The ethics of rhetoric

Our subject begins with the threshold difficulty of defining the question which Plato’s _Phaedrus_ was meant to answer. Students of this justly celebrated dialogue have felt unc...

We have maintained that dialectic and rhetoric are distinguishable stages of argumentation, although often they are not distinguished by the professional mind, to say nothing of...

We are now in position to affirm that the rhetorical study of an argument begins with a study of the sources. But since almost any extended argument will draw upon more than one...

Although most readers of Lincoln sense the prevailing aspect of his arguments, there has been no thoughtful treatment of this interesting subject. Albert Beveridge merely allude...

In an earlier part of this work we defined rhetoric as something which creates an informed appetition for the good. Such definition must recognize the rhetorical force of things...

There are many who have wished that Milton were living at this hour, but not all have taken into account the fact that his great polemical writings demand an heroic kind of atte...

Few species of composition seem so antiquated, so little available for any practical purpose today, as the oratory in which the generation of our grandparents delighted. The typ...

One of the serious problems of our age is the question of how scientific information, which is largely the product of special tools of investigation, shall be communicated to th...

We have shown that rhetorical force must be conceived as a power transmitted through the links of a chain that extends upward toward some ultimate source. The higher links of th...