July 12, 2005
Two sentences…
The last two posts, the comments on those posts, and the current essay I’m writing has me thinking about the nature of rhetoric. I’m writing about what (I think) happens when we account for the role of rhetoric in the illocutionary act of speech-act theory.
I re-read George Kennedy’s essay “A Hoot in the Dark” today. It begins with one of the two best sentences ever to open an academic essay:
After spending much of my professional life teaching rhetoric, I began to wonder what I was talking about.
The other one comes from Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit“:
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.
BTW, the revised formula is: Fr(p) / C ->PE
Posted by acline | July 12, 2005 | Posted in: Rhetoric | Comments Off
