Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, Books, Books eng, books NON FICTION, Philosophy
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
Editor-in-Chief Thomas O. Sloane
ISBN13: 9780195125955ISBN10: 0195125959 hardback, 856 pages
Aug 2001, In Stock
Price:
$150.00 (08)
Description
Rhetoric is one of the Western world's oldest disciplines. From ancient Greece and Rome to the modern
era, the art of persuasion has been used, discussed, and debated for over twenty-four hundred years. In
recent times, scholars in such areas as philosophy, literary theory, and communications have renewed
their attention to rhetoric as a way of understanding many areas of culture and social life. And now the
ideal reference work is available to further enhance the study of this fascinating field.
Providing a comprehensive survey of the latest research--as well as the foundational teachings in this
broad field--the
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
features 150 original, signed articles by leading scholars. It
synthesizes a vast amount of knowledge from classics, philosophy, literature, literary theory, cultural
studies, speech and communications, and discusses basic concepts and themes throughout rhetoric.
As the most wide ranging reference work of its kind--combining theory, history, and practice, with a
special emphasis on public speaking, performance and communication--the
Encyclopedia
is an
invaluable resource to a wide audience. Numerous cross-references, bibliographies after each article,
and synoptic and topical indexes further enhance the book and make it the definitive reference work on
this powerful discipline.
Features
The most comprehensive, up-to-date resource of its kind
Balanced coverage of classical rhetoric and the rhetorical turns in contemporary critical thought
Strong focus on public speaking, performance, and communication
Reviews
"An excellent work of reference, organized systematically and historically comprehensive. All in all, a most
useful research tool."--Professor Dr. Claus Uhlig, Philipps-Universitat Marburg, Germany
Page 1 / 837
Product Details
856 pages; 15 halftones & line illus.; 7 x 10; ISBN13: 978-0-19-512595-5ISBN10: 0-19-512595-9
About the Author(s)
Editor-in-Chief Thomas O. Sloane,
Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Preface
TEACHERS IN ANCIENT TIMES INSISTED THAT RHETORIC
—
ITS IDENTITY AS WELL
as its nature—is best learned
through practice, not through reading about it. Such doctrines, of course, keep teachers in business.
Nonetheless, theories and manuals of rhetoric demonstrably fall short of the mark, and have done so for
twenty-five hundred years. “For all a rhetorician's rules,” wrote Samuel Butler in 1663, “[t]each nothing
but to name his tools.” Often called the world's second-oldest profession, the teaching of rhetoric has
probably derived as little benefit from books as has the world's oldest profession. Readers, therefore,
should not expect to find a “compleat rhetoric” within these covers. Rhetoric is a storehouse of
communicative tactics: some are hoary and stale (e.g., “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,”
which was identified in antiquity and preserved as a figure of speech); some are too new to be codified
(like “emoticons” in e-mails); most are time-bound, dependent upon audience and occasion.
Given its great antiquity as well as the capriciousness of intellectual fashion, it is little wonder that our
subject has been variously defined through the centuries: sophistry, queen of the liberal arts, oldest of
the humanities, style, deception, specious reasoning, practical logic, loaded language, purple prose,
what my opponent speaks, ad infinitum. Lately, rhetoric has been called “purposive communication”—a
stunning neutrality. Our readers, we assume, will have at least some acquaintance with our subject's
scarlet past, and will be neither astounded nor dismayed to discover that they have actually used its
tactics from time to time. Indeed, our putative readers will in fact have moved beyond curiosity about
such matters as a “simile” (which is nonetheless defined herein) to wondering what on earth a
hendiadys
might be, or how to conceive of a “virtual audience” or a “hypertext.” Given the readers we
have in mind, all recognizable words from antiquity have been left intact and more or less in their
original Latin or Greek:
eloquentia
, for example, or
mythoi
; or for that matter
encyclopedia
and
rhetoric
.
