Library of Rhetorics – serie

Both Perelman's collaborators, Professors Haarscher and Ingber, shared with me their deep personal insights about origins, birth and phases of the develop­ ment of the New Rhetoric. Without their good will, advice and creative com­ ments, my personal knowledge would have been narrower. I am grateful to the Chaim Perelman Foundation for their grant which enabled me to cover my expenses of collecting materials, editing and preparing the manuscript. Professor Michel Meyer was very instrumental in the negotiations with the publisher. Mr. Raphael Lipski, treasurer of the Perelman Foundation, spent many hours with me, and shared his remembrances of Perelman's personality, his social and political activity. lowe special thanks to Dr. Richard Kramer, whose friendship I cherish for a quarter of a century. He read and edited not only the entire text of the book, but he offered many critical remarks and constructive suggestions which helped me to revise my own ideas and to formulate them more clearly and precisely. The first critical reader and editor was as usual Mrs. Elizabeth Previti. Professor Elzbieta Ettinger-Chodakowska, MIT, read this entire manuscript and shared with me her impressions. lowe special gratitude to my dear friend, Mrs. Stephanie Silvers for her steady help and moral support. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for all the deficiencies of this book.

The dominant paradigm in the sciences of language conceives the subject-in-community as a truth-sayer, a communicator, and a player-economist. The major ontology of the human community reconstructs being-together as a system of interactions and transactions subject to the rules of economic rationality and, as a consequence, the community as source and target of finite strategical games. The primordial value then is the circulation of information and ideal communication is favoured by the truth-functional status of our discourses. However, this dominant ontology has a few cracks. This is where the aesthetic dimension intrudes, establishing here and there the blink of an eye, shattering the economic, communicational, and truth-saying phantasm, scattering the field of being-together, fragmenting it. These aesthetic fringes conduct themselves according to the isotopy of blossoming, of rupture and fracture, of thresholds and discontinuity. Their effect is one of bedazzlement, trembling, shaking, upheaval, lightheadedness.Infinite games in conversation, the musicality of voices, understanding by flair and tact, the temporariness of nostalgic memory, reasonable pathos, are what has been emphasized in this book.

This work reveals Lessing's contribution to the history of rhetoric and his participation in the long-standing debate between philosophy and rhetoric. It also reassesses the importance of rhetoric to argumentation in the 18th-century and establishes that Lessing developed his own views on rhetoric and argumentation, and that these views were opposed to the anti-rhetorical position of other 18th-century intellectuals, including Kant. The few treatments of Lessing's polemical writings that have appeared in the last few years concentrate on the practice of rhetoric and not on Lessing's own views on language and argument. Moore's work, on the other hand, combines both an interest in style of argument and the philosophy which informs it. The book should interest students of European rhetoric, 18th-century German critical writing and 18th-century polemics on theatre and theology. All quotations in German have been translated into English to inform a wider audience.

This book deals with various aspects of metaphorics and yet it is not only, or perhaps not even primarily, about metaphor itself. Rather it is concerned with the argument from metaphor. In other words, it is about what I think we can learn from metaphor and the possible consequences of this lesson for a more adequate understanding, for instance, of our mental processes, the possibilities and limitations of our reasoning, the strictures of propositionality, the cognitive effect of fictional projections and so on. In this sense it is not, strictly speaking, a contribution to metaphorology; instead, it is an attempt to define the place of metaphor in the world of overall human intellectual activity, exemplary thematized here in the span that ranges from problems relating to the articulation of meanings up to general issues of creativity. Most of the aspects discussed, therefore, are examined not so much for the sake of gaining some new knowledge about metaphor (work conducted in the »science of metaphor« is presently so huge that an extra attempt to spell out another theory of metaphor may have an infiatory effect); the basic strategy of this book is to view metaphor within the complex of language usage and language competence, in human thought and action, and, finally, to see in what philosophically relevant way it improves our knowledge of ourselves. Certainly, by adopting this basic strategy we also simultaneously increase our knowledge of metaphors, of their functions and importance.

Both Perelman's collaborators, Professors Haarscher and Ingber, shared with me their deep personal insights about origins, birth and phases of the develop­ ment of the New Rhetoric. Without their good will, advice and creative com­ ments, my personal knowledge would have been narrower. I am grateful to the Chaim Perelman Foundation for their grant which enabled me to cover my expenses of collecting materials, editing and preparing the manuscript. Professor Michel Meyer was very instrumental in the negotiations with the publisher. Mr. Raphael Lipski, treasurer of the Perelman Foundation, spent many hours with me, and shared his remembrances of Perelman's personality, his social and political activity. lowe special thanks to Dr. Richard Kramer, whose friendship I cherish for a quarter of a century. He read and edited not only the entire text of the book, but he offered many critical remarks and constructive suggestions which helped me to revise my own ideas and to formulate them more clearly and precisely. The first critical reader and editor was as usual Mrs. Elizabeth Previti. Professor Elzbieta Ettinger-Chodakowska, MIT, read this entire manuscript and shared with me her impressions. lowe special gratitude to my dear friend, Mrs. Stephanie Silvers for her steady help and moral support. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for all the deficiencies of this book.

This book deals with various aspects of metaphorics and yet it is not only, or perhaps not even primarily, about metaphor itself. Rather it is concerned with the argument from metaphor. In other words, it is about what I think we can learn from metaphor and the possible consequences of this lesson for a more adequate understanding, for instance, of our mental processes, the possibilities and limitations of our reasoning, the strictures of propositionality, the cognitive effect of fictional projections and so on. In this sense it is not, strictly speaking, a contribution to metaphorology; instead, it is an attempt to define the place of metaphor in the world of overall human intellectual activity, exemplary thematized here in the span that ranges from problems relating to the articulation of meanings up to general issues of creativity. Most of the aspects discussed, therefore, are examined not so much for the sake of gaining some new knowledge about metaphor (work conducted in the »science of metaphor« is presently so huge that an extra attempt to spell out another theory of metaphor may have an infiatory effect); the basic strategy of this book is to view metaphor within the complex of language usage and language competence, in human thought and action, and, finally, to see in what philosophically relevant way it improves our knowledge of ourselves. Certainly, by adopting this basic strategy we also simultaneously increase our knowledge of metaphors, of their functions and importance.

AESTHETICIZING PRAGMATICS The Gamut of Pragmatics Pragmatics emerged among the sciences of language at the end of the 1960's in reaction to certain totalizing models in linguistics: structuralism (primarily in Europe) and generative grammar (initially in the United States). Certain disciples of Chomsky became dissatisfied with autono­ mous syntax and later with generative semantics: they decided to break away from their mentor. Whereas Chomsky continued to talk a lot about very little, they defied him by speaking very suggestively about an exces­ sively broad range of phenomena. Pragmatics -which Bar-Hillel consid­ ered as a 'wastebasket discipline' in the fifties - nevertheless gained respectability. The history of pragmatics spans, of course, much more than three decades. The Stoic conception of language, in the shadow of the great Greek tradition and therefore intensely subversive, had in fact a pragmatic aim. The term pragmatisch appears in Kant: it expresses a relation with a human goal, this goal being only determinable within a community. This characterization naturally inspires the pragmaticism of l the Neo-Kantian Charles Sanders Peirce . It is this Kant-Peirce lineage that led to Morris and Carnap's rather bland conceptions of pragmatics, after the heavy losses incurred by positivism and behaviorism. In any case, despite the constant presence of a pragmatic approach in the history of thought, this reassessment of pragmatics (against the triumphs proclaimed by structuralism and generativism) was experienced as a Significant break­ through. A whole range of pragmatics came to the attention of linguists.