Approaches and Paradigms in the History of Rhetorical Theory II – Human Origins

The “human” has often been defined by its inherently rhetorical capacity, namely the ability to speak and to reason. Thinkers in the Western tradition have offered a variety of origin stories that explain the exceptional “nature” of the human. In this course, we will explore theories of reason and language through a close textual analysis of works that offer philosophical and anthropological accounts of the origin of the human. We will begin with Thomas Hobbes and read figures such as Rousseau, Marx, and Darwin, before turning to more modern authors including Leroi-Gourhan, Donna Haraway, and Bernard Stiegler.