Research Theme: The Academic and The Civic

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Colloquium: "The Democratic Intellect after Half a Century", Monday, 21 May 2012

Atlantic World Rhetorics, 19 March 2012

"English Literature 1762 –2012: Spring 2012

Symposium: "The Business of Education", 20 October 2011

Festival of Politics Event - "Whose heritage - whose society?", 25 August 2011

Voices of Moderatism in the Atlantic World, 1600-2010, 3-4 March 2011

'Global Humanities' and Public Policy, 26 November 2010

Changing Relationships: The City and The University, 27 October 2010

Monday, 21 May 2012
IASH, Hope Park Square

The Democratic Intellect after Half a Century

A one-day colloquium on George Elder Davie’s The Democratic Intellect

The year 2012 is the centenary of the birth of George Elder Davie, author of The Democratic Intellect, first published in 1961. Davie’s book focused debate on the distinctive character of Scottish education and the traditional place of philosophy within it. His work prompted widespread discussion in educational circles while also coming under sustained critical scrutiny. His title ‘the democratic intellect’ provided a rallying cry for Scotland’s educationalists. The book has never been out of print, but since its first publication, education and philosophy have undergone great changes. The passage of fifty years allows, and calls for, a dispassionate assessment of Davie’s cogency, influence, and contemporary relevance. This interdisciplinary colloquium aims to stimulate just such an assessment. Speakers will address Davie's philosophical, historical, educational and public legacy in academic and public life.

PROGRAMME:

As space is limited, registration is essential. Please email iash@ed.ac.uk to reserve a place.

Monday, 19 March 2012
IASH, Hope Park Square

Atlantic World Rhetorics

A STAR (Scotland's Transatlantic Relations)/Atlantic World Research Network Joint Colloquium

An interdisciplinary symposium in collaboration with colleagues from University of North Carolina Greensboro, this event will develop issues raised in the successful IASH / STAR meeting on ‘Voices of Moderation in the Atlantic World,’ held in 2011. Historians, rhetoricians and English scholars will discuss public and private idioms of engagement in the Anglophone Atlantic World between 1750 and the present. Together, we shall consider a range of rhetorics – and disciplinary practices for their assessment – across domains from Literature to Philosophy, Politics and Religion. We shall address historical and contemporary languages of moderation, to ask what kinds of vocabulary, verbal structure and stance are deployed to promote the virtues of moderate thought? The symposium is part of our larger inquiry into how analysis of the rhetorics of moderatism help us better understand literary, cultural and political developments historically and in our own time.

PROGRAMME:

ABSTRACTS:

Walter Beale: New Rhetorics of Moderation in Scotland and America

For a variety of reasons, “moderation” is inherently a concern of rhetoric. As a dialectically indeterminate term, it is always the carrier of potentially conflicting meanings, resolvable only in specific arenas of rhetorical contest. As a matter of political practice, it can only be enacted coherently through a rhetorical discourse. It is no accident, then, that Scotland’s eighteenth century advocates of “moderation” would also be theorists and proponents of “new rhetorics” of moderation: these are rhetorics based upon a vernacular “belles lettres” over the teaching of Latin and classical literature; also upon induction and testimony over the enthymemic (deductive), dialectical “places” of traditional rhetoric.  An especially important innovation was the emphasis upon writing—a medium constitutionally suited to a discourse of moderation—as over against the traditional emphasis upon oratory.  In the process, they created a new literary humanism that would emerge as the discipline of “English” in Great Britain and America.

Robert Calhoon: A Man for All Seasons: Adam Smith as a Moderate Public Intellectual

This paper deals with a central problem in Atlantic World Political and Intellectual History, the relationship of structure and contingency in political theory. Adam Smith built on Locke's instrumental concept of property and moral interpretation of life and liberty but also recast Lockean theory to fit the circumstances of 18th century Scottish history.



