Ramus as Credibility

We can say with certainty how many editions of Omar Talon’s and Peter Ramus’s Rhetoric were published in the 16th century—it’s not this that causes tension over the man, Ramus, and his legacy. The briefest, though most contentious, way to describe this legacy is by explaining that Ramus reorganized the academic curriculum of his day, so that where previously invention and arrangement had been areas of study in both rhetoric and logic, under Ramus’s revision they were studied only under the subject of logic. Behind this division is a method (which Ramus calls “method”), but this and lots of other innovations made Ramus a controversial though influential figure in his own time—and he continues to generate controversy today. For one thing, he serves as a sort of test for credentials in Renaissance rhetoric. Here is a passage from a review by Peter Mack of E. Armstrong’s book A Ciceronian Sunburn:

Armstrong’s view of Ramus is distorted by a widely shared misunderstanding. Ramus always insisted that rhetoric and dialectic had to be taught together. So when he removed invention and disposition from rhetoric and taught them within dialectic he was making a clear delineation between the two subjects (where previously there had been a large overlap) rather than impoverishing rhetoric and depriving students of access to invention. (Rhetorical Review 5.3)

Through his review, Mack, a Renaissance rhetoric heavyweight, employs his correction of Armstrong’s misunderstanding as a means of critiquing Armstrong’s hold over the rhetorical educational and theoretical milieu of the period on which he writes.

Historiography of Sense

“Bodies and states are only of the present. For the present living instant is a temporal expanse that accompanies the act, that expresses and measures the action of the agent, the passion of the patient. But, at the limits of the unity of bodies and the space between them, at the limits of the unity of active principles and passive principles, one cosmic present encompasses the whole universe: only bodies exist in space, and only the present in time.” Deleuze, Logique du Sens, p 13.

I won’t pretend to have insight into this complicated quote, which I may or may not have translated accurately. I’ve translated this myself, and I’m an adequate reader of French but by no means do I have the nativity to be running around translating it, particularly when it’s as complicated and tricky as Deleuze’s work. On the one hand I bring it here partly just for the astonishing pomposity of the gesture, which this space seems to encourage almost—would I have the guts to stand up in front of a room of scholars or an empty room that could have potentially had scholars in it and explicate a Deleuze quote I just translated myself? I’m not sure, I doubt myself. But there also seems something appropriate to offering up a translation here in this space, where I’m comfortable enough not even to be concerned with the translation’s accuracy—if an accurate translation is even possible in this case.

This is philohistorhetorica

An awkwardly titled blog with a vaguely 1890s bourgeoisie design. Should the fates will it, however, this will be our group's new virtual home, and the home for our thoughts, reflections and experiments in the philosophy of the history of rhetoric, whatever that might come to, hopefully, mean. Welcome friends!