine some underlying principles by posing and answering three questions. What is the quality of care? What basic principles must be followed in defining `standards'? How then may quality be assured? Any definition of care must be multi-faceted and in common (...) use pervaded with the patients' pre-occupation with a search for cures. Nevertheless, it is argued that there are gains in restricting the technical use of the term `care' to those systematic processes of health services and their culture which impinge on the personal experience of patients and which fashion their response. In contemporary society care ought to be designed to restore and enhance the independence, dignity and choice of the patient. Although there is a contrary tendency to abandon problems of care to the professionals, standards for care should be judged ultimately not from the specialised professional but from the viewpoint of lay people whose behaviour in the outside world fashions those norms by which independence, dignity and choice are judged. A number of difficulties in identifying and securing improvements in care are discussed. In particular, it is argued that such is the interdependence of the style of management of an institution and the style of care it provides that enforcement of high quality care is likley to be a contradiction in terms. Only trained and sensitive staff can act intuitively and pre-emptively to prevent even incipient deterioration in care. They cannot carefully foster at all times the independence and dignity of their patients unless they are treated in a similar way as professional employees. As an initial step in improving the quality of care a simple start is urged upon implementing an inventory of checks. These are designed to establish the identification and operation of health care policies and practices which give appropriate recognition to the characteristics of care that patients and public expect, coming as they do from a lay rather than professional world. The article concludes with an appropriate inventory of questions to be put to professionals by those laymen who are increasingly imported into health care management through community representation (in CHCs) and staff participation (in joint consultation) and whose interest and concern should be harnessed appropriately. (shrink)