Rhetorical Turn Research Articles

Fantasy as Epanalepsis: ‘An Anticipation of Retrospection’

This article begins by discussing the rhetorical turn of the first sentence in M. T. Anderson's Thirsty. That first sentence reads: 'In the spring, there are vampires in the wind' (1997 p. 11). Do not these words sound similar to the subtitle of Tolkien's The Hobbit: 'There and Back Again'? I mean, doesn't the shape of the sentence that begins Thirsty remind us of the meaning of Tolkien's subtitle? The sentence begins with a prepositional phrase and ends with a prepositional phrase; in other words, it begins, with a phrase blowing in the wind and ends with the return of that wind; it begins, goes there, and then comes back, so to speak. When winter passes, a spring wind is sure to follow. If we are of a psychoanalytic cast of mind, we might say that rhetorically, the sentence enacts a return - the return of the repressed - but it does so slyly; it disguises the return of the repressed because we always have to disguise repressed content when it insists on emerging from the unconscious. Those pesky vampires insist on returning time and again; this time they come in with the wind - a sort of undead Chinook. My argument, then, is that fantasy rhetorically enacts the journey of return. When we begin a fantasy, we anticipate a return; we read retrospectively. Fantasy can deliver a productive nostalgia, a looking backward in order to look forward, fantasy opens a space for invention, and what returns in fantasy is both the repressed itself and the mechanism of repression.

Interpretations of Renaissance humanism

Preface Contributors Introduction, Angelo Mazzocco PART I 1. Kristeller's Humanists as Heirs of the Medieval Dictatores, Ronald G. Witt 2. The Origins of Robert Black 3. Humanism: Ancient Learning, Criticism, Schools and Universities, Paul F. Grendler 4. Curial Humanism Seen Through the Prism of the Papal Library, Massimo Miglio 5. Humanism and the Medieval Encyclopedic Tradition, Giuseppe Mazzotta PART II 6. Humanism and Scholasticism: Toward an Historical Definition, Riccardo Fubini 7. Religion and the Modernity of Renaissance James Hankins 8. Rethinking Christian Humanism, Charles G. Nauert 9. Renaissance Humanism: the Rhetorical Turn, Eckhard Kessler 10. Literary Humanism in the Renaissance, Arthur F. Kinney PART III 11. Petrarch: Founder of Renaissance Humanism?, Angelo Mazzocco 12. Angelo Poliziano, Aldo Manuzio, Theodore Gaza, George of Trebizond, and Chapter 90 of the Miscellaneorum Centuria Prima (With an Edition and Translation), John Monfasani 13. Reinterpreting Renaissance Humanism: Marcello Adriani and the Recovery of Lucretius, Alison Brown Bibliography Index

Introduction to Special Issue: Select Papers from the Commemoration of the 50Th Anniversary of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's the New Rhetoric

