Modern Dogma And The Rhetoric Of Assent

Paperback. English. University of Chicago Press. 1974. In fair condition.

When should I change my mind? What can I believe and what must I doubt? In this new 'philosophy of good reasons' Wayne C. Booth exposes five dogmas of modernism that have too often inhibited efforts to answer these questions. Modern dogmas teach that 'you cannot reason about values' and that 'the job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted,' and they leave those who accept them crippled in their efforts to think and talk together about whatever concerns them most. They have willed upon us a 'befouled rhetorical climate' in which people are driven to two self-destructive extremes