Amelie Rorty

(1932 - 2020)

IN PREPARING A HANDBOOK ON RHETORIC, Aristotle proceeds as he does for a discussion of any craft or practice. After distinguishing it from other closely related arts, he defines its proper aim: that of finding the means that can be used to persuade an audience of any subject whatever. Since the most effective exercise of any craft or faculty is conceptually connected to its fulfilling its norm-defined aims, his counsel is directed to guiding the master craftsman who is responsive to the larger issues that surround the exercise of his skill--a rhetorician speaking about important matters to those authorized to affect them. Aristotle's advice to the rhetorician imports the results of his philosophic investigations: the Rhetoric presupposes and is implicitly informed by Aristotle's logical works, by his philosophy of mind, and his theory of action; it is also strongly conjoined with his political and ethical theory. But while the rhetorician relies on these theories, he is not himself a philosopher, logician, statesman, or moralist.

Courage is dangerous. If it is defined in traditional ways, as a set of dispositions to overcome fear, to oppose obstacles, to perform difficult or dangerous actions, its claim to be a virtue is questionable. Unlike the virtue of justice, or a sense of proportion, traditional courage does not itself determine what is to be done, let alone assure that it is worth doing. If we retain the traditional conception of courage and its military connotations–overcoming and combat–we should be suspicious of it. Instead of automatically classifying it as a virtue, attempting to develop and exercise it, we should become alert to its dangers. And yet and yet. There is an aspect of traditional courage that serves us: we require the capacities and traits that enable us to persist in acting well under stress, to endure hardships when following our judgments about what is best is difficult or dangerous. If courage is checked, redefined as the virtue that enables virtue–the various sets of dispositions, whatever they may be, that make us resolute in worthy, difficult action–then we need not fear the dangers of courage. We need rather to reform it by diversifying it, as a heterogeneous variety of traits that enable us to act well under stress, against the natural movements of self-protection.

Philosophic writing appears in a variety of genres, addressed to a variety of audiences; it appears nestled within distinctive 'enterprises' : Plato, Berkeley and Hume wrote dialogues; Augustine and Rousseau wrote autobiographical confessions; Mill and Bernard Williams wrote reports to Parliament; Boethius and Descartes wrote meditations; Bacon, Montaign and Hume wrote essays; Aquinas and our contemporaries contribte articles;Leibniz and Hume wrote histories' they all wrote letters and discourses.