Joseph Moore: Covenanter Sensibility: Scotland's anti-Enlightenment Atlantic export

The Covenanter movement outlived its seventeenth century political effloresce in the form of a lay-based, anti-statist Presbyterian sensibility.  This sensibility was passed generationally through rhetorics of resistance and the memorialization of religious and state conflict.  Once their conflict with the British state dissipated, however, Enlightenment ideas took on the role of primary antagonist to the Covenanters' worldview.  Later incarnations of Covenanters, including Reformed and Seceder Presbyterians, traversed the Atlantic World through Ulster, early America, Canada, and the American South.  They remained in perpetual conflict with Enlightenment teachings, and offer a counter-narrative to the exporting of the Scottish Enlightenment to the Atlantic.  Taking root in the American backcountry, the Covenanter sensibility informed the Protestant dogmatism that evolved into American fundamentalism.  This paper will trace the development of those ideas.  

Alex Murdoch: The limits of moderation, William Robertson and Roman Catholic Relief in Scotland 1778-1781

William Robertson created a movement of ministers and laymen in the Church of Scotland in the 1750s who received the name of 'moderates' from one of their opponents, John Witherspoon. Robertson's many triumphs arguably came to an end with the assault on his house in George Square Edinburgh by a mob in 1779 and the death threats he received around the same time as a supporter of a parliamentary bill to repeal the 'anti-popery' legislation of the old Scottish Parliament and grant Roman Catholics the right to worship freely in public under the law (but not to enjoy full civil rights). The episode revealed the hatred directed at Robertson by many Scottish Presbyterians who viewed him as a crypto-Episcopalian and a reincarnation of the notorious James Sharp, Presbyterian minister turned Episcopalian Archbishop assassinated by Scottish Covenanting radicals in 1679 and named in several of the death threats Robertson and his family received in 1779, when they were compelled to take shelter from the mob in Edinburgh Castle. Robertson never served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland again.

                                             
Frank Cogliano: The immoderation of Thomas Jefferson

The theme is that Jefferson was actually much more aggressive and bellicose in his foreign policy than is generally supposed.

Andrew Taylor:  "Strong, genial and abundant”: Henry James’s Trollope and the racialised virtues of moderation

In the 1880s the New York-based Century Magazine was a regular home for Henry James’s work, both fiction and criticism. The magazine’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder, was keen to promote a distinctly national cultural identity from its contributors: indeed William Dean Howells’s hymn to, as he saw it, James’s powerfully new, American style of literary realism appeared, with much controversy, in an 1882 number of Century. (James was appreciative but a little embarrassed, referring to Howells’s “ill-starred amiabilities to me”.) If Howells’s essay is a provocation on behalf of a close friend, James’s first major intervention on the theory of fiction in the magazine is his July 1883 essay on Anthony Trollope (published over a year before Century printed his now canonical consideration “The Art of Fiction”). The essay represents, perhaps unsurprisingly, a more nuanced view of the literary scene, in which allegiances circle and return, and reputations are diminished and then rebuilt. This paper explores James’s contorted reading of Trollope as a literary precursor who is both criticised for his immoderate, promiscuous productivity and, at the same time, recuperated as a moderate sensibility standing opposed to the scientific avant-gardism of the French naturalist tradition. By exploring the complex national allegiances of an American author writing in a proudly American journal about a recently-deceased, and highly popular, English novelist, I consider the ways in which James attempts to carve out for himself a transatlantic literary space where the metaphoric possibilities of moderation and its antonyms find a restless purchase in a writer Trollope whose “inestimable merit”, James writes, “was a complete appreciation of the usual”.

Allyson Stack: Willa Cather's O Pioneers!: French unanimisme and the American Frontier

The complex interweaving of European and New World cultures that lies at the heart of Willa Cather's O PIONEERS! has been much discussed in recent years. But a close examination of the more specific strains of European thought that inform Cather's novel have been largely unremarked upon. This talk will explore some of these correspondences in an attempt to move the discussion of the trans-Atlantic strains in Cather's writing into more concrete terrain. In particular, it will examine how Jules Romans' concept of unanimisme might be mobilised to yield fresh insights into the Old World/ New World conversation that lies at the heart of all Cather's work.

