Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity

Since antiquity, philosophy and rhetoric have traditionally been cast as rivals, with the former often lauded as a search for logical truth and the latter usually disparaged as empty speech. But in this erudite intellectual history, Nancy S. Struever stakes out a claim for rhetoric as the more productive form of inquiry.

Struever views rhetoric through the lens of modality, arguing that rhetoric's guiding interest in what is possible-as opposed to philosophy's concern with what is necessa...