It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Time and Narrative

Oneself as Another

The third way.

When Black Culture and Black Consciousness first appeared thirty years ago, it marked a revolution in our understanding of African American history. Contrary to prevailing ideas at the time, which held that African culture disappeared quickly under slavery and that black Americans had little group pride, history, or cohesiveness, Levine uncovered a cultural treasure trove, illuminating a rich and complex African American oral tradition, including songs, proverbs, jokes, folktales, and long narrative poems called toasts--work that dated from before and after emancipation. The fact that these ideas and sources seem so commonplace now is in large part due this book and the scholarship that followed in its wake. A landmark work that was part of the \"cultural turn\" in American history, Black Culture and Black Consciousness profoundly influenced an entire generation of historians and continues to be read and taught. For this anniversary reissue, Levine wrote a new preface reflecting on the writing of the book and its place within intellectual trends in African American and American cultural history.

Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom

Many rhetoricians treat argument from example as a kind of induction, an illustration of a general principle. Although this is one function of example, consistent with Aristotle's statements about the paradeigma and The New Rhetoric's argumentation by example, it camouflages the practice of exemplary proof that has contributed to our richest sense of rhetorical understanding. Inductive example allies itself with the principles of theoretical science and contradicts Aristotle's insight that rhetoric functions where rules or systems are wanting. A properly rhetorical understanding of the exemplum does not work through a universal, implicit or otherwise, but follows a sideways movement from particular to particular. This essay traces the alliance of the paradeigma with inductive science to an unstable fault-line in our Aristotelian heritage, then retraces the path of the prudential tradition by following the long and distinguished career of the rhetorical example in the West in order to reclaim this heritage and to challenge the pre-eminence of inductive subsumption.

Where There Are No Rules or Systems to Guide Us: Argument from Example in a Hermeneutic Rhetoric.

Theory in the cognitive sciences around schemas, neural networks, and mapping supports and complements a hermeneutic rhetoric's championing of informal and practical reasoning against more rigid structures of logic, where concept, category, and judgment are born out of contingency and the to and fro of discursive practice. Contingency is not some extrinsic nuisance to adaptation for a neurobiological theory that posits a labile and dynamic structuring of cognition in the ongoing interaction of organism and environment. The endless reconfiguration and enrichment of neural patterns that come about through experience are born out of contingency and are suggestive, at their own level, for the performative view of rhetoric as the medium of reason at the level of discourse. This venture into cognitive science and neurobiology is undertaken to illuminate and develop our understandings of topical invention in rhetoric.

Locating the instability of the topic places: Rhetoric, phronesis and neurobiology

This intellectual history and textual analysis of Hans-Georg Gadamer's famous and obscure theme of the verbum interius or 'inner word', serves as an indispensable guide to and reference for hermeneutic theory. John Arthos here gives a full exposition and interpretation of the medieval doctrine of the inner word, long one of the most challenging ideas in Gadamer's "Truth and Method". The scholastic idea of a word that is thought but not yet spoken serves Augustine as an analogy for the procession of the Trinity, serves Aquinas as the medium between divine ideas and human expression, and serves Gadamer as an expression of the embodied nature of human language. Arthos offers a history of the idea of the inner word in ancient and medieval thought, its place in German philosophy, and its significance for probing the deepest implications of hermeneutic understanding. Arthos also provides a close reading of Gadamer's exegesis of the source texts of the doctrine of the inner word. He cross-references Gadamer's analyzes with the original texts and draws out their Heideggerian and Hegelian overtones. Through this close reading, Arthos deepens our understanding of the radical nature of Gadamer's thought, which not only calls upon the authority of tradition but also develops some of the profoundest insights of classical and Judaeo-Christian teaching about language.

http://www3.nd.edu/~undpress/excerpts/P01295-ex.pdf

The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

A charismatic sleight of hand characterizes many rhetorical transactions in African American culture, an adroit manipulation engendered by a history that crushed open confrontation. The skill of the double voiced utterance was appropriated into a performance art which is practiced even today. The Million Man March exemplified the art of “gittin’ ovuh,” an action that simultaneously undercuts one's enemies‐putting something over on someone‐and provides spiritual uplift‐getting over to the promised land. Such a magical performance works by exploiting the power of rhetoric to show and hide. But this is not the same as an exploitation of sophistic technique, because there is an overlapping of the magic of illusion and the magic of the sacred. For contemporary rhetoric this presents an occasion to regard the ethics of deception and the curious phenomenon of a moral sophistry. Louis Farrakhan, although often viewed (perhaps with reason) as either ambitious claimant to national black leadership, or as a skillful...

The shaman‐trickster's art of misdirection: The rhetoric of Farrakhan and the million men

Hans-Georg Gadamer's idiosyncratic reading of what he calls “the distant ancient meaning of rhetoric” pulls out an unfamiliar thread in the history of the Greek logos from the weave of the ancient texts, and his separation of the sophistic challenge from rhetoric proper stems from his commitment to rhetoric. What has typically been read as rhetoric's counter-tradition, a kairotic-performative rhetoric championed by Isocrates and Cicero against Platonic essentialist philosophy, is for Gadamer the counter-tradition to Western essentialism as a whole, anchored squarely in Plato's dialogic example. In this reading, Plato becomes strange to all ersatz platonists, and the great body of the dialogues become the gravitational center of a humanist rhetoric. Gadamer's recommendation that we treat Plato's dialegesthai as the highest fruit of ancient rhetoric provides a fresh opportunity to reimagine our interdisciplinary debates.

John Arthos

Papers

Where There Are No Rules or Systems to Guide Us: Argument from Example in a Hermeneutic Rhetoric.

Locating the instability of the topic places: Rhetoric, phronesis and neurobiology

The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

The shaman‐trickster's art of misdirection: The rhetoric of Farrakhan and the million men

Gadamer's Rhetorical Imaginary