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca published Traite de l'argumentation: la nouvelle rhetorique in 1958, a work that has since come to represent the revival of rhetoric, helping to prompt the rhetorical turn in twentieth-century thought. The influence of their work is seen in a host of disciplines, including rhetoric, philosophy, jurisprudence, communication studies, critical theory, argumentation and informal reasoning. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of the Perelman Olbrechts-Tyteca magnus opus, John Gage, Jim Crosswhite and I collaborated to host international conference at the University of Oregon on May 17-20, 2008. Featured speakers at the conference included Jeanne Fahnestock, University of Maryland; Alan G. Gross, University of Minnesota; Michael C. Left, University of Memphis; Perelman's daughter Noemi Mattis Perelman; Francis J. Mootz III, Dickinson School of Law, Pennsylvania State University; Christopher W. Tindale, University of Windsor; and Barbara Warnick, University of Pittsburgh. Over 100 papers were presented at the conference on a variety of topics, including: argumentation, informal reasoning, legal argument and justice, rhetoric and human rights, and ethical rhetoric and communication. Dale Hample has generously offered me the opportunity to select from among the conference papers those the readers of Argumentation and Advocacy would find informative on issues related to argumentation theory and practice. The four essays in this special volume represent significant thinking about the new rhetoric, and the high quality of scholarship we witnessed at the conference. Three of the four essays are based on original archival research, and the author of the fourth provides his experience teaching Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's argument theory with a distinguished philosopher and the responses of his students. Jim Crosswhite, author of the lead article, is one the best readers of Perelman and is well known for his Rhetoric of Reason (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), which the Modern Language Association awarded the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize. His essay in this special issue extends his thinking about the new rhetoric. For scholars and teachers of argument, his essay will be a significant contribution. He highlights the limitations of argument modeling, and illustrates the need for argument theory to better develop the sources of argument invention. He juxtaposes the Toulmin model with Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's theory of argumentation. While the former is static, decidedly unrhetorical, the latter, Crosswhite maintains, is less a model and more a philosophical effort to set the boundaries of argument and the sources of argument invention. Enacting Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's agenda, Crosswhite reflects on his concrete experience teaching a Perelmanian perspective of argumentation in collaboration with philosopher Mark Johnson, co-author of Metaphors We Live By, and student evaluations of his efforts to use the new rhetoric in the classroom. Perelman was a Jew, a biographical and cultural fact influencing the new rhetoric. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi and Janice W. Fernheimer consider both argument theory in the new rhetoric and the contested nature of twentieth-century Judaism in their essays. Ritivoi is the author of the well-reviewed Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory (State University of New York Press, Albany, New York, 2006). She provides a new interpretation of what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca believed was their most innovative contribution to philosophical thinking, the notion of dissociation. She considers dissociation in both its pluralistic and dichotomous expressions. The framing of the post-World War II Romanian Diaspora and the Aron-DeGaulle confrontation, in this essay, is a contribution to our field's thinking about dissociation, bolstered with research conducted in the Hoover archive and a sophisticated close reading of the arguments advanced in the Aron-DeGaulle exchange. …

Mapping practitioner perceptions of ‘It’s research based’: scientific discourse, speech acts and the use and abuse of research

Our goal is to deconstruct the text formed by practitioners’ narratives about the use of the claim ‘It’s research based’ to understand both how this claim is used and received by practitioners and how it may impact on teachers’ attitudes. We map a range of differences in these narratives about what is ‘real’ (research versus practice), patterns (‘rhetorical turns’) in how the claim is received and how the claim is valued. We question the power position of scientific discourse, explore the use of speech acts to either wield power or resist it and speculate about the results in terms of the use and abuse of research itself. We find that practitioners vary according to whether they: (a) adopt a scientized response reflecting uncritical acceptance of the claim; (b) maintain an attitude of sceptical and critical reflection, but tentatively adopt research based on the claim; (c) resist and even defy the claim, reflecting a hypercritical response that ignores research altogether and insists on their own practice as the locus of the ‘real’.

Reversing the Grand Tour: Guest Discourse in Indian Travel Narratives

In this article, Julie F. Codell examines the rhetorical turns and themes of travel accounts written in the late nineteenth century by Indian travelers to Europe, demonstrating how their guest narratives structured comparisons between Britain and India in particular, comparisons that at once sublimated and remained invisible to imperial power relationships. The essay shows the way in which these travelers wrote back to the genre of travel accounts by appropriating, reversing, and ironizing its conventions-including its ethnographic posture, the aristocratic Grand Tour, and the celebration of hospitality-as well as its specific vocabulary. Seeing Britain as at once utopia and dystopia, these writers projected an empowering atopia, which allowed them to imagine the future of India.

C. S. Peirce's Rhetorical Turn

While work of such expositors as Max H. Fisch, James J. Liszka, Lucia Santaella, Anne Friedman, and Mats Bergman has helped bring into sharp focus why Peirce took third branch of semiotic (speculative rhetoric) to be the highest and most living branch of logic, more needs to be done to show extent to which least developed branch of his theory of signs is, at once, its potentially most fruitful and important. The author of this paper thus begins to trace out even more fully than these scholars have done unfinished trajectory of Peirce's eventual realization of importance of speculative rhetoric. In doing so, he is arguing for a shift from formalist and taxonomic emphasis of so many commentators to a more thoroughly pragmaticist and rhetorical approach to interpreting Peirce's theory of signs.

