OK so back on the blog horse.

RSA has come and gone, and in the month since reflecting, of a sort, has been happening here.  All the work I saw there stimulated much thought and especially much thought about who we write for and what it is we hope to accomplish in our scholarship.  I say we--of course I mean me.

And for this blog's RSA panel, what of that?  We had, I thought, an excellent discussion.  As I recall, the key thing that emerged from the discussion was a real putting to the test of the idea that just because we are all doing historical work, that we are all doing the same thing.  I said at the panel that what was most interesting about the work of that 10 months or so (!) was that we never really came to any kind of agreement about what our key terms, philosophy, history, rhetoric, meant individually, much less in combination.  The discussion itself suggested that some of the divisions we've pointed out throughout this blog--namely intellectual history and 'on-the-ground' history--determine the way we think about what historical work is, how it operates in the field of rhetoric, and how it stands in relation to a philosophical history.  It was clear for instance that while the definition of rhetorical history as a history of rhetorical instruction (this general idea was discussed I think earlier in the blog, though at the RSA discussion was put specifically in terms of an article by Mike Leff and Richard Graff) could not adequately capture the work we were all doing.