Campbell, Blair, Whately
I. Background: Campbell's work, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776, grows out of and contributes to the Age of the Enlightenment.
A. Preference for the rational and the precise begun by Locke and Bacon, is now extended to other epistemic thinking.
B. By mid-1700s, the academic community is still plagued by the problem of skepticism:
II. Campbell escapes this problem by relying on Augustinian intuition.
A. This position opens some doors for Campbell.
1. He accepts what he calls "moral evidence": It includes:
a. the data of experience
b. the data of analogy
c. testimony from authority, because the authority has intuitive powers. Has seen the truth.
d. data from probability: calculation of chances.
2. He accepts moral evidence as deductively useable and divinely inspired and hence beyond reason and senses. "Such instincts are . . . oracles of eternal wisdom."
3. The initial need for memory is recall the instinctively true past.
a. Memory is composed of the captured sensations of the mind; they are stored as abstractions and associations (Locke).
b. Imagination is the ability to pull ideas from the memory and then generalize them to a current problem or situation.
c. Rhetoric's job is to make ideas of the imagination more real, more vivid, and more applicable to current situation.
I.) Use contiguity in place II.) Use proximity in time III.) Use Similarity: What's it like IV.) Give it energy: power, force V.) Give it animation: personify, movement VI.) Give it probability and plausibility
B. Campbell theory full blown:
1. Faculty psychology: the job of rhetoric is to enlighten (argue to) the
understanding, to awaken the memory, to engage (please) the imagination, and to
arouse (move) the passions to influence the will to action or belief.
2. The theory is then fine tuned with certain goals for an ideal rhetoric:
a. Perspicuity: End vagueness and ambiguity, be efficient as audience will
allow. Nothing unnecessary is said.
b. Therefore, eloquence must be both beautiful and functional (ornatus). Hugh Blair
I. Blair = Lectures On Rhetoric and Belles Lettres were delivered at the
A. The great spring to action was pathos. "To every emotion or passion,
nature has adapted a set of corresponding objects; and without setting these
before the mind, it is not in the power of any Orator to raise that
emotion."
B. The sublime = a grandeur, a sense of elevation and expansion, transcendence.
Like Campbell he endorsed vivacity, which we already investigated, and perspecuity = purity, propriety and precision.
"The internal emotion of the speaker adds a pathos to his words, his looks, his gestures, and his whole manner, which exerts a power almost irresistible over those who hear him."
C. The vehement style = ardour, glowing, heated, affected.
D. The matter of taste and belle lettres is also contributed to by Dryden, Addison, and Edmund Burke.
1. Taste is a propensity of the mind "ultimately founded on a certain natural and instinctive sensibility to beauty." Bishop Richard Whately,
I. Whately reverses Ramus, makes logic the province of rhetoric, and then narrows rhetoric to argumentation. A. "The only provice that rhetoric can claim entirely and exclusively is 'the art of inventing and arranging arguments...'"
B. Handbook = The Elements of Rhetoric, 1828 1. onus probandi, the burden of proof.