Rhetorical Turn in Cognitive Science

Rhetorical Turn in Cognitive Science

The Hermeneutic Version of the Rhetorical Turn, or Heidegger and Gadamer in the Recuperation of a Humanist Rhetoric

The Hermeneutic Version of the Rhetorical Turn, or Heidegger and Gadamer in the Recuperation of a Humanist Rhetoric

‘Women and children first!’ Anti-immigration parties and gender in Norway and the Netherlands

ABSTRACT Immigration, multiculturalism and citizenship policies have deeply divided political parties in Western Europe. In Norway and the Netherlands these divisions have been exploited successfully by radical-right populist parties. Akkerman and Hagelund compare the ideas and policies of the Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party) and the Dutch Lijst Pim Fortuyn (List Pim Fortuyn) with regard to cultural diversity, immigration and citizenship policies. What initially puzzled them was that issues that are normally left out of the radical-right agenda—such as gender equality, liberal family laws and women's participation in the labour market—seem to have been moved centre-stage in the policies and discourses of these parties. This is a development worthy of closer scrutiny. In Norway and the Netherlands, one can observe a general shift away from multiculturalism and a growing emphasis on citizenship and social cohesion. The issue of women's rights seems to provide a key to developing a renewed understanding of the boundaries of cultural diversity in these countries. To what extent have the radical-right parties provoked a rhetorical turn and policy shift towards cultural unity in Norway and the Netherlands, and to what extent are the programmes of these parties based on a defence of liberal values and gender equality?

Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (review)

Reviewed by: Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style Roderick McGillis (bio) Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. By Constance W. Hassett. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. Recently we have seen a number of studies that discuss mainstream literature alongside children's literature, [End Page 211] and this cross-border writing is welcome. Even if we decide that the conventions of children's and young adult literature differ from those of mainstream (for lack of a better term) work, we must recognize that many of our canonical writers crossed over and wrote for the young. The nineteenth century is rich in such writers, from Dickens and Thackery to MacDonald and Gaskell. Novelists often wrote for children as well as for adults. Poets, however, seem less inclined to cross over. As far as I know, the likes of Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, and so on did not write for children. The recent A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002) does not contain a chapter on children's verse. The only mentions of children's poetry are in the chapters on "Nonsense" and on "Hymn." Thus, a study such as Hassett's is doubly welcome: it reminds us that Victorians wrote poetry for children, and it notices that one of the period's premier poets practiced her craft for children as well as for adults. In Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style, Rossetti emerges as a poet accomplished for the strength of her vision and the intricacy of her form. The poetry she wrote for children contains the same delicacy, or what Hassett calls "patience of style," as does her poetry for adults. The argument has to do with Rossetti's formal grace: "if we wish to understand a poem as a response to an issue, we must treat it not only as a statement but as an action; what it says is inseparable from how it moves" (3). Hassett's book demonstrates just how subtle and meaningful even the most ostensibly simple poem can be. What makes this study invaluable are its demonstrations of close reading. Hassett is attuned to nuance, subtlety, and delicacy. She notices intricate formal beauties, from the working of alliterative affect to the suggestiveness of language. She knows a rhetorical turn when she sees and hears one. For her, poems such as Rossetti's develop organically, like surprising blossoms from familiar shoots. For example, she notices the "watchfulness that underlines" many of Rossetti's images and Rossetti's "empathetic heeding of what evolves" (213). The stanza Hassett scrutinizes here is Joy is but sorrow, While we know It ends tomorrow:- Even so! Joy with lifted veil Shows a face as pale As the fair changing moon so frail and fair. Of course, Hassett acknowledges the paradox of a joy that is not really joy. But her interest is in the movement of the stanza from the opening paradox to the turn at "Even so," to the potentially clichéd unveiling. Hassett goes on to examine the second stanza of this poem, where she lights on the "evolving sound pattern" that "turns pain into a tenderly intricate cleansing" (214). We could press these stanzas harder than Hassett chooses to do, noticing the intertextual connections of the "lifted veil" in Novalis, Shelley, MacDonald, and others, or commenting on Romantic joy, or praising the finely balanced central line with its gentle punning. Like her subject, however, Hassett knows how [End Page 212] to let silences speak. She nicely relates Rossetti's poetic evocation of change to the manner in which her poetry slowly and ever so lightly reveals its meaning. I might cite many instances of Hassett's deft reading, but for our purposes the important aspect of her study deals with children's literature. Rossetti wrote both poetry and prose for children; scholarship usually identifies "Goblin Market," Speaking Likenesses, and Sing-Song as Rossetti's contributions to children's literature. The mixture of prose and verse Rossetti wrote in 1850, Maude, might be included in this list; Hassett mentions Maude once in passing, but she does not consider it in her examination of Rossetti's work. Its absence indicates Hassett's interest in Rossetti as a poet and not...

