The New York Sophist

This essay is one of my absolute favorites to teach in argumentation. My friend Dan and I take it on in an hour long conversation on the latest podcast.

Every year the students complain about this essay mostly because of Burke’s eccentric writing style. I’ve tried different ways of teaching it over the years, but part of the difficulty is that each time you read the essay something new pops out at you.

Burke’s essay really speaks to our moment where those involved in political argument take great pleasure from a strategy of total eradication of the other side, person, utterance – you name it. In Burke’s essay he explains why this strategy does not advance understanding.

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Delighted to participate in the 2021 World Speech Day at the invitation of Simon Gibson who founded World Speech Day to celebrate and educate everyone on the power of oratory.

On this panel we all consider the question of what the future of speech looks like for humanity after the global pandemic experience we’ve all had this past year. That, combined with seemingly intractable political positions and controversies is a pretty grim canvas to work on.

Nevertheless, this panel had some amazing contributions and I was so very happy to hear the different points of view. Have a look and let me know in the comments what you think.

World Speech Day: “Rhetoric Remix” (pscp.tv)

via RadioPublic

You can also listen to this episode and others at Anchor.fm/inthebin where we host the show.

At that site you can drop us a voice note or message as well. What other topics in speech, presentation, oratory, argumentation, or debate would you like to hear about? We are open to all ideas.

By now regular visitors to the blog should be aware of my twice a year sojourn to Cornell University to introduce a fairly good number of Cornell students to the art of rhetoric. Of course since they are alive human beings in their 20s who are in college they have been practicing rhetoric for quite some time and quite successfully. But naming a thing is often a transformative moment.

It’s become a pretty fun and cool ceremony for me of all people to return to the site of Herb Wicheln’s career and introduce a bunch of people to the formal theory and study of rhetoric. It’s odd that nothing of his legacy survives there outside of some archive which I suspect doesn’t get called on much. One day I’ll have to go take a look.

I always try to account for and capture these talks as I’m interested in how they vary. YouTube has a good number of the one’s I’ve recorded. Here’s the most recent one, delivered February 15th, and it’s not really edited that much. I took out some of the sidebars and other random conversation during the class break and stuff like that. I tried to preserve the conversation as it was, both the mistakes I make in the talk and the discussion afterwards. It’s audio only, but everything is here. I wonder if people prefer the audio to the video. It seems an audio lecture is easier to take in than a video one sometimes (plus we are all burned out on video chats).

Thoughts and comments welcome!

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