Will Dodson: Rhetoric, Humanism, Living Learning Communities, and Future Directions in University Education

This presentation applies key neurological functions of memory to George Campbell’s rhetorical conceptions of intuition and deduction. I argue first that these neurological functions in some ways confirm Campbell's principles. This combined perspective, far from suggesting "current-traditional" approaches to rhetoric and composition, call instead for Writing in the Disciplines and Living Learning Community centered education.

Mark Robson: Floating in the middle: Tocqueville and the democracy to come

Democracy in America is, claims Alexis de Tocqueville in his introduction, an attempt to "contemplate the future". It has become common to view Tocqueville as an immoderate moderate, an aristocrat who sees democracy as simultaneously inevitable and threatening, in need of a moderation that can only come from within the resources of democracy itself. Pursuing a rhetoric and politics of moderation that finds expression in and as literature and theatre in the early modern period, I want to offer a reading of the place of literature in Tocqueville's text, especially that accorded to drama and particularly Shakespeare. There is, I suggest, an analogy between Tocqueville's own position as a "stranger" in America and that which he gives to a certain kind of literature as "alien" to American democracy. From this analogy, it is possible to discern an ambivalence towards democracy that is also an ambivalence towards the literary. Perhaps Tocqueville is best thought of as offering the vision of a moderate passion for moderate liberty, but one determinedly posited as "to come".

REGISTRATION

As space is limited, registration is essential. Please email iash@ed.ac.uk to book a place.

Edinburgh and "English literature," 1762 –2012: academic and civic contexts

 2012 marks the 250th anniversary of the establishment of English Literature as an academic subject.  In 1762 the Rev. Hugh Blair became the first incumbent of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh. Blair had been giving popular lectures on literary history, style and critical analysis under this title to an audience of students and townspeople for several years.  The University’s decision to make these part of the curriculum was a landmark in the history of a discipline that has become one of the most popular subjects for undergraduate study. As Blair himself put it in his first lecture, ‘Whether the influence of the speaker, or the entertainment of the hearer, be consulted; whether utility or pleasure be the principal aim on view; we are prompted by the strongest motives to study how we may communicate our thoughts to one another with most advantage.' It was not an uncontested claim: the stakes were high then, and they remain so now. The dialogues in this series will consider such topics as Blair’s legacy and the institution of ‘English’, and the history of the discipline; they will also address the implications of historic civic contexts for the academic study of the humanities, for contemporary debates about their 'value' to society, and for the national economy.

"The Business of Education"

Thursday, 20 October 2011
2.00 - 6.00 pm

The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,
2 Hope Park Square

A symposium on the increasing mutual involvement of education and the world of business and the questions that arise when Higher Education becomes a matter of business

Programme:

Space is limited. Please email iash@ed.ac.uk to book a place.

Festival of Politics Event: "Whose heritage - whose society?"

Thursday, 25 August at 10.30 a.m. - 12 noon

Committee Room 1, The Scottish Parliament

Can culture, in all its forms, help us to understand better Scotland's place in the world, as well as addressing the issues that face Scottish and global society? A panel of cultural commentators, academics and practitioners in the field of 21st century enlightenment will explore those themes in a highly interactive audience discussion.

Chair Jan McDonald (Professor Emerita and honorary professorial research fellow at the University of Glasgow) is joined by:

Mark O'Neill (Director of Policy, Research and Development at Glasgow Life)

Matthew Taylor (Chief Executive, Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce)

Professor Neil Blain ( Head of Film, Media & Journalism Department, Stirling University)

David Greig (Playwright)

In association with British Council Scotland, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, RSA UK, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and UNESCO UKNC Scotland Committee

The event is free. There are no tickets; you should report to the Registration desk at Visitor Services on arrival. N.B. You need to be at the Scottish Parliament at least 30 minutes in advance of the start time to enable you to clear Security.

