Overview

A revolutionary approach to rhetoric that asks why audiences need persuading. What is persuasion? For some, it is the ideal alternative to violence. For others, persuasion is simply a neutral instrumentality—a valued source of soft power. Both positions rest on a fundamental belief: persuasion is a power that resides in a speaker acting on an audience. Loving the World Appropriately asks a different, more fundamental, question: why does an audience need persuasion? In shifting our focus, James Kastely delivers a provocative new history of rhetoric and philosophy, one that describes rhetoric as more than a matter of effective communication and recasts persuasion as a philosophical concern central to notions of human subjectivity. Ultimately, Kastely insists, persuasion enables us to love the world appropriately.

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9780226822105

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Reviews

Loving the World Appropriately presents a robust rhetorical theory of mind on its way to an entirely new formulation of persuasion. And Kastely is just the scholar to present such a theory. The resulting account is by turns riveting, delightful, and weighty. -- Debra Hawhee, Pennsylvania State University

Author Information

James L. Kastely is professor of English at the University of Houston. He is the author of Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism and The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion.

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