In this paper I examine a recent artistic attempt to publicly visualize a future at risk, Alexis Rockman’s mural painting Manifest Destiny. By turning to J. Robert Cox’s work on the “Locus of the Irreparable,” I contend that Manifest Destiny compels viewers to see the irreparable nature of global climate change in terms of the unique, precarious, and timely. Arguing that Rockman’s creation is a...

Thirty-five years ago I argued that portraying rhetoric as the inexorable result of real situational demands, as opposed to competitive persuasion, creating perceptions of situational demands, would relegate the field to secondary disciplinary status and ethical irrelevance. Since then, this prediction has been largely fulfilled, but a change in perspective can make rhetoric a primary study wit...

This paper provides a review of Rhetoric and the Rule of Law, by Neil MacCormick, focussing on the role of logic in legal reasoning. In particular it considers the connection between syllogism, formal methods and rhetoric, and it distinguishes various aspects of legal defeasibility.

Mary Robinson was elected the first female President of Ireland in 1990, a position she held until she resigned in 1997 to take up the post of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which she held until 2002. The daughter of two physicians, she holds a Master of Arts from Trinity College Dublin, a law degree from King’s Inns, Dublin, and a Master of Law from Harvard Law School. In 1...

One aspect of the art of rhetoric is the ability to change other people’s minds (opinions, beliefs) without providing them new information. Rhetoric often employs analogies between cases, and induction from cases to rules. Using analogies, one may draw the listener’s attention to similarities between cases. Induction is used to re-organize existing information in a way that highlights certain r...

A proper assessment of the relation between discourse structure and speaker's communicat ive intentions requires a better understanding of communicative intentions. This contribution proposes that there is a crucial difference between intending the hearer to entertain a certain belief (or desire, or intention), and intending to affect the strength with which the hearer entertains the belief (or...