ESRC funded Workshop: Rhetorics of Moderation

"Voices of Moderatism in the Atlantic World, 1600-2010"

Thursday 3 - Friday 4 March 2011

Description:

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have tended to focus on fundamentalists of various hues. For some, the extremist enables one to follow Foucault's maxim that exploring the world through the eyes of the madman can shed light on the everyday. For others, the militant constitutes a character whose behaviour can only be understood pathologically, therefore demanding attention and diagnosis in the tradition of psychoanalysis. Such characters tend to be 'colourful' and hence attractive to those engaged in historical research, but focussing them can give us a distorted picture of social, cultural and political developments. However, it could be the very ubiquity of the moderate that is most unsettling for scholars. After all, moderates often seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time; even when they claim to speak for a 'silent majority' they might as well speak for no-one if political silence can be equated with apathy, disinterest and/or non-participation. Furthermore, Moderates often claim to speak with 'reason' and 'common sense' that invoke Classical or Enlightenment traditions of self-evidence in the humanities and social sciences. As a result, moderates perhaps constitute a unique analytical challenge for contemporary scholars of political and social change: subtle performers of the 'obvious,' they are often only visible by contrast with 'fundamentalists' or 'extremists' against whom they appear to achieve momentary definition. Their tactics and their effectiveness depend on verbal (self-) presentation and techniques of persuasion: Rhetoric. This colloquium will consider a range of rhetorics - and disciplinary practices for their assessment - across domains from Literature to Philosophy, Politics and Religion. We shall address historical and contemporary languages of moderation, to ask what kinds of vocabulary, verbal structure and stance are deployed to promote the virtues of moderate thought? What are its philosophical antecedents? Does a rhetoric of moderation avoid, or depend on, potentially troublesome grand narratives of Enlightenment progress? What constitutes a 'moderate' intellectual? To what extent has the romantic idea(l) of the transgressive, unfettered thinker impeded the ways in which moderate, pragmatic thought is regarded?

Some of the questions the colloquium will explore will include:

• Is the label 'moderate' an empty vessel, able to stand for anything (and fall for nothing)?
• What is the character of the moderate?
• Must political moderates be understood merely as centrists, consensus-builders and/or pragmatists?
• What is the relationship between moderation and Classical or Enlightenment discourses of foresight, reason and wisdom?
• Does the term 'moderate' refer to differences with the ideologically committed in approach and style rather than fundamental ends?

Such questions will contribute to the larger inquiry into how analysis of the rhetorics of moderatism help us better understand literary, cultural and political developments historically and in our own time.

Programme:

Thursday, 3 March 2011
5.30 pm, Faculty Room South, David Hume Tower

Opening Plenary Lecture by Professor Robert McCluer Calhoon (University of North Carolina, Greensboro'):
Provincial Moderation in Scotland and America: Bailyn and Clive 50 years on (and counting)

Followed by reception for participants

Friday, 4 March 2011
One-day workshop, IASH, Hope Park Square

Abstracts:

MARK ROBSON: "Halfway: Aesthetics Between Politics and Ethics"

This paper explores both rhetorics of moderation and the moderation of rhetoric. Tracing the inheritance of classical models in the early modern rhetorical tradition, I offer a reading of some key moments in Shakespeare's work in order to open up the ethical, political and aesthetic stakes of moderation. In particular, I will address the interlacing of spatial and temporal conceptions of moderation as they are figured through ideas of temper, temperance and temporizing.

MICHAEL F. GRAHAM: "Sectarian Discourse in the Cause of Moderation: Reginald Scot and Demonological Scepticism"

Exceptional figures (such as Montaigne or Erasmus) aside, the sixteenth century, with its sharp religious divisions and aggressive persecution of nonconformists, real or imagined, has not been regarded as an age of moderation. Contestants in the battle of ideas claimed moderation by grounding their viewpoints in their own particular society's orthodoxy, which was often marked by the aggressive denunciation of the orthodoxies of others. To modern ears, such viewpoints seem remarkably immoderate. But this perception, grounded in modern western associations of moderation with tolerance of other views, can obscure the actual positions being argued by sixteenth century contestants. The aggressive persecution of the imaginary crime of witchcraft seems, from a modern perception, one of the most immoderate aspects of sixteenth century culture, followed closely on the league table of immoderation by the literature of religious controversy. But Reginald Scot, one of the sixteenth century's two major witchcraft sceptics, expropriated the language of religious polemic in his countercultural dismantling of the witchcraft beliefs of his contemporaries, thus employing conventional (immoderate) discourse to argue for the moderation of the pursuit of witches. This paper will explore this aspect of Scot's eclectic polemic, which is particularly interesting in light of doubts which have recently been cast on Scot's own religious orthodoxy.