The Archival Turn in Rhetorical Studies; Or, the Archive's Rhetorical (Re)turn

The Archival Turn in Rhetorical Studies; Or, the Archive's Rhetorical (Re)turn Charles E. Morris III (bio) To announce an "archival turn" in rhetorical studies might rightly strike some veterans of the nation's various repositories as grossly revisionist, and just a bit opportunistic. After all, any cursory survey of the field's best scholarship, particularly in public address studies, reveals the archive as a long-standing habitat of the rhetorical critic and theorist. Especially in the past decade or so, the mandate of "primary" research has become fixed, as the emergent bevy of book-length studies and articles in this journal and others richly attest. I do think it accurate to claim that the disciplinary relationship with the archive has deepened recently, and as such one impetus for this forum is to engage in reflection on some of the important topoi related to archival research on rhetorical history, particularly questions of method and their relation to scholarly production and professional success. More appropriately, and perhaps provocatively, such an announcement enacts a "rhetorical (re)turn" of the archive, a rhetorical construction that calls attention to the archive as a rhetorical construction. Of course, such a rhetorical turn has already been effectively made regarding the history of rhetoric, rhetorical history, and historiography. Surprisingly, however, the archive itself, chief among the inventional sites of rhetorical pasts, has yet to be subjected to sustained critical-rhetorical reflection by scholars in this discipline. Contributors to this forum here aim to facilitate that (re)turn by exploring the archive, understood both traditionally and more broadly to include, for [End Page 113] instance, anthologies and Web holdings, as a spatial and temporal rhetorical embodiment, crucible of cultural debate, and source and arbiter of historical production and public memory. Drawing on diverse experiences in multiple archives, these gathered scholars reflect on archival space, holdings, policy, process, scholarship, and circulation that broadly or specifically can be considered rhetorical, which is also to say ideological and political. Cara A. Finnegan relates her experience responding to the challenges of classification of photographs in the Farm Security Administration archive at the Library of Congress. One elusive image in particular, ultimately discovered to be filed under the category "Shacks," inspired Finnegan to ask, "What is this a picture of?" In answering that question, Finnegan reflects on what she calls the agency of the archive, the ways in which an archive functions as terministic screen by means of the "connotations masked as denotations" its various operations entail. In recognizing this, Finnegan suggests that we engage in "rhetorical negotiations" of the archive by reading it as a rhetorical critic in order to enhance our research and scholarship. Barbara A. Biesecker responds to the "revival of the archive" with important suspicions about this alluring site of presumed discovery, of its presumed "referential plentitude," and the presumption of the archival object as material, given, able to speak for itself with the authority of evidentiary status. Against these presumptions, Biesecker asserts the radical indeterminacy of the archive, its historicity, as an always ongoing site and source of rhetorical mediation, or "scene of invention," and as an invitation not to recovery or authentication, but rather to the art of persuasion. To illustrate, Biesecker revisits the 1995 controversy over the Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum, and the 2002 NBC documentary Price for Peace. The lesson Biesecker derives from her archival engagement is that we must deconstruct the "material presence of the past" and write rhetorical histories of the archive. Davis W. Houck charts the archival turn in public address studies from Martin Medhurst's significant call for enhanced research at the first Public Address Conference in 1988. The aftermath of that call has resulted in consequential encounters with the archive. In assessing those consequences, for his part discovered in the presidential libraries of FDR and Hoover and in amassing a civil rights anthology, Houck highlights the various ways in which archives are "preferred sites of memory," and the strategies we might deploy in managing them. Houck also considers how the archive has been transformed by the Internet revolution, including unprecedented access to holdings and the efficiency with which scholars can now traverse them...

