A conversation with Steven Katz, the R. Roy and Marnie Pearce Professor of Professional Communication, and Professor of English, at Clemson University.
Wednesday, October 22
125 Nolte Center
11:30 a.m.
Presented by the Department of Writing Studies
This presentation will entail discussions of rhetoric, Judaism, and philosophies of language and reality. Revisiting what he had considered to be a primary ethical problem rooted in classical Greek and Roman rhetoric, what he called "the ethic of expediency" first formalized in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Dr. Katz will touch on the apparent manifestation of this ethic in technical communication, and whether and to what degree the ethic of expediency was a major operant in the Holocaust.
Picking up the Jewish theme, Dr. Katz will summarize an ancient philosophy of the Hebrew aleph-bet, and briefly compare this philosophy to that of classical Greek rhetoric; he will argue, as he has done in publication, that this philosophy of the Hebrew aleph-bet seems to represent a somewhat unique strand of classical rhetoric. Dr. Katz will suggest ways this Jewish sophistic relates to technical communication, and how the rhetoric of the aleph-bet may harbor or at least hint at an ontological antidote to the ethic of expediency.
In the conclusion of his presentation, Dr. Katz will speculate about the epistemological implications of this orthographic ontology for mystical, magical, empirical, social-epistemic, deconstructive, object-oriented, and digital philosophies of communication and reality in a post-human age.
Lunch will follow this special event. Please RSVP to Kate Gobel (kdgobel@umn.edu.)
This lecture is sponsored by Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, The Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of English.
