The Deep Ecology Of Rhetoric In Mencius And Aristotle

Discusses philosophers Mencius and Aristotle as socio-ecological thinkers. Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Artistotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of energy and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of pistis, “persuading-and-being-persuaded,” in Aristotle and zhi, “governing-and-being-governed,” in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess’s “ecosophical” deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle. Douglas Robinson is Dean of Arts and Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of many books, including Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason, also published by SUNY Press.

Discusses philosophers Mencius and Aristotle as socio-ecological thinkers.

Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Artistotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of energy and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of pistis, “persuading-and-being-persuaded,” in Aristotle and zhi, “governing-and-being-governed,” in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess’s “ecosophical” deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle.

The Dao of Translation sets up an East-West dialogue on the nature of language and translation, and specifically on the "unknown forces" that shape the act of translation. To that end it mobilizes two radically different readings of the Daodejing (formerly romanized as the Tao Te Ching): the traditional "mystical" reading according to which the Dao is a mysterious force that cannot be known, and a more recent reading put forward by Sinologists Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, to the effect that the Dao is simply the way things happen. Key to Ames and Hall’s reading is that what makes the Dao seem both powerful and mysterious is that it channels habit into action—or what the author calls social ecologies, or icoses. The author puts Daoism (and ancient Confucianism) into dialogue with nineteenth-century Western theorists of the sign, Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure (and their followers), in order to develop an "icotic" understanding of the tensions between habit and surprise in the activity of translating. The Dao of Translation will interest linguists and translation scholars. This book will also engage researchers of ancient Chinese philosophy and provide Western scholars with a thought-provoking cross-examination of Eastern and Western perspectives.

This book is about the philosophical, historical, and interpretative aspects of Mencius. It explores his influence, reception, and relevance in China from the third century BCE to the present, as well as offers comparative studies of Mencius and major figures in the history of Chinese and Western philosophy. With 34 accessible articles written by leading philosophers and scholars, the Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Mencius provides both broad pictures and in-depth discussions regarding the work of one of the most important and influential Chinese philosophers. It covers his normative ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy, epistemology and moral psychology. The last section of the volume, “Mencius and Western Philosophers: Comparative Perspectives,” explicitly puts him in dialogue with major Western philosophers. The Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Mencius serves as an essential volume for college students, graduate students, and scholars who study and teach Mencius as well as Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy in general.​

The rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries The rhetoric of food is more than just words about food, and food is more than just edible matter. Cookery:Food Rhetorics and Social Production explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The classical canon of rhetorical invention entails the process of discovering one's persuasive appeals, whereas the contemporary landscape of agricultural production touches virtually everyone on the planet. Together, rhetoric and food shape the boundaries of shared living. The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies--human and extra-human alike--in the forms of intoxication, addiction, estrangement, identification, repulsion, and eroticism. Our bodies, in turn, shape the boundaries of food through research, technology, cultural trends, and, of course, by talking about it. Each chapter explores food's persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, "food porn," strange foods, and political "invisibility." In each case readers gain new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food's powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion in agricultural production. The purpose of Cookery, then, is to demonstrate the deep rhetoricity of our modern industrial food system through critical examinations of concepts, practices, and tendencies endemic to this system. Food has become an essential topic for discussions concerned with the larger social dynamics of production, distribution, access, reception, consumption, influence, and the fraught question of choice. These questions about food and rhetoric are equally questions about the assumptions, values, and practices of contemporary public life.

In Aleksis Kivi and/as World Literature Douglas Robinson tracks the global reception of Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872) as a wedge for exploring the nature and boundaries of world literature, and the contributions made by translators to it.

ICT and globalization have completely redefined learning and communication. People virtually connect to, collaborate with, and learn from other individuals. Because educational technology has matured considerably since its inception, there are still many issues in the design of learner-centered environments. The Handbook of Research on Ecosystem-Based Theoretical Models of Learning and Communication is an essential reference source that discusses learning and communication ecosystems and the strategic role of trust at different levels of the information and knowledge society. Featuring research on topics such as global society, life-long learning, and nanotechnology, this book is ideally designed for educators, instructional designers, principals, administrators, professionals, researchers, and students.

Through a range of accessible and innovative chapters dealing with a spectrum of genres, authors, and periods, this volume seeks to examine the complex relationship between translation and the classic, and how translation makes and remakes (and sometimes invents) classic works for new audiences across space and time. Translation and the Classic is the first volume in a two-volume series examining how classic works fare in translation, how translation is different when it engages with classic texts, and how classic texts can be shaped, understood in new ways, or even created through the process of translation. Although other collections have covered some of this territory, they have done so in partial ways or with a focus on Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts or translations. This collection alone takes the reader from 1000 BCE up to the digital age in a sequence of chapters that encompass areas including philosophy, children’s literature, and pseudotranslation. It asks us to consider translation not just as a mechanism of distribution, but as one of the primary ways that the classic is created and understood by multiple audiences. This book is essential reading for those taking Translation Studies courses at the senior undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as courses outside Translation Studies such as Comparative Literature and Literary Studies.