The Synoptic Outline of Contents at the end of the book offers a quick and easy overview. Because the
purpose of that outline was to help us plan this book and keep its parts from becoming disparate, it
might prove useful to anyone wondering how some entry (e.g., “Questioning”) fits in or if there is any
coherence in a work like this, or in a subject like rhetoric. Obviously, as a glance at the outline will show,
we treat our subject as something anchored in the past. At the same time, however, we treat it as
something that has a place in the present and is not exactly limited to this or that culture. The history of
the art from its origins in ancient Greece is recounted in these pages, in our longest single entry
(“Classical rhetoric”). But we attempt also to track that history up to a possible postmodern era—when
rhetoric's media extend from oratory to the Internet, its “commonplaces” encompass data storage and
retrieval systems, and its
memoria
conceptualizes “space” on a “hard disk.” Included too is recent work
in comparative rhetoric, research into cultures that have not fully experienced the effects of our classical
Western heritage. However pandemic rhetoric itself might prove to be, our subject nonetheless remains
deeply ingrained within the academic worlds of Europe, England, and North America, where for
centuries it has received its most explicit treatment—and where, moreover, scholarly interest in the
Page 2 / 837
subject has recently gained momentum and become a fully international enterprise. In North America,
research in rhetoric is now bolstered by five journals, and well over a thousand students are enrolled in
graduate programs in the subject. It is noteworthy, however, that our major entry on style and all the
entries on figures of speech were composed by non-native speakers of English.
More than three-quarters of our 120 contributors are from the United States. Other contributors—who
wrote almost half the articles—come from Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany,
Hong Kong, India, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the
United Kingdom. Their departmental affiliations are primarily communications and secondarily English;
classics is third; rhetoric is fourth, just ahead of philosophy. Other departments and disciplines include
French, German, law, comparative literature, music, philology, theology, and sociology.
There are approximately two hundred entries in this volume, ranging in size from very short (about 100
words) for certain figures of speech to our longest entry (16,000 words) on classical rhetoric. Almost
every entry emphasizes our common rhetorical tradition, partly as a result of the way this volume was
planned. The three modes of proof, the five offices (or arts, or more loftily “canons”) of rhetoric, and the
traditional ends of eloquence and persuasion—these were the infrastructure of our project, the antique
starting points of our Synoptic Outline, and in the editors' minds, the very requisites of rhetoric. Most of
these matters move in directions unforeseen by our progenitors—eloquence and persuasion, for
example. The former has to do with the beauty of an utterance, something that to modern readers
might seem either quaint or much more at home in poetry than in rhetoric and something that in these
pages just barely escapes its classical foundations. Persuasion, on the other hand, quickly flees those
foundations and rushes headlong into the waiting arms of modern social scientists.
Too, in view of the experiential nature of rhetoric, the reader will find much overlapping between these
entries. Plato seemed to think that the best rhetoric is a kind of love. Aristotle defined it as a kind of
ability. In neither conception is the art itself clearly formulable, nor has it become so, and thus, virtually
every entry offers a passage into a complex whole. One will find, for instance, that the entry on
eloquence includes a discussion of
inventio
. Turning to the entry on invention, one finds a capsule
history of classical rhetoric, where of course, everything seems either to belong or to have gotten
started. The entry on persuasion, the other traditional end of rhetoric, leads one through an audience's
emotions, a rhetor's credibility, and “message characteristics” at least part of the way back to traditional
modes of proof, though with little dimming of persuasion's modernist sheen. The figures of speech, in
the eyes of some the very essence of rhetoric, are treated in a long entry by that name; then again in the
entry on style; once more in the entry on poetry; and then most are given individual treatment. Nor
does the matter stop there: References to the figures, either collectively or individually, are sprinkled
throughout this work, indicating their importance certainly, but also indicating the interlocking nature of
rhetoric's pieces. Every entry, in short, could cross-reference every other entry, including our most
defiantly modernist ones. When we came to consider “related subjects” (see the Synoptic Outline), we
tried to keep from considering them simply as a miscellany, a nod in the direction of political
correctness, or a scholarly appendix. But in order to keep the section from expanding exponentially, we
selected subjects that seemed to have at least an indirect bearing on the identity of rhetoric—and
wherein there are potential contributors whom we might recruit.
