Here at the 4Cs, seeing a history panel and other things, enjoying Louisville I would say.  Supposed to say something or include something from the Cs homepage when blogging from the conference, can't remember what so let's just say this statement serves that purpose, with apologies.  I'm thinking about Brandon's most recent post and also thinking about this project, this thinking about the philosophy of history of rhetoric, and maybe it's just being someplace surrounded by a combination of really amazing insights and always already empty jargon, and I'm wondering what it means to think about this question.  Rethinking, doubting, etc. 

One thing that strikes me from being in this atmosphere is what philosophies are apparent--for instance our push to develop an ethical angle to rhetoric.  Not that this is 'our' project that we just invented--obviously Quintillian and Cicero had thoughts on this.  But it pushes us into certain positions--for instance we can't necessarily just evaluate rhetorical moments based on the efficacy of the rhetorical performance.  Many analysts of history of rhetoric denounce or at least demarcate something they call 'bad' rhetoric--the rhetoric around the Iraq war being an easy example of this (see Wendy Olmsted's Rhetoric: An Historical Introduction).  In what ways does this limit our understandings of this moment?  Maybe we need a Machiavellian approach--not a reclaimed one in which we think of his work as an exploration of the possibilities of negotiation, but one in which we think of things "as they are, not as they ought to be"?  I think it's actually more complicated than that, I just throw out the question: what philosophy we already have that we can defintively mark out?