The Letters of David Hume.

When Michael Dukakis accused George H.W. Bush of being the 'Joe Isuzu of American Politics' during the 1988 presidential campaign, he asserted in a particularly American tenor the near-ancient idea that lying and politics (and perhaps advertising, too) are inseparable, or at least intertwined. Our response to this phenomenon, writes the renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay, tends to vacillate - often impotently - between moral outrage and amoral realism. In "The Virtues of Mendacity", Jay resolves to avoid this conventional framing of the debate over lying and politics by examining what has been said in support of, and opposition to, political lying from Plato and St. Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Jay proceeds to show that each philosopher's argument corresponds to a particular conception of the political realm, which decisively shapes his or her attitude toward political mendacity. He then applies this insight to a variety of contexts and questions about lying and politics. Surprisingly, he concludes by asking if lying in politics is really all that bad. The political hypocrisy that Americans in particular periodically decry may be, in Jay's view, the best alternative to the violence justified by those who claim to know the truth.

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Pathos is a deeply problematic notion in the Western rhetorical tradition. This essay proposes that cross‐cultural rhetorical studies may provide singularly valuable insights into the sources of these difficulties with pathos. The argument proceeds by means of an extensive case study, that of appeals to the emotions in Classical Chinese rhetorics. The presuppositions of these rhetorics highlight the contingent nature of certain fundamental assumptions of many Western rhetorics and also point to potentially fruitful lines of reconceptualization for Western rhetorical theory, criticism, and pedagogy.

Pathos reconsidered from the perspective of classical Chinese rhetorical theories

Is appealing to emotions in argumentation ever legitimate and, if so, what is the best way to analyze and evaluate such appeals? After overviewing a normative pragmatic perspective on appealing to emotions in argumentation, I present answers to these questions from pragma-dialectical, informal logical, and rhetorical perspectives, and note positions shared and supplemented by a normative pragmatic perspective. A normative pragmatic perspective holds that appealing to emotions in argumentation may be relevant and non-manipulative; and that emotional appeals may be analyzed as strategies that create pragmatic reasons and assessed by the standard of formal propriety or reasonability under the circumstances. I illustrate the explanatory power of the perspective by analyzing and evaluating some argumentation from Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.” I conclude that a normative pragmatic perspective offers a more complete account of appealing to emotions in argumentation than a pragma-dialectial, informal logical, or rhetorical perspective alone, identifies a range of norms available to arguers, and explains why appealing to emotions may be legitimate in particular cases of argumentation.

A Normative Pragmatic Perspective on Appealing to Emotions in Argumentation

This essay argues that the two principal modes of organizing rhetorical theories in histories of rhetoric, according to influence or systems, are problematic. Influence and systems histories frequently mask or distort the particularity of rhetoric's history, and they implicitly disenfranchise future retheorizing of rhetoric. These problems result from the preservative and progressive politics that inhere in the ostensibly neutral organizational devices of influence and systems respectively. In conclusion, the essay forwards an alternative critical history that privileges the notions of text, particularity, change, and criticism.

Contested histories of rhetoric: The politics of preservation, progress, and change

A substantial body of literature has been produced in the twentieth century by religious and philosophical writers on the ethics of belief. Discussion of this topic has generally focused on the processes leading up to belief within the individual, so that it would not be inaccurate to say that for most of these writers ‘the ethics of belief’ means ‘the ethics of coming–to–believe’. There has been little attention among these writers, however, to the moral questions which surround the production or inducement of beliefs in others, to the ethics of persuasion. An extension of the ethics of belief to cover moral issues which arise in connection with persuasion seems reasonable; the ethics of belief, widely construed, might be said to encompass questions about both the production of beliefs within oneself and the inducement of beliefs in others.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/8B46EF9C0B54F0B4EB560E59BA9295AB/S003441250001547Xa.pdf/div-class-title-st-augustine-and-the-problem-of-deception-in-religious-persuasion-div.pdf

St Augustine and the problem of deception in religious persuasion

Two admissions in Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres seem peculiar in relation to his own rhetorical practice. One is his observation in Lecture 25 that it is debate in popular assemblies, rather than the pulpit, which provides the "most illustrious field" for the highest kind of eloquence. The other, not so striking in itself, but somewhat so in relation to Blair's own choice of rhetorical strategies as a preacher, is his judgment in Lecture 26, and again in Lecture 29, that among modern divines, it is French preachers rather than English who most nearly approach the ideal of true eloquence. There are repeated indications in the middle parts of Blair's Lectures that he accepts the Ciceronian view that the truest eloquence is strongly pathetic in the sense of vigorously arousing the more violent and more perturbing emotions. This highest degree of eloquence he characterizes in Lecture 25 as eloquence

Hugh Blair and the True Eloquence.

Contemporary moral philosophy for the most part relegates examples to a negative role, as counter-examples. In this essay a view is articulated according to which the example has a much more positive and more fundamental role to play in the argumentation of moral philosophy: according to this view, examples may provide grounding for general moral principles. Some of the philosophical implications or presuppositions of such a view of examples are examined.

The role of examples in moral philosophy

Agnosticism and atheism

L'A. defend la validite logique et morale de ce qu'il nomme en latin l'argument pour la pitie, contre la tradition des manuels rhetoriques qui, depuis Aristote et Ciceron, denoncent le recours a l'emotion, et plus particulierement a la pitie, comme un argument fallacieux et non legal au regard de l'art oratoire comme de la morale, etant donne le caractere non rationnel et non volitif de la pitie qui ne peut s'eriger en principe d'action

Alan Brinton

Papers

St Augustine and the problem of deception in religious persuasion

Hugh Blair and the True Eloquence.

The role of examples in moral philosophy

Agnosticism and atheism

A plea for argumentum ad misericordiam