Long—for two and one-half millennia—considered the exclusive pursuit of white, classically-trained
males preparing for careers in law, politics, or teaching, rhetoric once formed the very core of the
educational curriculum, where it was linked closely with logic and grammar. The link with logic yet
stands, but grammar seems to have bowed out in favor of linguistics, a discipline that pervades and
Page 3 / 837
gives a certain air to many definitions in this encyclopedia, particularly in that area mentioned earlier,
the figures of speech, which rhetoric once shared with grammar. Old-school rhetoricians will surely be
flabbergasted to read, for example, that
prolēpsis
is a “permutative metataxeme.” At the same time,
however, those same rhetoricians may be gratified to note that, given the many references throughout
our entries to Plato's
Phaedrus
, Aristotle's
Rhetoric
, Cicero's
De oratore
, and Erasmus's
De copia
, there
yet seems to be a rhetorical canon—perhaps made inescapable, like our tradition itself, by the way we
planned this volume. Nonetheless, if the wisdom of that canon is attended to in all its impulses toward
openness and experience, rhetoricians—old-school or otherwise—will welcome its inevitable expansion
to include, say, the contributions from studies in African-American, communicationist, comparative,
feminist, and queer rhetoric, all of which are already integral to our subject in a way that the word
related
in our Synoptic Outline might seem merely to patronize. Within this book, however, their
contributions are encountered in alphabetical order as matters that seem to have an equally-significant
bearing on the whole. The ostensible hierarchies of the Synoptic Outline merely locate what we take to
be our foundations.
Those who believe they already know the subject sufficiently well may wonder why an encyclopedia
about it has been published. These readers will, we hope, browse this work and find the answer the
editors themselves found to their own similar inquiry. There are entries herein that might never have
been written, or might not have been so succinctly put forth, without the prompting of a project like
this. If some essays are reliquaries, others clearly move our subject toward its fourth millenium, in which
it appears that rhetoric will continue to be as useful for analysis as for genesis; that is, as useful for the
interpretation of discourse and phenomena as it is for their composition. Finally, although rhetoric is
often thought of as a blend of literary and political interests, the subject itself is too seldom viewed
discretely, as something that just might possibly stand alone. The “old rhetoric,” one commentator
observed, “has been spread over a multiplicity of disciplines”—but not, we believe, to such an airy
thinness that something of its integrity cannot be restored.
There are other peculiarities, of course, one in particular: Although rhetoric is a people art, not one
person is listed among the entries of this encyclopedia—not even Aristotle, not even Nietzsche. That
decision was based on our effort to abstract rhetoric as far as we could, not only from this or that
discipline but also from this or that theorist, time, place, culture, and to endeavor to search for its
principles. We recognize the paradox, in view of what we take rhetoric to be. It is nearly impossible
either to abstract a temporal cause from its effects or to look anew at a subject anchored in but not
confined to an ancient tradition. But the attempt to do so, we believe, sets this work apart from other
recent publications as the
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition
edited by Theresa Enos (1996) or
Heinrich Lausberg's magisterial
Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik
(1960).
There are oversights, no doubt, omissions and errors. But we have done what we could in chasing this
Proteus, with more than a little help from Christopher Collins, Merilee Johnson, and Mark Mones at
Oxford University Press, who were always ready with logistical support and advice. Oxford, moreover,
was the “onlie begetter” of this work, though encouraged from the outset by scholars in the field. Those
of us who were drawn to it, however reluctantly at first, gradually became enthusiastic participants, an
attitude we hope we demonstrate.
Kenneth Burke dedicates his
Grammar of Motives
(1945) “To Elizabeth / Without Whom Not.” I shall
follow the example of this master rhetorician and offer similar praise of my colleagues on the editorial
board—Shadi Bartsch, Tom Farrell, Heinrich Plett—and of our distinguished contributors. They are truly,
in the language of Cicero, the
litterati sine quibus non
of this endeavor.
Page 4 / 837
—T
HOMAS
O. S
LOANE
Berkeley, California
October 2000
Abolitionist rhetoric
. See
African-American rhetoric
, article on
Abolitionist rhetoric
.
How to cite this entry:
"Abolitionist rhetoric"
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
. Ed. Thomas O. Sloane.
© 2006 Oxford University Press
.
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric: (e-reference edition). Oxford University Press. The Midnight University. 16
Ad Hominem Argument
.
Argumentum ad hominem
refers to a kind of argument in which the person is
the focus of the argument, as opposed to objective evidence on which the argument may be based.
Argumentum ad hominem
has been prominently treated as a fallacy, in the logical tradition; however,
recent work has shown that this type of argument is not always fallacious and that there is pervasive
ambiguity in how it has been defined and what it has been taken to represent. [See
Fallacies
.]
