This lecture is part of the Agora speaker series within the Department of Communication, which invites scholars to share work of relevance to the many aspects of communication scholarship. This lecture will feature, Daniel Gross (University of California, Irvine), whose book on the history of emotions was published by the University of Chicago Press. It follows the interdisciplinary symposium on emotion that takes place on April 7.

The purpose of this presentation is threefold: 1) to outline what Heidegger found in Aristotle's Rhetoric just 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.

This event is also sponsored by the Department of Psychology, the Department of Communication, the Department of English, and the Humanities Center. For more information, contact Daniel Shaw at danielshaw@pitt.edu.