The Rhetoric of Rhetoric

Bibliographic Data

ID4455765
AuthorsPeter Munz (corresponding author)
Year1990
Volume51
Issue1
Pages121
Publication date1990-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2709750
OpenAlexW2314027332
LanguageEN
Citations received8

One of the remarkable features of the second half of our century is the revival of an interest in rhetoric, always alleged to be the art of persuasion not by truth or reason or any other authority but by a number of irrational, psychologically effective, devices, which an earlier more rational age might have dismissed as irrelevant tricks. Rhetoric, broadly speaking, had its heyday before science and reason and declined as science grew. Why the revival in the age of computers, space flight, and genetic engineering? In a general sense the new interest in rhetoric is part of the language imperialism of our century which stretches from Fritz Mauthner and Wittgenstein to Marshall McLuhan and Derrida. But it is also something more specific. When I. A. Richards's Philosophy of Rhetoric was published in 1936, he was a lone voice. In 1979, when Chaim Perelman published his The New Rhetoric and the Humanities, he proposed nothing more daring than that the humanities should not confine themselves to formal logic but practice reasonableness. But today, ten years later, it is all but taken for granted that writings on natural and human science, history, and even fiction are which organize most of their meanings according to linguistic rules, and it takes a bold person to argue that in spite of this fact, some texts manage to make assertions about the real world or about what went on in the mind of their authors.5

Art · Epistemology · Irrational number · Linguistics · Literature · Nothing · Persuasion · Rhetoric · Sociology · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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