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Since antiquity, philosophy and rhetoric have traditionally been cast as rivals, with the former often lauded as a search for logical truth and the latter usually disparaged as empty speech. But in this erudite intellectual history, the book stakes out a claim for rhetoric as the more productive form of inquiry. It views rhetoric through the lens of modality, arguing that rhetoric's guiding interest in what is possible—as opposed to philosophy's concern with what is necessary—makes it an ideal tool for understanding politics. Through innovative readings of Thomas Hobbes and Giovanni Battista Vico, the book reexamines rhetoric's role in the history of modernity and makes fascinating connections between thinkers from the classical, early modern, and modern periods. From there it turns to Walter Benjamin, reclaiming him as an exemplar of modernist rhetoric and a central figure in the long history of the form. Persuasive and perceptive, this book provides a rewriting of the history of rhetoric and a heady examination of the motives, issues, and flaws of contemporary inquiry.

From high school cafeterias to the floor of Congress, insult is a truly universal and ubiquitous cultural practice with a long and earthy history, and yet this most human of human behaviors is not often the subject of organized and comprehensive attention. Viewed through the lens of the study of rhetoric, insult, this book argues, is revealed as at once antisocial and crucial for human relations, both divisive and unifying. Explaining how this works and what exactly makes up a rhetoric of insult prompts the book to range across the vast and colorful history of offense. Taking in Monty Python, Shakespeare, Eminem, Cicero, Henry Ford, and the Latin poet Martial, the book aims to break down various types of insults, examines the importance of audience, and explores the benign side of abuse. In doing so, it initiates readers into the world of insult appreciation, enabling us to regard insults not solely as means of expressing enmity or disdain, but as aspects of human interaction.

Focused on clarity and logical argument, analytic philosophy has dominated the discipline in the United States, Australia, and Britain over the past one hundred years, and it is often seen as a unified, coherent, and inevitable advancement. This book questions this assumption, rethinking the very grounds that drove analytic philosophy to develop and uncovering its inherent tensions and confusions. Drawing on J. L. Austin and the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, it argues for the solution provided by ordinary language philosophy—a philosophy that trusts and utilizes the everyday use of language and the clarity of meaning it provides—and in doing so contributes to the philosophy of language and twentieth-and twenty-first-century philosophy as a whole.