Kenneth D. Johnson’s Rhetoric Weblog

Once again, the remedy for bad speech is . . . more speech.

I confess to being a Quentin Tarantino fan, but, not having any conceptual vocabulary for analyzing movies, I've never understood why. I think Inglourious Basterds is his masterpiece (although unlike, say, Reservoir Dogs or Kill Bill 2, I'm unlikely to want to see it again soon). I found myself speculating, as I often do, about counterfactual argum […]

A new CFP from Criticism via Jeff Pruchnic: SPECIAL ISSUE: "Open Source Culture and Aesthetics" read more

I'm always taken with Jim Aune's thoughtful argument on pro-life rhetoric: that many Republicans who advocate legislative restrictions seem to care a whole lot about the fetus in the womb, and not so much about helping to care for that baby after she's born. For people so fearful and hateful (especially with this particular presidency) of stat […]

I've been reading Bernard Williams's remarkable book Shame and Necessity, a study of agency and responsibility in Greek tragedy and how these concepts relate to our own. (Williams's style is a model of lucidity, the English philosophical style at its very best.) One topic in the book (pp. 44-46) is the notion of akrasia, unhappily translated a […]