The expression
argumentum ad hominem
is ambiguous. The main meaning it has in popular speech, as
well as in the traditions of logic and rhetoric, is the use of personal attack as a way of refuting an
argument. In its simplest form, this argument has the following schema: so-and-so is a person of bad
(defective) character, therefore his argument should not be accepted. This simple form of argument is
properly called
ad hominem
. It is also often called the “abusive”
ad hominem
argument in many modern
logic textbooks. It could perhaps even be called the personal attack or character attack type of argument.
However, not all attacks on character are
ad hominem
arguments. In order to be an
ad hominem
argument in the proper sense, the following conditions must be met. There must be two parties involved
in disputation. The first party must have put a particular argument forward. The second party must then
cite the bad character of the first party as a reason for concluding that the argument is no good. For a
contrasting example, in a famous biography of the singer Frank Sinatra, the writer alleged that Sinatra
was a person of bad character. But since no particular argument attributed to Sinatra was being attacked,
the argumentation in the book would not properly be said to be
ad hominem
in the main sense
appropriate for logic and rhetoric.
There is also another meaning of the expression
argumentum ad hominem
that has a place in traditional
logic and rhetoric, as well as in everyday speech. This secondary meaning is not so dominant as the main
meaning, but it is a fairly common usage in philosophical speech. According to this meaning, an argument
is
ad hominem
if it is based on the other party's position in a dispute. For example, suppose that prolife
Bob and prochoice Wilma are engaged in a dispute on the issue of abortion and that Wilma puts forward
an argument based on the premise that human life is sacred. Let us say that she does not accept this
premise, but she uses it to try to convince Bob to accept a conclusion because she knows that Bob
accepts the premise. This form of argument is called “argument from commitment” in modern
argumentation theory (Walton, 1996). Traditionally, it was called the
ex concessis
argument. But
traditionally as well, in philosophy, it has often been called the
argumentum ad hominem
. However, the
two kinds are distinct. Not all arguments from commitment (
ex concessis
arguments) are personal-attack
arguments. And not all
ad hominem
arguments in the personal-attack sense are arguments from
commitment (although many of them are, as will be shown below). How then, one might well wonder, did
this ambiguity of terminology arise?
The answer, as Nuchelmans (1993) has shown, is that there are two separate lines of historical
Page 5 / 837
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Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
Editor-in-Chief Thomas O. Sloane
ISBN13: 9780195125955ISBN10: 0195125959 hardback, 856 pages
Aug 2001, In Stock
Price:
$150.00 (08)
Description
Rhetoric is one of the Western world's oldest disciplines. From ancient Greece and Rome to the modern
era, the art of persuasion has been used, discussed, and debated for over twenty-four hundred years. In
recent times, scholars in such areas as philosophy, literary theory, and communications have renewed
their attention to rhetoric as a way of understanding many areas of culture and social life. And now the
ideal reference work is available to further enhance the study of this fascinating field.
Providing a comprehensive survey of the latest research--as well as the foundational teachings in this
broad field--the
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
features 150 original, signed articles by leading scholars. It
synthesizes a vast amount of knowledge from classics, philosophy, literature, literary theory, cultural
studies, speech and communications, and discusses basic concepts and themes throughout rhetoric.
As the most wide ranging reference work of its kind--combining theory, history, and practice, with a
special emphasis on public speaking, performance and communication--the
Encyclopedia
is an
invaluable resource to a wide audience. Numerous cross-references, bibliographies after each article,
and synoptic and topical indexes further enhance the book and make it the definitive reference work on
this powerful discipline.
Features
The most comprehensive, up-to-date resource of its kind
Balanced coverage of classical rhetoric and the rhetorical turns in contemporary critical thought
Strong focus on public speaking, performance, and communication
Reviews
"An excellent work of reference, organized systematically and historically comprehensive. All in all, a most
useful research tool."--Professor Dr. Claus Uhlig, Philipps-Universitat Marburg, Germany
Page 1 / 837
Product Details
856 pages; 15 halftones & line illus.; 7 x 10; ISBN13: 978-0-19-512595-5ISBN10: 0-19-512595-9
About the Author(s)
Editor-in-Chief Thomas O. Sloane,
Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Preface
TEACHERS IN ANCIENT TIMES INSISTED THAT RHETORIC
—
ITS IDENTITY AS WELL
as its nature—is best learned
through practice, not through reading about it. Such doctrines, of course, keep teachers in business.
