Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, _The Secret History of Emotion_ offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and (...) Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how researchers from both the sciences and the humanities can learn from Charles Darwin’s mixed methodology. We identify two basic challenges that face emotion research in the sciences, namely a mismatch between experiment design and the complexity of life that we aim to explain, and problematic efforts to bridge the gap, including invalid inferences from constrained study designs, and equivocal use of terms like “sympathy” and “empathy” that poorly reflect such methodological constraints. We argue that Darwin’s mixed (...) methodology is a model for addressing these challenges even in laboratory work on emotion, because it shows how close observation of emotional phenomena makes sense only within broader historical contexts. The article concludes with 5 practical research recommendations. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 16th century in Germany, religious ends and human art joined forces to produce a sacred rhetoric: a rhetoric that could transform human nature, and explain at the same time how such transformation was possible according to both science and scripture. No longer was it enough to ask in Scholastic fashion ‘What is man?’ - his essence and unique faculties, his special place in God’s world. A new question took on urgency in the wake of religious (...) reformation, namely ‘What could man become?’ But theology alone could not provide a practical response to this question. Rhetoric, in its various adopted forms, could. Consequently rhetoric emerged as architectonic of the human sciences in Reformation Germany, shaping pedagogy as a practical art. Whereas scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the way in which the exact sciences such as mathematics influenced Enlightenment human science, the history of human science as practical art has received little attention. This article contributes to such a history by showing how rhetoric as a practical protreptic art structured human scientific initiatives in the wake of Philipp Melanchthon’s Reformation pedagogy. (shrink)

Leading scholars address Heidegger’s 1924 lecture course, “Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy.”.

ExcerptI.During the 1960s, it seemed obvious to many on the American and European Left—including the founders of Telos in 1968—that a thoroughgoing cultural critique was badly needed, since the dominant forms of culture in the West appeared either to be promoting false consciousness or to have literally become false consciousness. More than this, by the twentieth century culture in general seemed to have reached the point where it was “mediating” practically everything. For many observers of the contemporary scene, it became (...) increasingly difficult to grasp what was happening economically, politically, or socially without first understanding what was happening culturally. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Google Ngram metadata reveal that the English phrase “rhetorical theory” is not that old, appearing on the scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and then picking up dramatically with critical and literary theory in the 1960s. How do we square this with familiar arguments that rhetorical theory is much, much older? In this forum contribution I argue that the long view applies to our contemporary rhetorical theory only if we equivocate. Much of what currently falls under (...) the heading “rhetorical theory” has little or nothing to do with the systematic conceptualization of persuasive discourse —general, posthuman, eco-, and materialist rhetorics are the most prominent counterexamples. Instead, around 1900, Gertrude Buck develops what I call the short and sharp view that prevails to this day: rhetorical theory offers reality figured by way of its alternatives. (shrink)

If rhetoric is the art of speaking, who is listening? In Being-Moved, Daniel M. Gross provides an answer, showing when and where the art of speaking parted ways with the art of listening-and what happens when they intersect once again. Much in the history of rhetoric must be rethought along the way. And much of this rethinking pivots around Martin Heidegger's early lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric, where his famous topic, Being, gives way to being-moved. The results, Gross goes on to (...) show, are profound. Listening to the gods, listening to the world around us, and even listening to one another in the classroom-all of these experiences become different when rhetoric is reoriented from the voice to the ear. (shrink)

