Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic, is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. Aristotle defines rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law, for passage of proposals in the assembly, or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies, he calls it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics". Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle's three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric or phases of developing a persuasive speech were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
Stephen Edelston Toulmin was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning. Throughout his writings, he sought to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind moral issues. His works were later found useful in the field of rhetoric for analyzing rhetorical arguments. The Toulmin model of argumentation, a diagram containing six interrelated components used for analyzing arguments, and published in his 1958 book The Uses of Argument, was considered his most influential work, particularly in the field of rhetoric and communication, and in computer science.
Edward P.J. Corbett was an American rhetorician, educator, and scholarly author. Corbett chaired the 1970 Conference on College Composition and Communication, and was chair of the organization and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English Executive Committee in 1971. He was also chair of the Rhetoric Society of America from 1973 to 1977. From 1974 to 1979, he was editor of the journal College Composition and Communication. He is known for promoting classical rhetoric among composition scholars and teachers.
Chaïm Perelman was a Belgian philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth century. His chief work is the Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique (1958), with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (1969).
Rhetoric of science is a body of scholarly literature exploring the notion that the practice of science is a rhetorical activity. It emerged following a number of similarly-oriented disciplines during the late 20th century, including the disciplines of sociology of scientific knowledge, history of science, and philosophy of science, but it is practiced most fully by rhetoricians in departments of English, speech, and communication.
Robert L. Scott was an American scholar influential in the study of rhetorical theory, criticism of public address, debate, and communication research and practice. He was professor emeritus in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of five books, numerous articles in speech, communications, philosophy, and rhetoric journals, and contributed many book chapters. His article "On Viewing Rhetoric As Epistemic", is considered one of the most important academic articles written in rhetorical studies in the past century.
James Phelan is an American writer, literary scholar, and Distinguished University Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He joined the faculty of Ohio State in 1977 after earning his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago, he studied with the Chicago School theorists Sheldon Sacks and Wayne Booth. In 2013 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Aarhus University (Denmark), and in 2016 he was inducted into the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 2020 the International Society for the Study of Narrative named him the winner of the 2021 Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award. The citation for the Award reads in part,"Phelan has influenced generations of narrative theorists and literary scholars, as he has provided a powerful model for thinking about the purposes of literature and reasons and methods to engage with it. In so doing, he has transformed and energized the interdisciplinary field of narrative studies." The recording of the Award ceremony from the May 2021 ISSN Conference can be found at the Society's website.
Informal logic encompasses the principles of logic and logical thought outside of a formal setting. However, the precise definition of "informal logic" is a matter of some dispute. Ralph H. Johnson and J. Anthony Blair define informal logic as "a branch of logic whose task is to develop non-formal standards, criteria, procedures for the analysis, interpretation, evaluation, criticism and construction of argumentation." This definition reflects what had been implicit in their practice and what others were doing in their informal logic texts.
The Quarterly Journal of Speech(QJS) is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the National Communication Association. QJS publishes original scholarship and book reviews that take a rhetorical approach to diverse texts, discourses, and cultural practices through which public beliefs, norms, identities, institutions, affects, and actions are constituted, empowered, enacted, and circulated. Rhetorical scholarship traverses and mobilizes many different intellectual, archival, disciplinary, and political vectors, traditions, and methods, and QJS seeks to honor and engage such differences.
Henry Johnstone Jr. (1920–2000) was an American philosopher and rhetorician known especially for his notion of the "rhetorical wedge" and his re-evaluation of the ad hominem fallacy. He was Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University (1952–1984) and began studying Classics in the late 1970s. He was the founder and longtime editor of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric and edited the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.
The Journal of Philosophical Research is a peer-reviewed academic journal sponsored by the University of Notre Dame and the Canadian Philosophical Association. It publishes articles in English or French, from any philosophical orientation. The current editor-in-chief is Raja Halwani. It is published by the Philosophy Documentation Center.
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of philosophy, established in 1998 and published five times a year by Springer Science+Business Media. It publishes articles in English, focusing on ethics and related fields. It is edited by A. W. Musschenga and F. R. Heeger.
Matthew Henry Kramer is an American philosopher, currently Professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He writes mainly in the areas of metaethics, normative ethics, legal philosophy, and political philosophy. He is a leading proponent of legal positivism. He has been Director of the Cambridge Forum for Legal and Political Philosophy since 2000. He has been teaching at Cambridge University and at Churchill College since 1994.
Diane Davis is a post-structuralist rhetorician and professor of Rhetoric and Writing, English, and Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She was the Director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab at UT from 2009 to 2017, and is now the chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. She holds the Kenneth Burke Chair of Rhetoric and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where she teaches intensive summer seminars on Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.
Edwin Benjamin Black was one of the leading scholars of rhetorical criticism. He criticized "Neo-Aristotelianism" for its lacking a larger historical, social, political, and cultural understanding of the text and for its concentrating only on certain limited methods and aspects, such as the Aristotelian modes of rhetoric: ethos, pathos, and logos. He urged critics to analyze both the motives and goals within situated cultural norms and ideologies.
Anthony Edward Schiappa, Jr. is an American scholar of communication and rhetoric, currently Professor of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he holds the John E. Burchard Chair of Humanities; from 2013 to 2019, he also served as the program's Head. Previously, he spent seventeen years in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, the last seven of which he served as chair. He is the author of eight books and numerous articles that have appeared in classics, communication, English/Composition, philosophy, psychology, and law journals.
Christopher William Tindale is a Canadian philosopher specializing in rhetoric, argumentation theory, and ancient Greek philosophy. Tindale is an editor of the journal Informal Logic, and currently serves as the chair of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric. He has published numerous books and articles, translated into several languages, with a focus on argumentation and rhetoric.
Gerard Alan Hauser is an author and academic, and professor emeritus of communication and college professor emeritus of distinction in rhetoric at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on the interaction between formal and vernacular rhetorics in the public sphere. He has authored several books and numerous articles on the subject, and his writings have helped shaped the field of modern rhetoric.
The rhetoric of technology is both an object and field of study. It refers to the ways in which makers and consumers of technology talk about and make decisions regarding technology and also the influence that technology has on discourse. Studies of the rhetoric of technology are interdisciplinary. Scholars in communication, media ecology, and science studies research the rhetoric of technology. Technical communication scholars are also concerned with the rhetoric of technology.
Erik Doxtader is a scholar of rhetoric and critical theory. Born in Fort Collins, Colorado, Doxtader took a BA at the University of Kansas and both an MA and Ph.D. from the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.