Nonetheless, theories and manuals of rhetoric demonstrably fall short of the mark, and have done so for
twenty-five hundred years. “For all a rhetorician's rules,” wrote Samuel Butler in 1663, “[t]each nothing
but to name his tools.” Often called the world's second-oldest profession, the teaching of rhetoric has
probably derived as little benefit from books as has the world's oldest profession. Readers, therefore,
should not expect to find a “compleat rhetoric” within these covers. Rhetoric is a storehouse of
communicative tactics: some are hoary and stale (e.g., “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,”
which was identified in antiquity and preserved as a figure of speech); some are too new to be codified
(like “emoticons” in e-mails); most are time-bound, dependent upon audience and occasion.
Given its great antiquity as well as the capriciousness of intellectual fashion, it is little wonder that our
subject has been variously defined through the centuries: sophistry, queen of the liberal arts, oldest of
the humanities, style, deception, specious reasoning, practical logic, loaded language, purple prose,
what my opponent speaks, ad infinitum. Lately, rhetoric has been called “purposive communication”—a
stunning neutrality. Our readers, we assume, will have at least some acquaintance with our subject's
scarlet past, and will be neither astounded nor dismayed to discover that they have actually used its
tactics from time to time. Indeed, our putative readers will in fact have moved beyond curiosity about
such matters as a “simile” (which is nonetheless defined herein) to wondering what on earth a
hendiadys
might be, or how to conceive of a “virtual audience” or a “hypertext.” Given the readers we
have in mind, all recognizable words from antiquity have been left intact and more or less in their
original Latin or Greek:
eloquentia
, for example, or
mythoi
; or for that matter
encyclopedia
and
rhetoric
.
The Synoptic Outline of Contents at the end of the book offers a quick and easy overview. Because the
purpose of that outline was to help us plan this book and keep its parts from becoming disparate, it
might prove useful to anyone wondering how some entry (e.g., “Questioning”) fits in or if there is any
coherence in a work like this, or in a subject like rhetoric. Obviously, as a glance at the outline will show,
we treat our subject as something anchored in the past. At the same time, however, we treat it as
something that has a place in the present and is not exactly limited to this or that culture. The history of
the art from its origins in ancient Greece is recounted in these pages, in our longest single entry
(“Classical rhetoric”). But we attempt also to track that history up to a possible postmodern era—when
rhetoric's media extend from oratory to the Internet, its “commonplaces” encompass data storage and
retrieval systems, and its
memoria
conceptualizes “space” on a “hard disk.” Included too is recent work
in comparative rhetoric, research into cultures that have not fully experienced the effects of our classical
Western heritage. However pandemic rhetoric itself might prove to be, our subject nonetheless remains
deeply ingrained within the academic worlds of Europe, England, and North America, where for
centuries it has received its most explicit treatment—and where, moreover, scholarly interest in the
Page 2 / 837
subject has recently gained momentum and become a fully international enterprise. In North America,
research in rhetoric is now bolstered by five journals, and well over a thousand students are enrolled in
graduate programs in the subject. It is noteworthy, however, that our major entry on style and all the
entries on figures of speech were composed by non-native speakers of English.
More than three-quarters of our 120 contributors are from the United States. Other contributors—who
wrote almost half the articles—come from Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany,
Hong Kong, India, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the
United Kingdom. Their departmental affiliations are primarily communications and secondarily English;
classics is third; rhetoric is fourth, just ahead of philosophy. Other departments and disciplines include
French, German, law, comparative literature, music, philology, theology, and sociology.
There are approximately two hundred entries in this volume, ranging in size from very short (about 100
words) for certain figures of speech to our longest entry (16,000 words) on classical rhetoric. Almost
every entry emphasizes our common rhetorical tradition, partly as a result of the way this volume was
planned. The three modes of proof, the five offices (or arts, or more loftily “canons”) of rhetoric, and the
traditional ends of eloquence and persuasion—these were the infrastructure of our project, the antique
starting points of our Synoptic Outline, and in the editors' minds, the very requisites of rhetoric. Most of
these matters move in directions unforeseen by our progenitors—eloquence and persuasion, for
example. The former has to do with the beauty of an utterance, something that to modern readers
might seem either quaint or much more at home in poetry than in rhetoric and something that in these
pages just barely escapes its classical foundations. Persuasion, on the other hand, quickly flees those
foundations and rushes headlong into the waiting arms of modern social scientists.