CATHERINE PACKHAM: "Cicero's ears: rhetoric, moderation, and the sublime in Enlightenment Scotland"

Enlightenment Scotland witnessed a resurgent interest in rhetoric as part of its newly formulated Science of Man. Philosophers, including David Hume and Adam Smith, turned their attention to written and spoken language use, in all their forms, both to understand this crucial area of human activity, and - in line with Enlightenment concerns - to improve it. This paper explores Hume and Smith's discussions of eloquence, oratory and rhetoric, and in particular their attention to forms of linguistic or oratorical extremes, including the sublime. It argues that for both thinkers, the realm of the aesthetic poses both the problem of the excessive in human nature, and the possibility of its moderation. It discusses attempts by Hume and Smith to theorise accounts of self-moderating mechanisms in human nature and society, by which moderation in rhetoric, character and politics might be secured.

ANDREW TAYLOR: "Men are conservative after dinner": Emerson, Montaigne and radical moderatism

The philosopher Susan Haack published a collection of essays in 1998 entitled Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate. The book is, indeed, a strong articulation of its author's beliefs on matters ranging from feminism to multiculturalism to the literary turn (via Richard Rorty) of her discipline. The apparently oxymoronic phrase "passionate moderate", while undefined in her text, gets discursive purchase through Haack's sense of herself as battling the current thinking on race, gender and aspects of philosophical activity more generally. Her radicalism and her moderatism lie in a resistance to what she sees as the fashionable - and philosophically dangerous - preoccupations of her subject. What, then, does it mean to be passionately - or radically - moderate? For Haack, the performance of her moderatism is what can radically counter what she regards as some of philosophy's faddish absurdities. Moderation can act as a check on excess while still proudly exhibiting the strength of its advocacy. In this paper I want to think through the counter-intuitive possibilities of a radical moderatism by offering a reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay (published in Representative Men in 1850) on Michel de Montaigne, whose own essay 'On Moderation' is a key text on the topic. Emerson's moderate credentials, I want to suggest, are radical in their refusal to form exclusive alliances, a discursive hesitancy embodied in a style which constantly qualifies or undercuts itself in a resistance to settled thought. If one definition of classic moderatism is the desire to adjudicate between positions, to find common ground, to reach a settlement, Emerson's radicalism lies in his reluctance to choose, or at least in his desire to maintain an openness to the possibility of further consideration of a subject. 'Montaigne' is a complex meditation on the role of scepticism in the production of thought, and of the conditions that might be necessary for thinking to retain its validity in the face of the false comforts of extremism. Emerson maintains a sometimes precarious balance between scepticism and belief, keen to argue against our craving for easy certainty (the stance we lazily slip into, he suggests, after a good meal) and yet also holding onto the notion that the abandonment of belief is a human impossibility. The essay treads between and around these positions, in itself reluctant to close a dialectic whose very existence speaks to Emerson's commitment to a moderatism that, in the words of Virginia Woolf (writing about Montaigne), follows the mind's "own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection".

