“Martin Heidegger’s 1924 Lecture Course on Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Key Research Implications”, Daniel Gross, University of California, Irvine

The Agora is a speaker series within the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh that invites scholars to share work of relevance to the many aspects of communication scholarship.  The Agora features faculty and graduate students from both the Department of Communication and the wider University of Pittsburgh community, as well as other noted scholars from around the world.

This speaker series will feature Daniel Gross, University of California, Irvine

The purpose of this presentation is threefold: 1) to outline what Heidegger found in Aristotle's Rhetoricjust as he was radically reformulating the history of Western metaphysics against his contemporaries in philosophy; 2) to indicate how this moment also rewrote (with a debt to Dilthey and also Bultmann's sacred rhetoric) the conventional history of rhetoric per se; and 3) to identify our new historiography that foregrounds rhetorical topics Heidegger found interesting around 1924: emotion, orientation, and rhetoric as the art of listening. Such was Heidegger's work. But this final move invites a perspective that is not exactly Heidegger's, as I conclude with a pressing issue of the Weimar Republic (rhetoric beyond personal responsibility) that was forced in a way we still find terribly compelling.