Although what language users in different cultures say about their own language has long been recognized as of potential interest, its theoretical importance to the study of language has typically been thought to be no more than peripheral. Theorizing Language is the first book to place the reflexive character of language at the very centre both of its empirical study and of its theoretical explanation. Language can only be explained as a cultural product of the reflexive application of its own (...) creative powers to construct, regulate, and give conceptual form to objects of understanding. Language is itself, first and foremost, an object of cultural understanding. Theoretical analyses of language which have neglected its reflexive character, or simply taken its effects for granted, merely impose their own artificial structures on their analytical object. The first part of this book discusses the consequences of neglecting this reflexive character for the technical concepts and methods which are used in analysing different types of communicational phenomena. In the second part, normativity - a crucial aspect of language's reflexive nature - is examined. The book's third and final part focuses on particular issues in the history of linguistic thought which bear witness to the rhetoric of language theorizing as a reflexive form of inquiry. (shrink)

Classical rhetorical theory distinguished three kinds of genera of oratory - the judicial, the deliberative, and the demonstrative- and there are features of each in Francis Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry VII. The demonstrative genus provided the basic shape of classical and humanist rhetorical history, while the deliberative and judicial methods also contributed significantly. The judicial method in particular may be very important for modern standards of history-writing. The fact that Bacon employed rhetorical strategies (...) to shape his history suggests that the development of historiography is not as free from "literary" techniques as many historians might like to believe. The inadequacies, by modern standards, of Bacon's classicized historiographical methods and understanding do not condemn the art of rhetoric itself. Small shifts in rhetorical technique or emphasis could reflect significant changes of literary perception and philosophical approach, and different historical periods encourage the use of new and different rhetorical topoi. (shrink)

This article examines the recent construction of human milk's immune-protective qualities as scientific fact, demonstrating that long-standing controversies about human milk's immune-protective effects have not been resolved by a particular scientific discovery. Rather, experts’ consensus on how to respond to this uncertainty has been transformed, and this transformation has had as much to do with a change in the metaphor that governs interpretation of evidence about immune protection as it has with discovering new evidence about either human milk or the (...) antibodies in it. (shrink)

An examination of footnotes, quotations, and name-lists shows that historians try to follow the reality rule - to tell about the past the most likely story that can be sustained by the relevant existing evidence. But this is modified by the maximum impact rule - stories must have evocative force, and the reader should actively confront the past. The maximum impact rule may require the historian to sacrifice some completeness and exactness for evocative impact; and there is no parallel to (...) this sacrifice in scientific explanations. History, as it is practiced, is a rule-bound discipline, with rules and a rhetoric different from those of scientific explanation. There is no need for historians to structure their explanations according to the pattern of the sciences. (shrink)

An inquiry into the rhetorical aspects of history may seem paradoxical, given that historical discourse is not typically included among those types which, since Aristotle, have been understood to be governed by rhetoric; these types being the deliberative council, the tribunal and the commemorative assembly. It was to these specific audiences that the three kinds of discourse—the deliberative, judiciary, and panegyric—were addressed. However, are the boundaries of the historian's audience sufficiently delineated in order to allow us to identify (...) it as a specific addressee? This first objection, which regards the very legitimacy of the subject of these remarks, can be met by noting a common trait that links history to the above-mentioned three types of discourse; that is, competition between opposed discourses requiring a choice. In each case the aim is to structure a debate that calls for a clear-cut decision. Yet a major problem of the discipline of history is that it allows both for widely varying descriptions of the same series of events, and sanctions the use of a variety of equally acceptable rules or preferences for interpreting a given slice of the past. (shrink)

Traces Rhetoric from its composition through its preservation in Greece and Rome; investigates its emergence in the Middle Ages; and explores the development of its editions in Greek and Latin.