Political science, political ideas and rhetoric

The article reviews ‘ideational’ analysis and theory in political science. It argues that this is an important area of research limited by lack of a clear sense of what ideas in politics are and of how to analyse them as directly as possible. It is argued that political science should learn from the ‘rhetorical turn’ in various areas of the social sciences, developing ways, appropriate to political science, of analysing the language, rhetoric and argumentation of political and policy discourse in its governmental contexts. Such an approach rests on a strong sense of the dynamic, contested and creative nature of political activity.

From Vita contemplativa to vitaactiva: Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's Rhetorical Turn

Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's Traité de Vargumentation: la nouvelle rhétorique marked a revolution in twentieth-century rhetorical theory. In this essay, we trace Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's turn from logical positivism and the accepted belief that reason's domain was the vita contemplativa to rhetoric and its use as a reason designed for the vita activa. Our effort to tell the story of their rhetorical turn, which took place between 1944 and 1950, is informed by an account of the context in which they considered questions of reason, responsibility, and action in the wake of World War II.

FromVita contemplativa to vitaactiva: Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's Rhetorical Turn

AbstractChaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's Traité de Vargumentation: la nouvelle rhétorique marked a revolution in twentieth-century rhetorical theory. In this essay, we trace Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's turn from logical positivism and the accepted belief that reason's domain was the vita contemplativa to rhetoric and its use as a reason designed for the vita activa. Our effort to tell the story of their rhetorical turn, which took place between 1944 and 1950, is informed by an account of the context in which they considered questions of reason, responsibility, and action in the wake of World War II.

Rhetorical Agency as a Property of Questioning

Attention to agency has increased with the ongoing crisis of thought arising from the critique of metaphysics. With the absence of a foundation for reason comes an increased scope for choice in the interpretation of the world and the necessity to persuade others where demonstrative reason is lacking. Hence the accompanies the problematization of knowledge. Even identity itself has been with the death of the subject, and attention turns to how discourse constructs knowledge of the world and of ourselves. The rhetorical turn supports an increased capacity of agency in the use of language to construct identity and to relate to others. Agency is a fundamental property of rhetoric: we can debate the discourse of an interlocutor through resort to argumentation even if, as Gerard Hauser notes in the call for papers, that interlocutor is a monster. Philosophy itself has been rhetoricized in that the many philosophical systems of history have been revealed to be unsupportable now that there is no firm foundation upon which to ground inference in general. In a discourse without foundations we are free to choose between different philosophies, so much so that some have rejected philosophy itself in favor of general arbitrariness. This is apparent in deconstruction in philosophy and the rehabilitation of sophism within rhetoric. Where there is choice there is agency, of the rhetor and the audience. But the agency that is so positive for rhetoric is also that for which rhetoric has been condemned. Rhetoric has long been associated with sophistic, in which discourse can be used to deceive others or to simply demonstrate the status of the rhetor regardless of the truth of the conclusions reached. Rhetorical agency permits deception and stands in contrast with logical demonstration, in which necessity and self-evidence are the hallmarks of ideal reason. We have no choice but to accept necessary conclusions. Hence the apparent weakness of rhetoric in relation to logic and the questionable sta-

A copyright cold war? The polarized rhetoric of the peer-to-peer debates

Participants in the United Stateso ongoing debates over peer-to-peer transfers of potentially copyrighted files have regularly trafficked in the rhetoric of warfare. While it is easy to understand how copyright holders would view peer-to-peer file transfers as a kind of attack, the rhetorical turn toward the discourse of military conflict has radiated throughout the debate. Individuals from across the spectrum of opinions on peer-to-peer file transfers both accept and reproduce the positioning of this public policy debate as a life-or-death struggle. The weaknesses of this comparison are illustrated through reference to the history of the Cold War, often cited as a model for the post-Napster period. Further, the relative immaturity of the peer-to-peer debate is demonstrated through reference to rhetorical analysis techniques suggested by stasis theory. This article concludes by suggesting ways in which the currently stalemated debate might be revitalized by principled interventions from scholars and concerned citizens.