ÁINE KELLY: The Provocative Polemics of Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty occupies a unique disciplinary position, somewhere between philosophy, literary criticism and cultural politics. The elements of humour and informality which characterize his writing combine with a self-consciously American idiom to voice a rhetoric of reasonableness and common sense, a voice Rorty considers singularly appropriate for the pragmatist intellectual. This paper aims to explore in detial this rhetoric of neo-pragmatism. By "rhetoric", I mean to suggest both the persuasive force of Rorty's writing and the figural dimensions of his prose. Famously contending that philosophy is not delimited by subject matter or genre but is "a kind of writing", Rorty wishes to view philosophy as a mode of discourse that amounts to re-describing and narrating the history of philosophy. The very fact that these rhetorical perspectives ("writing", "style", "re-description", "narrative" and so forth) are so privileged encourages us to consider the possibly figurative aspect of Rorty's own writing, the metaphorical investments that make his critical position possible as well as the literary dimensions of his prose. The key question, of course, is whether these rhetorical perspectives are constitutive of his writing; whether Rorty's style, in fact, is as important as he claims.

ALEXANDRE GUILHERME: The Contrasting Philosophies of Martin Buber and Frantz Fanon: The political as dialogue or as confrontation.

There are many who advocate dialogue and peace talks as avenues to be pursued (e.g. Obama; "So we face big and difficult challenges. And what the American people hope - what they deserve - is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences") and there are just as many who defend a confrontational attitude as a way of dealing with the situation (e.g. Bush: "you're either with us, or against us"). Both of these schools of thought appear to defend such views either as something that ought to be done pragmatically or because common sense demands it, and consequently these views become philosophically unsatisfactory. That said, it is evident that the 'political' takes these two distinct forms: either dialogue or confrontation. The questions here are: How are we to philosophically ground these two perspectives? How are we to decide which is more philosophically sound? How do they relate to the 'rhetorics of moderation'? In answering these questions I claim that 'dialogue' is epitomised by the philosophy of Martin Buber and 'confrontation' by the philosophy of Frantz Fanon; moreover, I claim that the former embodies 'moderation' and the latter challenges it. In my analysis, I refer to Buber and Fanon's respective philosophies to demonstrate my point; I advocate the dangers of not pursuing 'dialogue' and 'moderation'; and I conclude that Buber and Fanon remain relevant for our modern times by way of referring to modern 'political' examples.

The event is free but, as space is limited, registration is essential. To register, please email iash@ed.ac.uk

'Global Humanities' and Public Policy

A meeting on 'Global Humanities' was held on the 26th of November at the Institute. It was designed to provide a forum for further discussion after a Work-in-Progress Seminar, "Knowing the Enemy: A Political Economy of the Humanities' given by Dr. Ming Lim (Visiting Research Fellow, University of Leicester School of Management) on the 10th of November. Ming's talk had explored the pervasive sense of the 'crisis' in the Humanities through a political economy lens, drawing on concepts of cosmopolitics and compressed modernity. She had argued for a comparative 'East/West' approach to the question of the Humanities in order to consider the different histories, ideologies and impacts of the Humanities in cross-cultural contexts. Fellows of the Institute (among whom were social scientists, philosophers, historians, creative arts and literary scholars and practitioners) took up the opportunity at this meeting to extend and interrogate the themes of 'crisis', globality, public impact and the power of cross-disciplinary collaborations and alliances.

It was agreed that it was important for those in the Humanities to look beyond Anglo-American (and national) perspectives; to look outside the Academy and to re-assess the relationship(s) between the Humanities, what we do and the public sphere. Direct links with policymaking bodies could be established: although there are many people who champion and believe in the shaping influence of the Humanities in our lives and in policy, many of these impact(s) remain invisible. It was noted that the Humanities provides deep structures for societies and the sense of a nation's and people's 'identity'. Important questions were also raised about how helpful the notion of 'crisis' was, altogether, and whether it would not be more productive to map out who/what the battlefield was and who/what we were contending with. From this basis, we could begin to cultivate free, democratic spaces for engagement in civil society and to engage in a positive spirit with many other disciplines and partners. Several members of the University had already expressed a keen interest to work with the Institute on developing new bridges to policy and practice. Another meeting has been scheduled for the 16th of December (Thursday) to take these discussions forward. The results of all these discussions may then form part of phased initiatives for IASH to develop in the New Year.

Wednesday, 27 October 2010
2.00 - 5.30 pm, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,
Hope Park Square

"Changing Relationships: The City and The University"

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