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, _The Secret History of Emotion_ offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, (...) and Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines Foucault as a rhetorician rather than as a historian of parrhesia and rhetoric. It explores what we can learn about his philosophy by examining it through the lens of his rhetorical practices. Focusing on his famous 1961 preface to History and Madness, it suggests that Foucault’s model of philosophy entails a rhetoric of conversion or transformation.

When a term is used in science, we tend to integrate its origins, functions, and history to see if the term is a scientific one or comes from other fields. The term «empathy» is an example to such a case. This article challenges the widespread view that empathy is the capability of a person to understand emotions and thoughts of others. We will deconstruct the concept of empathy as an academic one by focusing on its limits. We will discuss (...) the possibility of empathy for humans in critically reconstructing the meaning of the word and its meanings from its ancient origins to contemporary research. Our question is centered on cognitive actions that enable empathy as an emotional way of understanding others. Based on our findings, we argue that the concept of empathy is a recently established academic term. As a concept, it matches with some alternative concepts such as apathy and sympathy. In rhetoric, it is the pathos of the speech that affects the speaker by emotions since no specific receptive ability of the speaker is needed. Similarly, when we use the term empathy, we should use it as a category of the sender, not that of the receiver. This concept of logical empathy opposes to the classical view of empathy studies emphasizing that empathy is a receptive category of the receiver. So, empathy is nothing else but the ability to send emotional or intellectual content suitable to a capable receiver. Also, the comparative study in the concept of empathy in Buddhism gives us evidence that empathy is a spiritual or mental concept whose applications are in the area of pre-linguistic states and esoteric contexts. In rhetorical terms we could define it as a persuasive mood of pathos-driven speech. (shrink)

One of the most hotly contested debates concerning medieval historiography concerns the question of whether medieval authors viewed "what really happened", in a positivist sense, as the object of their inquiry, or whether they were concerned with writing the past as "it should have been". This study examines that question with relation to two historical narratives composed at the city of Worms during the final decade of the thirteenth century. The thesis of this article is that the authors of these (...) two texts were concerned to describe the past as it actually happened, in a positivist sense, and that they relied on written documents, which they considered to be reliable, to write their texts. (shrink)

Paperback. The intention of this book is to set forth the history (up to the end ofthe 17th Century) of logical and rhetorical reflections on dilemmaticarguments, i.e. arguments in which from each member of an exhaustivedisjunction of premisses an identical conclusion is drawn. Certain types ofsuch arguments were widely discussed among ancient teachers of rhetoricand, to a lesser extent, by ancient logicians. After a period of relativeneglect in the Middle Ages, there was a remarkable revival during theRenaissance. In the (...) 17th Century, several attempts were made to find theproper logical form of dilemmatic reasonings. In the course of tracingthese developments, special attention is paid to the consequentiamirabilis, a kind of argument in which a conclusion is inferredfrom a premiss that is its direct contradictory. (shrink)

I THE REHABILITATION OF RHETORIC The ancients denned rhetoric as the art of speaking and writing both well and convincingly: ars bene dicendi and ars ...

The Rhetorical Invention of Man examines how the category "Man" has dominated Western thinking since the sixteenth century. This category, a historical anomaly according to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, has produced distortions in our ability to understand reality that do great harm to our health, morals, and environment.

Ranke's work marks a turning point in the development of historiography: it changed from literature to science. Ranke's introduction of reason into historiography gave it a certain aesthetic quality, which modern historical studies have forgotten. Traditional rhetoric, or the use of language for strategic purposes, was discarded for its fictitious nature. In its place, Ranke advocated a synthesis of the scientific principles of research and the more artistic principles of writing history. This synthesis initiated the aesthetics of historiography, (...) and yielded a hidden rhetoric in the form of linguistic patterns of significance, or topoi, which give the facts of the past their sense and meaning for present-day life. Historiography, by its aesthetics, addresses its audience in a way that makes visible the mental forces which constitute the identity of the addressed people in the temporal course of their life. The postmodern recognition of rhetoric in historiography should not lead us back to premodern rhetoric but forward to a rhetoric of historiography which preserves the necessity of liberating reason in historiography and which reflects this reason not simply as a technique of research, but 'With a much wider and deeper approach to historical studies as a question of the aesthetics of historiography. (shrink)