A lot can be learned about a culture by observing how it deals with the underside of life—with all those things it decides, for whatever reason, are unacceptable or beyod the pale. Every society, like every individual, holds up an image of what it thinks it is, but this is never the whole of what it actually its. Underneath the façade, in the interstices of social life and in the hidden spaces still considered taboo, one can often find the key (...) to understanding the official world of surfaces. Toulouse-Lautrec understood this when he chose to paint the demimonde of Paris, calling it a “mirror of the bad dreams of contemporary society.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 308-321 [Access article in PDF] Early Modern Emotion and the Economy of Scarcity 1 - [PDF] Daniel M. Gross Where do we get the idea that emotion is kind of excess, something housed in our nature aching for expression? In part, I argue, from The Passions of the Soul (1649), wherein Descartes proposed the reductive psychophysiology of emotion that informs both romantic expressivism and (...) latter-day psychology. Indeed, one goal of this article is simply to recall that we do not just naturally express emotions generated in our amygdala or wherever, but rather that we are first constituted as expressive agents by what the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment called "social passions." Contrary, however, to these largely optimistic philosophers, such as Hutcheson and Smith, who anchored social passions in a moral sense equally shared by all, I argue that the constitutive power of emotion derives from their unequal distribution. In what follows I work primarily with Aristotle's Rhetoric and Thomas Hobbes to outline a "political economy" wherein passions are (1) constituted as differences in power and (2) conditioned not by their excess but by their scarcity. Though we may reject the political conclusions reached by Aristotle and Hobbes, their analysis of emotion allows us to address important political questions neutralized in the Cartesian paradigm. 1. Descartes If you are tickled to learn that Aztec culture located passions in the liver, here is something at least as quaint from Descartes: "The ultimate and most proximate cause of the passions of the soul is none other than the agitation with which the spirits move the little gland which is in the middle of the [End Page 308] brain," that is, the pineal gland. Or so Descartes proposes in his 1649 treatise on the passions composed for Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. Now compare this to Aristotle's Rhetoric, where for instance anger is defined as "desire, accompanied by distress, for conspicuous retaliation because of a conspicuous slight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or those near to one" (1378a 31-33). For Aristotle anger may indeed be accompanied by physical distress, as in the boiling of blood expressed in crimson cheeks, but its proximate cause is anything but that little gland in the middle of the head. Anger is a deeply social passion provoked by perceived slightsunjustified, and it presupposes a public stage where social status is always subject to performative infelicities.Indeed, we can learn a good deal about the rhetoric of human nature in early-modern Europe simply by asking what passions were. When we do, we find not only that their descriptions disagree, but also that the things described as passions seem incommensurable. Are passions tangible "things" residing in the soul, or are they dispositions of the heart or beliefs of the mind? Is passion a matter of personal expression, or is it something essentially social that a person performs? Do they come from our interior, or from the things we perceive? Can they be measured and manipulated--their causes controlled--or do passions elude control by their very nature? Are they divine, diabolical, or human, and can we distinguish them according to the status of their origin? Are they the enabling condition of virtue or its enemy? Are they necessary or disposable? What is their number and what do they do? Exasperated by endless wrangling over such questions, Descartes complains: There is nothing in which the defective nature of the sciences which we have received from the ancients appears more clearly than in what they have written on the passions; for although this is a matter which has at all times been the object of much investigation, and though it would not appear to be one of the most difficult, inasmuch as since everyone has experience of the passions within himself, there is no necessity to borrow one's observations from elsewhere in order to discover their nature. (331) 2With this preliminary remark Descartes renders human nature in its quintessential modern form: it is something housed in a body subject to the self-evidence... (shrink)

At the outset it is worth remembering how Heidegger in the 1970s first appeared prominently, though very differently, at the intersection of rhetoric and philosophy. The "rhetoric of figures and tropes" then seemed compelling due in part to Derrida's Heidegger, who played a key role in the famous Derrida essay translated into English with the added subtitle "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." Compelling for many was the history there referenced from Cicero, book 3 of Aristotle's Rhetoric, book (...) 8 of Quintilian's Institutes through the later French treatises of Fontanier and Du Marsais, which, if read in a certain way, destroyed the language transparency model that seemed threatening at the time.1... (shrink)

Alva Noë, who is a major figure in establishment philosophy, has been producing work that speaks directly to rhetoric in new ways that are important. This "In Focus" project explores how so, with the help of Carrie Noland on dance, Thomas Rickert on music, and, in a previous issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric 53.1, Nancy Struever on the basics of human inquiry including pictorial, which she thinks almost nobody gets right except for R. G. Collingwood, and perhaps now Noë. In (...) each case you will see how "rhetoric" must be stretched by way of these lateral artistic, and at the same time essential, projects in the discipline per se."Rhetoric" in these considerations is certainly not a vague notion that the things we do... (shrink)