Too, in view of the experiential nature of rhetoric, the reader will find much overlapping between these
entries. Plato seemed to think that the best rhetoric is a kind of love. Aristotle defined it as a kind of
ability. In neither conception is the art itself clearly formulable, nor has it become so, and thus, virtually
every entry offers a passage into a complex whole. One will find, for instance, that the entry on
eloquence includes a discussion of
inventio
. Turning to the entry on invention, one finds a capsule
history of classical rhetoric, where of course, everything seems either to belong or to have gotten
started. The entry on persuasion, the other traditional end of rhetoric, leads one through an audience's
emotions, a rhetor's credibility, and “message characteristics” at least part of the way back to traditional
modes of proof, though with little dimming of persuasion's modernist sheen. The figures of speech, in
the eyes of some the very essence of rhetoric, are treated in a long entry by that name; then again in the
entry on style; once more in the entry on poetry; and then most are given individual treatment. Nor
does the matter stop there: References to the figures, either collectively or individually, are sprinkled
throughout this work, indicating their importance certainly, but also indicating the interlocking nature of
rhetoric's pieces. Every entry, in short, could cross-reference every other entry, including our most
defiantly modernist ones. When we came to consider “related subjects” (see the Synoptic Outline), we
tried to keep from considering them simply as a miscellany, a nod in the direction of political
correctness, or a scholarly appendix. But in order to keep the section from expanding exponentially, we
selected subjects that seemed to have at least an indirect bearing on the identity of rhetoric—and
wherein there are potential contributors whom we might recruit.
Long—for two and one-half millennia—considered the exclusive pursuit of white, classically-trained
males preparing for careers in law, politics, or teaching, rhetoric once formed the very core of the
educational curriculum, where it was linked closely with logic and grammar. The link with logic yet
stands, but grammar seems to have bowed out in favor of linguistics, a discipline that pervades and
Page 3 / 837
gives a certain air to many definitions in this encyclopedia, particularly in that area mentioned earlier,
the figures of speech, which rhetoric once shared with grammar. Old-school rhetoricians will surely be
flabbergasted to read, for example, that
prolēpsis
is a “permutative metataxeme.” At the same time,
however, those same rhetoricians may be gratified to note that, given the many references throughout
our entries to Plato's
Phaedrus
, Aristotle's
Rhetoric
, Cicero's
De oratore
, and Erasmus's
De copia
, there
yet seems to be a rhetorical canon—perhaps made inescapable, like our tradition itself, by the way we
planned this volume. Nonetheless, if the wisdom of that canon is attended to in all its impulses toward
openness and experience, rhetoricians—old-school or otherwise—will welcome its inevitable expansion
to include, say, the contributions from studies in African-American, communicationist, comparative,
feminist, and queer rhetoric, all of which are already integral to our subject in a way that the word
related
in our Synoptic Outline might seem merely to patronize. Within this book, however, their
contributions are encountered in alphabetical order as matters that seem to have an equally-significant
bearing on the whole. The ostensible hierarchies of the Synoptic Outline merely locate what we take to
be our foundations.
Those who believe they already know the subject sufficiently well may wonder why an encyclopedia
about it has been published. These readers will, we hope, browse this work and find the answer the
editors themselves found to their own similar inquiry. There are entries herein that might never have
been written, or might not have been so succinctly put forth, without the prompting of a project like
this. If some essays are reliquaries, others clearly move our subject toward its fourth millenium, in which
it appears that rhetoric will continue to be as useful for analysis as for genesis; that is, as useful for the
interpretation of discourse and phenomena as it is for their composition. Finally, although rhetoric is
often thought of as a blend of literary and political interests, the subject itself is too seldom viewed
discretely, as something that just might possibly stand alone. The “old rhetoric,” one commentator
observed, “has been spread over a multiplicity of disciplines”—but not, we believe, to such an airy
thinness that something of its integrity cannot be restored.
There are other peculiarities, of course, one in particular: Although rhetoric is a people art, not one
person is listed among the entries of this encyclopedia—not even Aristotle, not even Nietzsche. That
decision was based on our effort to abstract rhetoric as far as we could, not only from this or that
discipline but also from this or that theorist, time, place, culture, and to endeavor to search for its
principles. We recognize the paradox, in view of what we take rhetoric to be. It is nearly impossible
either to abstract a temporal cause from its effects or to look anew at a subject anchored in but not
confined to an ancient tradition. But the attempt to do so, we believe, sets this work apart from other
recent publications as the
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition
edited by Theresa Enos (1996) or
Heinrich Lausberg's magisterial
Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik
(1960).