There is a tension apparent in Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society between his naturalistic account of the history of societies as emanating from principles of human nature on the one hand, and on the other, the rhetorically charged moralism that readers have generally noted in his critique of contemporary polished and commercial societies. This is related in the article to questions about the appropriate relationship between forms of rhetoric and the writing of moral (...) and political philosophy as they appeared in early-modern political thought and were taken up by other figures in the Scottish Enlightenment (most notably Hume). The article shows how reading Ferguson's text as an exercise in political rhetoric, which harnesses the additional force of forensic and demonstrative forms of eloquence, can provide a basis for understanding not only the intended relationship between the two sides of its argument but also its relationship with Ferguson's role as a teacher of morals at Edinburgh University. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Rhetoric of Narrating Communal History in the Nineteenth-Century Finnish Historical NovelMari Hatavara (bio)Det var en mulen och dyster afton om våren 1718. Klockan knäppte fem minuter till sex i salen på den ståtliga herrgård, som tillhört den stolte Baronen Göran Boije, och som nu ägdes af hans enka, fru Catharina Boije. I detsamma hördes en klocka ringa gårdsfolket tillsamman för aftonbönen. I nedra ändan af salen (...) samlades med sakta steg allt gårdsfolket i tyst förbidan. Nu slog vägguret sex. […]It was a cloudy and dreary evening in the spring of 1718. The clock turned five to six in the great hall of the stately manor which once had belonged to the proud Baron Göran Boije, and which now was in the possession of his widow, Lady Catharina Boije. At the very moment, a bell was heard to summon all the folk together for an evening prayer. The servants gathered in the lower end of the hall with silent footsteps in a quiet waiting. The clock struck six now. […](All translations mine.)Finland's first historical novel, Fredrika Runeberg's Fru Catharina Boije och hennes döttrar (Lady Catharina Boije and Her Daughters) (1858),1 begins with this passage after a short frame narrative. The very first sentence provides the date where the story-world is set, and the lines following describe a setting suitable for that period of time. This is in accordance with the generic tradition of the historical novel. Even if the historical novel has very few characters whom theorists would agree upon, most theories of historical novel concur on the statement that the genre is "by definition referential, gesturing toward a world commonly understood to have existed" (Maxwell 545). This emphasis on the story-world has dominated the study of the historical novel. What I want to stress, however, are the specific ways in which a historical novel—to use Richard Maxwell's words—gestures toward this commonly comprehensible, preexistent world. How is the story-world made understandable to a reader and offered as the past? I want to demonstrate the importance of the literary means that help mediate between the past of the story-world and the present of the reader.The passage above begins with the retrospective view: the narrator refers to a date over two hundred years ago, and the passage is in the past tense. The text does, however, also apply expressions like "now." This indicates a point of view that is present in the story-world, at least in terms of temporality. The impression of a viewpoint present in the story-world is further emphasized by the frequent references to aural experience; the [End Page 21] sounds heard (the bell and the clock) and not heard (silent footsteps and quiet waiting) offer the reader an interpretative position that takes her into the story-world through experience. The origin of the experience, however, is not specified. Two questions arise that are crucial to my argument: Is the experiencing subject located temporally in the story-time or in the narrator's retrospective time? Is there a single experiencing subject? While the first question tackles the relationship between the past tense and the deictic markers indicating the present ("now"), the second question is concerned with features like the hearing of the sound of the bell in the passage: because the hearing is depicted in the passive mode, the hearer could be anybody or everybody.These two questions, the first about temporality and the second about the experiencing subject, intersect in the study of narrative identity. Alan Palmer suggests that in current research on narrative literature the individual consciousness has been emphasized at the expense of the social, and he stresses the importance of studying the latter (136). Still, individual and social modes of narrativizing one's past and present share common features, with the most important one perhaps being the need to mediate between different levels of time. Whereas self-narrations attempt to bridge the gap between the former, experiencing I, and the present, narrating I, historical narratives attempt to bridge the gap between characters experiencing the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's ‘Rhetoric’ to Modern Brain ScienceMichael J. HydeThe Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's ‘Rhetoric’ to Modern Brain Science. Daniel M. Gross. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. x + 194. $35.00, Hardcover.The twofold goal of this book is clearly stated by its author: "to reconstitute by way of critical intellectual history a deeply nuanced, rhetorical (...) understanding of emotion that prevailed until the triumph of psychophysiology; second, to show by way of literary and philosophical example how this rhetorical perspective helps us read anew the emotional complex of modernity, whether early or late" (8). Gross' appreciation of the function of emotion emphasizes a phenomenological orientation that is inspired by Martin Heidegger's unpublished 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric. Gross recently co-edited with Ansgar Kemmann a book of original essays dedicated to a critical assessment of this lecture course (Gross and Kemmann 2006). In concluding her contribution to the book, the well-known Renaissance scholar Nancy S. Struever maintains that the course "remains, arguably, the best twentieth-century reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric" (Struever 2006: 127). Gross advances this reading with his creative and insightful assessment of his topic.This advance unfolds as Gross, abiding by phenomenology's well-known critique of the matter, takes issue with the reductive psychophysiology of emotion that Descartes first proposed and that informs latter-day sciences of the mind and the brain. Gross turns to the research program of the distinguished cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio as a way of arguing "how brain science of emotion goes awry when it blunders into social fact" (29). The reductionism of science, in other words, misses the forest for the trees. Admitting that Damasio is open to inquiries outside the boundaries of neurobiology, Gross nevertheless takes particular issue with Damasio's model for such a project: Edward O. Wilson's, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Indeed, Wilson never gives rhetoric a nod when he acknowledges the worth of the humanities in his book.This slight, coming from Wilson, Damasio, and other scientists, fuels Gross's enthusiasm for turning to Aristotle's analysis of the pathe in book two of the Rhetoric. With Aristotle's discussion of "anger" in mind, for example, Gross emphasizes how we live in "a contoured world of emotional investments, where some people have significantly more liabilities than others" (3). [End Page 326]The point warrants elaboration: "The contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions such as slavery and poverty that simply afford some people greater emotional range than others, as they are shaped by publicity that has nothing to do with the inherent values of each human life and everything to do with technologies of social recognition and blindness" (4). Gross links this Aristotelian based social-psychological insight with such early modern philosophers, psychologists, and cultural critics as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, William Perfect, and then with such contemporary intellectuals as Judith Butler. Gross' discussion of this linkage enables him to argue a key point in his overall project: the constitutive power of emotions depends not on how the social passions originate in a moral sense equally shared by all, but rather on the "uneven distribution" of these passions in our social and political lives.Gross makes much of how the rhetoric of this uneven distribution is at work in such particular cases as Aristotle's apathetic slave, Seneca's angry tyrant, Hobbes's resentful preacher, Sarah Fielding's humble hero, and Adam Smith's compassionate spectator. Gross's intellectual acumen shines as he weaves together these cases and expands on their implications for developing a rhetorical understanding of emotion. For example, in chapter three ("Virtues of Passivity in the English Civil War"), Gross offers a critical assessment of Michael Walzer's classic The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics in order to show how the emotional makeup of passivity, too often "relegated to a diminished femininity" (87), not only informs the virtue of humility, but also helps it serve rhetorically "the most dramatic revolutionary ends" (110). Additional extended case studies emphasize the specific emotions of apathy, pride, pity... (shrink)