BackgroundThe West African Ebola virus epidemic from 2014 to 2016 is unprecedented in its scale, surpassing all previous and subsequent Ebola outbreaks since 1976. This epidemic provoked a humanitarian emergency that extended to different spheres of life, making visible ethical challenges in addition to medical, economic, and social ones. The present article aims to identify and differentiate the scope of ethical issues associated with the Ebola epidemic.MethodsAn online media analysis was performed on articles published from March 2014 to September 2015 (...) in ten preselected academic journals (scientific press) and two online newspapers (lay press). Two methodological approaches were combined: a systematic literature search and a qualitative content analysis. An additional keyword search was conducted on the PubMed database for the period after the end of the Ebola epidemic (2016-2020) to obtain an overview of research dealing with medical ethics due to the epidemic and to compare these results with the identified ethical challenges.ResultsA total of 389 articles dealing with the subject fields “Ebola epidemic” and “ethics” were researched. For qualitative content analysis, the time span with the highest article density was selected and a total of 64 articles were included (15 scientific articles, 49 popular articles). Five core ethical challenges of the Ebola epidemic emerged: 1. Responsibility and Accountability, 2. Spillover Effects, 3. Research and Development, 4. Health Communication, and 5. Resource Allocation. Articles in academic journals were dominated by the discussion of normative aspects in the area of “research and development”, while newspaper articles focused on aspects of “responsibility and accountability”.ConclusionAn ethical discussion of the Ebola epidemic requires an examination of as many of the ethical dimensions involved as possible. The presented investigation of the two types of media with regard to the Ebola epidemic offers this possibility of a more comprehensive insight into this diversity as a basis for ethical discussions. (shrink)

It is fascinating to see the extent to which European thought took a melancholic turn in the decades before World War I.Almost simultaneously, a number of related ideas became matters of major concern, particularly for middle-class intellectuals. Among these were the notion that life is by nature “incomplete,” that there is an irreconcilable opposition between desire and fulfillment, that the contemporary world is ugly and “impure,” and that existence itself is in a “fallen” state and apparently unredeemable. These ideas stimulated (...) a mood of melancholic sadness, since the realm of values and the realm of matter were by all appearances unbridgeable. Not surprisingly, a whole literary and philosophical generation felt compelled to speak of the “tragic,” or the “tragic vision,” or “tragic consciousness.”. (shrink)

We learn something from the mistakes we make with a book. In this case I read the word “quarkism” where I should have read the word “Quakerism.” As in the sentence on page 102 of Lisbeth Lipari’s quirky book: “This kind of listening is perhaps what is called in Quakerism [or was it “quarkism”] the ‘gathered meeting,’ where the assembled silent worshipers cease being individual selves and instead join together in ‘gathered harkening.’” You can guess “worshipers” alerted me to this (...) mistake, but the first part seemed perfectly plausible, as the discussion in the first chapter of holism versus atomism runs through quantum mechanics and brings up subatomic particles like quarks and the space in between.I venture there.. (shrink)

There is no serious work of which I am aware that does not consider the artistic and literary doctrine of “socialist realism” an intellectual disaster. When Zhdanov announced this doctrine as official Soviet policy at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, his words put an end to a variety of artistic experiments which had taken place within the context of the Russian and European Left during the previous two decades. Suddenly socialist realism, or Zhdanovism, became the only “correct” (...) Marxist approach to the question of what art in general, and literature in particular, should say, and how it should say it. (shrink)

In 1981, an extraordinary work, written by Lev Timofeev, was smuggled to the West and immediately printed in Russian. It has now been translated into English for the first time under the title Soviet Peasants (or: The Peasants'; Art of Starving).' The book is a rare exercise in social anthropology in as much as Timofeev manages to bring together an expert's knowledge of Soviet agricultural policy with penetrating observations on the everyday life of peasants based on his own direct experience (...) of the Russian countryside. Most of what Timofeev reveals about the economic, social, and moral quality of life in the USSR are things which have long been hidden (or denied) by Soviet authorities. (shrink)

When we pick up a big book like this with big names including Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, and Warburg, we want to learn something significant we don't already know by way of reading and reputation. And if we are in rhetoric per se, we are especially eager to see how these people are attached substantially to a field that none of them claimed. Following from these initial expectations, we are then owed a plausible methodology that tends neither toward the wish fulfillment (...) of big rhetoric, nor toward one of the more conventional methods—for example biographic, or dictated by the more familiar scripts of philosophy, politics, and art history—that would render these surprises unlikely because the field would have been... (shrink)