This paper is a contribution to a special issue of Hobbes Studies considering Quentin Skinner’s
Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes
at thirty. One of the central claims of Skinner’s book is that, having rejected humanist methods of composition based on the manipulation of rhetorical proofs for a method of purely philosophical reasoning founded on demonstrative certainty, Hobbes later reversed himself, effecting a rapprochement between rhetoric and philosophy. This contribution to the special issue argues, first, that the main textual basis for the rapprochement (a passage in the “Review, and Conclusion” to Leviathan) does not actually provide evidence for a volte face. It is shown, rather, to comprise a eulogy of Sidney Godolphin. The paper then examines some recent versions of the rapprochement thesis, which draw on the premise that Hobbes conceived of the end of philosophy as human benefit rather than truth.
This essay develops the rhetorical analysis of satire in
Leviathan
presented by Quentin Skinner in
Reason and Rhetoric and the Philosophy of Hobbes
. It considers the ways in which the literary features of satire supported Hobbes’s philosophical and political project – not only by ridiculing his opponents, but...
Two debates in the analytic philosophy of literature have run in parallel: one asks how literary criticism can be rational when critical reasons neither entail nor inductively support the readings they back (Isenberg, Sibley); the other asks whether literature has cognitive value, and is stalled on a dilemma, since ext...
This essay is written as a tribute to James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop arguing that the poetry they wrote in 1970s shows how lyric can be used as a rhetorical form through which not just to criticize but to refuse conventional narratives of historical continuity and accountability. The essay attempts to reawaken fo...
Peter Dimock· Twentieth Century Literature· 0 citations
Forty years since Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s 1987 SBL Presidential Address, we see a retreat from reading ideology and a recommendation to emphasize reading pleasure by a number of prominent scholars in the fields specifically mentioned by Schüssler Fiorenza to describe the interdisciplinary turn in biblical stud...
I make explicit how Michael Beaney’s The Joy of Chinese Philosophy is a reflexive book: its subject matter, the happy fish dialogue, and the overarching goal in discussing that subject are the same. Both the dialogue and the book, I argue, present a performative argument in favor of roaming beyond the confines of one’s...
Fons Dewulf· Asian Journal of Philosophy· 0 citations
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