This work approaches texts in the history of philosophy as the repository of a kind of literature that brings together rational thought and rhetorical principles.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric in History as Theory and Praxis: A Blast from the PastThomas B. FarrellPhilosophies of history have fallen on hard times. Grand comic metanarratives were the first casualty, auguring ironically in the futility of their own pronouncements. Positive and negative teleologies were next to fall. But if finalized themes and Utopian schemes are not exactly in vogue, it remains the case that history—as systematic documentation (...) and reminiscence about the past—is and must be ongoing. This is transparently because things that matter continue to happen: with ideas, cultures, nature itself. And even if we never really learn from history, all other things being equal, history has shown that it is helpful to keep careful records. In an age that personalizes nearly everything, it is easy enough to recognize the familiar dissociation of act and accountability on a personal scale. What may appear as nothing more serious than petty truancy for a person may become amnesia, revisionism, and much worse when the zone of accountability is widened, the deeds are deepened, the stakes are increased. In each case, the argument is the same: identification through a sort of opaque empathy. In short, you had to be there.I intend this essay to be a meditation on some of the ways my amorphousarea of study, rhetorical theory, finds itself implicated with history, some possible avenues it may open for invention and judgment in history. Time permitting, I will also hazard a speculation on that great chimera [End Page 323] that dangles before fields of scholarship and historical projects alike: that of progress.Aristotle’s famous definition of rhetoric, “that its function is not to persuade but to see the available means of persuasion in each case” (1991, 35), begins my inquiry in a productively ambiguous way. For one thing, the definition locates the function of rhetoric directly within the sphere of human history, through the terms available and in each case. For unless we believe that means of persuasion are fixed and that cases are eternally recurring, what the rhetorician “sees” must vary with the times. A second note maybe in order here. For Aristotle’s term for seeing, theoresai, also happens to be the Greek root term for what we call “theory.” In its most fundamental sense, then, the ocular-centered aesthetic of Greek tradition gives us theory as a mode of “seeing.” I could add at this point that this “seeing” needs to be shared with others and that there are many ways of “seeing,” but this maybe a less-than-productive ambiguity, given my aims here.Instead, I wish to consider three distinct construals of what sort of practice rhetoric is, along with some implications of these construals for the place of rhetoric as theory and practice in human history. These three construals are rhetoric as productive art, rhetoric as constitutive art, and rhetoricas inventional art.We begin with the conception of rhetoric as productive art. Simply put, this means that rhetoric makes things, prototypically speeches. Such a conception, like the other two I will be discussing, has ebbed and flowed throughout the long history of rhetorical tradition. The Sophists, when not purporting to teach virtue, did profess their competence in instructing other show to create persuasive documents. Such a preoccupation also appears in rhetorics of belles lettres and elocution. Today it can be found in modern composition curricula and in the rather different world of the professional speechwriter.There have been very few attempts to link an exclusively productive art conception of rhetoric to Aristotle and still fewer successful attempts. To view the matter this way, one would need to think of the Rhetoric and the Poetics as essentially parallel documents (one makes poems; the other, speeches). One would also have to ignore a wealth of disconfirming evidence. Nonetheless, Alan G. Gross is able to write (in the aptly titled collection Rereading Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”), “‘What did Aristotle mean by rhetoric?’ At this juncture, I can do little more than reiterate my claim that rhetoric is a productive art, and only a productive art” (2000, 35). George Kennedy, the translator of our earlier passage, sees the matter rather differently: “What [End Page 324] kind of... (shrink)

