The Practice of Letter Writing: Skills, Models, and Early Modern Dutch Manuals

Article / Letter to editorLeiden Univ Centre for LinguisticsLeiden Univ Centre for Linguistic

Relativism, Coherence, and the Problems of Philosophy *

The eventual topic of this paper is the perhaps grandiose question of whether we have any reason to think that philosophical problems can be solved. Philosophy has been around for quite some time, and its record is cause for pessimism: it is not, exactly, that there are no established results, but that what results there are, are negative (such-and-such is false, or won't work), or conditional (as Ernest Nagel used to say, "If we had ham, and if we had eggs, then we'd have ham and eggs"). 1 I hope in what follows first of all to explain the record. My explanation will naturally suggest a way of turning over a new leaf, and I will wrap up the paper by laying out that proposal and critically assessing its prospects. However, the approach to my topic will have to be roundabout. Along the way, I will detour to consider how the problems of philosophy can be * I'm grateful t

Medieval Forms of Argument: Disputation and Debate

These studies illustrate the various high and late medieval transformations of formal and formalized argument, from a broadly interdisciplinary perspective and it challenges today\u27s dominant disciplinary approaches to what was and is still a pervasive mode of thought in the West. Many current treatments of disputational texts have a narrow focus either on the history of scholasticism, rhetoric, and pedagogy, or the genesis and function of such period-specific forms of academic altercation as demonstrative, dialectic, or sophistic disputation, or the later quaestiones, quodlibeta, and sophismata. Moreover, scholarship in literature often ignores the parallel structures of academic argument and narrowly focuses on the narrative and aesthetic functions of debate poetry. In contrast to these tendencies, the contributions to this volume afford a view which enables readers to recognize that the manifold formalized discursive practices of positing a thesis, constructing a counter antithesis, and then finding a synthesis permeated not only the cathedral schools and universities and their direct textual products (commentaries, formal disputations, sermons, and so forth), but were received by a wide range of other discursive realms. Especially in the high and late Middle Ages the academic disputation gradually moved from the isolation of the universities and toward extracurricular forms of debate between theologians (e.g., the public quaestiones disputatae; epistolary theological debates between Christians and Muslims) and in literary genres (e.g. querelle, debate poem). By confronting sample investigations from all these related forms of medieval argument, the volume examines the ways in which disputational forms - sometimes directly dependent on academic practices, sometimes showing organizational, structural, and discursive parallels - established themselves as a central mode of thinking for Western society. To achieve this goal, the volume unites contributions from the English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian traditions of the disputational mode and discusses central issues of academic, political, theological, courtly and literary debates. -- Provided by publisherhttps://scholarworks.uni.edu/facbook/1357/thumbnail.jp

The Victorian Newsletter (Fall 1996)

The Victorian Newsletter is sponsored for the Victorian Group of Modern Language Association by Western Kentucky University and is published twice annually.Gender, Race, and Colonial Discourse in the Travel Writings of Mary Kingsley / Salome C. Nnoromele -- The Source of Callicles: Plato's Gorgias and Arnold's Empedocles on Etna / Carol Poster -- Autobiography—A Mill of Words, A Rhetoric of Silence / Susan C. Hines -- Clym Ancient and Modern: Oedipus, Bunyan amd The Return of the Native / Charles Swann -- Am I My Sister's Keeper? Sexual Deviance and the Social Community / Deborah A. Logan -- Voice of My Voice: Mutual Submission and Transcendental Potentiality in Jane Eyre / Nels C. Pearson -- Sex, Violence and Identity: A. C. Swinburne and Uses of Sadomasochism / Jonathan Alexander -- More Shakespeare in Carlyle / David-Everett Blythe -- Books Receive