Aristotle's contribution to the sum of wisdom dominates all our philosophy and even provides direction for much of our science. And all effective debaters, whether they know it or not, employ Aristotle's 3 basic principles of effective argument that form the spine of Rhetoric: "ethos," the impact of the speaker's character upon the audience; "pathos," the arousing of the emotions; and "logos," the advancement of pertinent arguments.

Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric challenges the accepted idea of a singular rhetorical tradition poorly maintained from the Athenian Golden Age until the present. Author Susan Miller argues that oratorical rhetoric is but one among many codes that guide the production of texts and proposes that emotion and trust are central to the motives and effects of rhetoric.

Contrastive Functional Analysis

Andrew Chesterman

University of Helsinki

 

Reason to Believe is about teaching and the possibility of making positive change in education. The authors explore the way that American pragmatism and the rhetoric of North American romanticism work together to create a method for restoring hope to teachers and responsiveness to the systems they work within. What the book calls romantic/pragmatic rhetoric offers teachers a way to locate the roots of their beliefs and methods, to name them, and thus to act to change and challenge systems that have become in William James' phrase "tyrannical machines."