The work transmitted to us as the fourth speech in the manuscripts of Andocides is an invective against Alcibiades on the occasion of the last ostracism to occur in Athens, the ostracism of Hyper bolus. Despite a challenging article by Raubitschek1 pointing to certain authentic-looking details in the speech, most scholars would probably now agree that [And.] 4 is neither by Andocides, nor a genuine speech delivered on the occasion of the last ostracism, but is most likely to be a (...) product of the fourth century. But if this general feeling is correct, why and in what context was the speech written? When in the fourth century did rhetoricians spend their time composing works like [And.] 4? (shrink)

The combination of rhetoric and philosophy appeared in the ancient world through Cicero, and revived as an ideal in the Renaissance. By a careful and precise analysis of the views of four major humanists-Petrarch, Salutati, Bruni, and Valla—Professor Seigel seeks to establish that they were first of all professional rhetoricians, completely committed to the relation between philosophy and rhetoric. He then explores the broader problem of the "external history" of humanism, and reopens basic questions about Renaissance culture. (...) He departs from the views held by such scholars as Hans Baron and Lauro Martines and expands the conclusions suggested by Paul Oskar Kristeller. The result is a stimulating, controversial study that rejects some of the claims made for the humanists and indicates achievements and limitations. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This article presents the first comprehensive study of Syriac rhetoric in late antiquity. It builds on existing scholarship on the Syrians’ engagement with Graeco-Roman paideia and Christian rhetoric, but it also goes further in that it draws attention to the Syrians’ participation in Near Eastern rhetorical traditions (mainly transmitted through Aramaic) and in the rhetoric of the Hebrew Bible, which was translated into Syriac without Greek intermediaries. At the same time, this article demonstrates that Syriac rhetoric (...) flourished in distinctive and original ways: It developed its own literary genres (with a strong predilection for poetry and a sensibility for gendered voices), performative settings (including the liturgy and the school), and thematic domains (notably Scriptural exegesis and religious controversy). It is especially remarkable that an elaborate “meta-rhetorical” reflection flourished in Syriac, as it first emerged in the work by Antony of Tagrit in the ninth century and in the broader context of late antique and Byzantine Aristotelianism. This comprehensive survey and its conceptual systematisation are designed to facilitate further research on Syriac rhetoric both during late antiquity and in later centuries, when the Syrians’ interaction with Arabic rhetoric came to play an increasingly influential role.Syriac words are given in a simplified transcription. For consonants, the standard system in use for Semitic languages is followed; spirantisation of b g k p t is marked by v gh kh f th respectively. East Syrian vocalisation is generally adopted unless the words are quoted from a West Syrian author; vowel length is not marked, with the exception of a/ā and e/ē in Eastern Syriac. (shrink)

During a series of protests in Hong Kong about a leadership transition widely perceived to give Mainland China greater political influence, the Hong Kong Museum of History held a Special Exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors of Xian, China. Sponsored by "The Leisure and Cultural Service Department, " the exhibit featured the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty who ushered in "an epoch-making era in Chinese history that witnessed the unification of China" (Museum Exhibition). This essay explores the multi-media (...) aspects of the exhibit, arguing that encounters with dramatic music and fully immersive digital experiences are examples of an embodied, affective form of constitutive rhetoric. Put differently, the museum's multi-media elements demonstrate how Maurice Charland's theory of a constitutive rhetoric can be informed by recent work on affect and can provide one point from which to engage affect theory and the "affective dimension of politics.". (shrink)

This book examines the conceptual contributions of constituent representatives in Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Spanish Parliament has been the stage for the political modernisation of the country. Constitutional debates have historically led to the gradual acknowledgement and broadening – usually unevenly – of citizens’ rights. At the same time, constitutional debates have created opportunities to design institutions and settle legal mechanisms to enforce rights and distribute state resources. The book identifies and analyses rhetorical and conceptual innovations (...) produced in such debates from a historical perspective. (shrink)

The book begins with the problem of the relationship between systematic philosophy and the history of philosophy. Why does philosophy attach so much importance to history? Consideration of this question is an essential part of metaphysics, and it has important consequences for the methodology of both history and philosophy. An analysis of the problem that begins the book leads to many other fundamental questions concerning the nature of philosophy. In treating these issues the author discusses positions taken (...) on them by Russell, Rorty, Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, and others of our century. He also draws inspiration from Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. (shrink)