Constructive Criticism: The Human Sciences in the Age of Theory ed. by Martin Kreiswirth, Thomas Carmichael

Màrtiri Kreiswirth ànd Thomas Carmichael, eds. Constructive Criticism: The Human Sciences in theAge o f Theory. Toronto: U ofToronto P, 1995". Pp. 223 + viii. $43.00 paper, $17.93 paper. The turns and returns o f th eory seem to teach that criticism should be con ­ structive and (thus) that destruction is not enough. D econstruction, w hich D errida brought to N orth A m erica and w hich de M an m ade the dom inant m ode o f th eory there for about a decade, suggests som ething m ore than H eidegger’s d estru ction w h ile indicating that con struction cannot occu r w ith ou t a certain am ount o f d estruction. Paradoxically, the skepticism o f the pre-Socratics and the rh etorical turn o f the Sophists found a kind o f ricorso in deconstruction. The return to skepticism and rhetoric represents, in the 1960s, a blatant, and perhaps necessary, challenge to Plato’s essential, ideal and logocentric view o f philosophy. D econstruction, philosophy that aspired to the condition o f literature in D errid a’s case and criticism that aspired to philosophy in de M an ’s, questioned the received w isdom o f a W estern philosoph ical tradition, w hich, in an anecdote, had been called a footn ote to Plato. That A ristotle had challenged his teacher, that Sidn ey reshaped A ristotle to give p oetics a higher place, that Shelley rew orked n eo-Platon ism , is som etim es forgotten, but the challenge o f d eco n stru c­ tion, although rooted in antiquity, happens in a new context— the up h eav­ als o f the 1960s. A n o th er crisis in m im esis o r rep resen tatio n is upon us. E ach crisis respon d s to new historical circu m stan ces. H ow texts relate to a changing w orld, w here w riters and readers face each oth er across a m utable rh eto ri­ cal abyss, becom es dram atic in each age becau se even if that period denies its ow n im portance, it reads and lives everyth in g from the present. Even in the nam e o f h isto ry a certain p resentism represen ts itself as if to erase the traces o f history that efface h om ologies in the guise o f difference. It is possible to be skeptical abou t a skepticism that calls itself new as a m eans o f effacin g its ow n gen ealogy in order to cou n ter a tradition it w ishes to oppose. A s present th eory declares its m om ent, as an avant-garde, it has little regard for history, o r any h istorical cu rren ts that do not su pp ort its prem ise, or any utopian p review that does not provide for the m om ent from w hich it rejects and projects. This m oving rhetorical now is skeptical o f all things except itself even as it speaks abou t its skepticism o f itself. In this b rief response, I can on ly hint at the issues that these essays raise, especially in the em phasis on the op p osition betw een rhetoric and p hilosoph ical truth that resides in the rebarbative notion o f represen ta270 IHart tion. Constructive Criticism is a collection o f essays that tries to com e to term s w ith recent changes in critical theory. The title echoes and addresses deconstru ction, but the b o ok also calls attention to cultural, postcolonial, fem inist, gay and lesbian critiques, theoretical m ovem ents that have gath ­ ered m om entum since the late sixties. The editors structure the collection along the lines o f several p ro b lem atics— th eorists, theory, representation and situation. The essays on theorists exam ine the follow ing specific issues: D oes the later Foucault stay w ith a rad ical skeptical view o f truth or is...

Recent Developments in Economic Methodology: The Rhetorical and Ontological Turns

Recent developments in the methodology of economics have drawn upon pragmatist and realist philosophies of social science. These recent developments are outlined. It is argued that a specific variant of realist philosophy known as critical realism can provide the basis for a prescriptive economic methodology that is not susceptible to pragmatist criticisms.

Appropriating a Slur

Appropriating a Slur

A Rhetorical Turn in Philosophical Counseling?

Far more than the dialectic philosophy of Socrates, the rhetorical humanist tradition avoids objectivist epistemology, charts a traversable path to practical wisdom, and aptly highlights the importance of aesthetic style. In those and other ways, we argue, it offers a preferable historical basis for today’s philosophical counseling. Advocates of that contemporary practice tend to cite Socrates as its historical progenitor and favor the narrow propositional logic that is ascribed to him. Some practitioners, though, have also grown more attuned to metaphorical and narrative elements in a client’s worldview. We aim to supplement their claims by drawing from principles of classical rhetorical theory, showing a way to rethink the practice of philosophical counseling today.