There are oversights, no doubt, omissions and errors. But we have done what we could in chasing this
Proteus, with more than a little help from Christopher Collins, Merilee Johnson, and Mark Mones at
Oxford University Press, who were always ready with logistical support and advice. Oxford, moreover,
was the “onlie begetter” of this work, though encouraged from the outset by scholars in the field. Those
of us who were drawn to it, however reluctantly at first, gradually became enthusiastic participants, an
attitude we hope we demonstrate.
Kenneth Burke dedicates his
Grammar of Motives
(1945) “To Elizabeth / Without Whom Not.” I shall
follow the example of this master rhetorician and offer similar praise of my colleagues on the editorial
board—Shadi Bartsch, Tom Farrell, Heinrich Plett—and of our distinguished contributors. They are truly,
in the language of Cicero, the
litterati sine quibus non
of this endeavor.
Page 4 / 837
—T
HOMAS
O. S
LOANE
Berkeley, California
October 2000
Abolitionist rhetoric
. See
African-American rhetoric
, article on
Abolitionist rhetoric
.
How to cite this entry:
"Abolitionist rhetoric"
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
. Ed. Thomas O. Sloane.
© 2006 Oxford University Press
.
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric: (e-reference edition). Oxford University Press. The Midnight University. 16
Ad Hominem Argument
.
Argumentum ad hominem
refers to a kind of argument in which the person is
the focus of the argument, as opposed to objective evidence on which the argument may be based.
Argumentum ad hominem
has been prominently treated as a fallacy, in the logical tradition; however,
recent work has shown that this type of argument is not always fallacious and that there is pervasive
ambiguity in how it has been defined and what it has been taken to represent. [See
Fallacies
.]
The expression
argumentum ad hominem
is ambiguous. The main meaning it has in popular speech, as
well as in the traditions of logic and rhetoric, is the use of personal attack as a way of refuting an
argument. In its simplest form, this argument has the following schema: so-and-so is a person of bad
(defective) character, therefore his argument should not be accepted. This simple form of argument is
properly called
ad hominem
. It is also often called the “abusive”
ad hominem
argument in many modern
logic textbooks. It could perhaps even be called the personal attack or character attack type of argument.
However, not all attacks on character are
ad hominem
arguments. In order to be an
ad hominem
argument in the proper sense, the following conditions must be met. There must be two parties involved
in disputation. The first party must have put a particular argument forward. The second party must then
cite the bad character of the first party as a reason for concluding that the argument is no good. For a
contrasting example, in a famous biography of the singer Frank Sinatra, the writer alleged that Sinatra
was a person of bad character. But since no particular argument attributed to Sinatra was being attacked,
the argumentation in the book would not properly be said to be
ad hominem
in the main sense
appropriate for logic and rhetoric.
There is also another meaning of the expression
argumentum ad hominem
that has a place in traditional
logic and rhetoric, as well as in everyday speech. This secondary meaning is not so dominant as the main
meaning, but it is a fairly common usage in philosophical speech. According to this meaning, an argument
is
ad hominem
if it is based on the other party's position in a dispute. For example, suppose that prolife
Bob and prochoice Wilma are engaged in a dispute on the issue of abortion and that Wilma puts forward
an argument based on the premise that human life is sacred. Let us say that she does not accept this
premise, but she uses it to try to convince Bob to accept a conclusion because she knows that Bob
accepts the premise. This form of argument is called “argument from commitment” in modern
argumentation theory (Walton, 1996). Traditionally, it was called the
ex concessis
argument. But
traditionally as well, in philosophy, it has often been called the
argumentum ad hominem
. However, the
two kinds are distinct. Not all arguments from commitment (
ex concessis
arguments) are personal-attack
arguments. And not all
ad hominem
arguments in the personal-attack sense are arguments from
commitment (although many of them are, as will be shown below). How then, one might well wonder, did
this ambiguity of terminology arise?
The answer, as Nuchelmans (1993) has shown, is that there are two separate lines of historical
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