This chapter explores Locke’s theory of language in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its history of influence on judicial thinking about hearsay evidence. Hearsay is distrusted because it is language all the way down – testimony based on second-hand narrative – rather than language grounded in the empirical world. The chapter analyzes three contemporary US Supreme Court opinions using this framework, Ohio v. Roberts (1980), Crawford v. Washington (2004), and Davis v. Washington/Hammon v. Indiana (2006).

The chapter provides a novel account of perceptual discrimination (krinein) in Aristotle. Against the widespread view that the most basic perceptual acts consist in noticing differences between two or more perceived qualities, I argue that discrimination is for Aristotle more like sifting, winnowing on a sieve: it consists in identifying – with an ultimate authority – the quality of an external object as distinct from any other quality of the given range that the object could have. The chapter further explores how the notion of discrimination is embedded by Aristotle within his causal assimilation model of perception. I argue that the central notion of a discriminative mean (mesotēs), introduced in An. 2.11, is intended to capture the role of the perceptive soul as the controlling factor of a homeostatic mechanism underlying perception. As such the notion lays the groundwork for resolving the apparent conflict between the passivity of perception and the impassivity of the soul (as analysed in Chapter 5). The prospect is further explored in Chapter 7. The present chapter concludes by arguing that Aristotle conceives perceptual discrimination as a holistic assessment of the external object acting on the perceiver, including those of its features which are not causally efficacious.

Appellate court opinions are often criticized for establishing difficult precedent as a result of imperfect reasoning.This chapter, inspired by Giambattista Vico, explores the role that prerational judgment, embodied in the sensus communis, plays in the authoring of what will become unintentionally difficult precedent, using Schuette v. BAMN (2014) and its relevant precedent as an example. In Schuette the Court ruled that a voter-approved constitutional amendment that removed the power to implement affirmative action plans was not an Equal Protection violation. The chapter argues that in the opinions that preceded Schuette, the Court was accustomed to the evils the majority could undertake to preserve white dominance and maintain the status quo. Those Courts could not have anticipated the extent to which the future Court would understand that dynamic as a problem of another time. Further, it demonstrates how critics of that precedent similarly fail to account for the role of sensus communis in those earlier cases (and in their own appraisal of them) through their insistence that those opinions should have anticipated the controversies and the shifts in language that accompanied them.

Integrating tradition in legal arguments remains an effective persuasive strategy, serving as a source of legitimacy and appeal, fostering the establishment of a shared identity between the speaker and the audience, and cultivating a sense of belonging to a distinct group with defined notions of its identity. This chapter examines the strategic utilization of the concept of tradition in forensic rhetoric. It investigates how communicators shape and influence discourse within forensic settings by leveraging enduring cultural norms, purported intentions and beliefs of esteemed historical figures, and narratives concerning a people’s historical trajectory. By examining cases from the popular courts of classical Athens and drawing parallels in contemporary American legal arguments, the chapter identifies instances where tradition serves as both a stabilizing force and a catalyst for innovation, and sheds light on the importance of tradition as a cornerstone of the rhetorical strategies of advocates on all sides of an issue, including those challenging the status quo. Consequently, the chapter contributes to a deeper understanding of the rhetorical functioning of tradition, offering insights into the intricate interplay between the construction of persuasive narratives grounded in tradition and legal concepts such as precedent, original intent, and legal interpretation.

We began this volume by describing it as a mosaic of theories and texts contributing tesserae – the small pebbles, stones, and glass that make up mosaics – to a larger picture of legal rhetoric. We are proud of the ways that this volume fills in a segment of this picture. First, the volume points to the richness of ancient texts. While much contemporary American legal thought relies on Aristotle, his work is often mischaracterized or simplified. The chapters by Mark Hannah and Jay Mootz on ethos (Chapter 2) and by Susan Tanner on the enthymeme (Chapter 5) challenge and complicate these received understandings. Other contributors illustrate the continued relevance of other figures of Greece and Rome – Brian Larson’s chapter on Cicero (Chapter 4), Vasileios Adamidis and Laura Webb’s chapter on the Attic orators (Chapter 3), and Beth Britt’s chapter on a text by an anonymous sophist (Chapter 13) – while Rasha Diab rereads early Arab-Islamic discourses on women’s rights (Chapter 9).

This chapter examines the role of enthymemes in legal argumentation, focusing on the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It argues that while legal reasoning is often presented as syllogistic, it should instead be understood as operating through enthymemes, which allow for the strategic omission of premises and the incorporation of implicit assumptions. The chapter analyzes the enthymematic structure of the Dobbs decision, revealing how Justice Alito’s opinion employs unstated premises and narrowly defined categories to overturn Roe v. Wade while maintaining a veneer of logical consistency. The chapter concludes that acknowledging the rhetorical nature of legal argumentation is crucial for understanding the complexities and nuances of judicial decision-making and the interplay between logic, persuasion, and societal values in shaping legal outcomes.

The chapter spells out the homeostatic model of how the soul is involved in perception introduced in Chapter 6, while addressing two main challenges for it. First, I argue that while the physiological details are not easy to tease out, there is no principal reason against Aristotle’s extension of the model from touch to other sense modalities. More importantly, I argue that we can understand the role of the perceptive soul as an extension of the model developed for the nutritive soul in An. 2.4 and based on Aristotle’s art analogy (from Phys. 2 and elsewhere). The upshot is that the basic perceptual acts are underlaid by bodily processes non-cognitively controlled by the soul. But while homeostasis is the aim of nutrition, in perception it only becomes a means for achieving something else, namely discrimination. The chapter closes by showing how the interpretation developed in this book pays off when it comes to understanding Aristotle’s two notoriously difficult concluding accounts: the account of perception as a reception of forms without the matter in An. 2.12 and the summarizing account of the cognitive soul in An. 3.8.

This chapter traces social medicine to Shibli Shumayyil, a medical doctor and key figure of the Nahḍa, an intellectual and cultural movement that spanned from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. He envisioned social medicine as a tool for social reform, diagnosing its social ills, and proposing a cure. Shumayyil and his successors rejected the colonial justification of social medicine, instead promoting social medicine as a means to free people from all kinds of oppression, ignorance, and injustice. Throughout the twentieth century until today, as poverty, authoritarianism, and social conflicts escalated in the Arab world, doctors increasingly became advocates for the marginalized, the poor, and the oppressed. The chapter examines the work of several revolutionary doctors in Tunisia, Sudan, and Egypt, who used their practice as a form of protest, praxis, and critique. Not only did these doctors embody the meaning that Guérin originally gave to social medicine but they also incorporated Shumayyil’s idea of medicine as a form of progressive clinical sociology.

In the middle of the twentieth century, “social medicine” manifested in Australia largely through its proxies and surrogates, which included tropical medicine, Aboriginal health, colonial health (in Papua New Guinea and parts of the Pacific), pediatrics, geriatrics, and some non-institutional aspects of psychiatry. These fields often emphasized socioeconomic drivers of disease emergence and social or political solutions to population health problems. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were few overt advocates for social medicine. From the 1970s, radical politicians and public health leaders began to support nationwide projects in social medicine and community health, influenced by similar schemes elsewhere, as well as strong local campaigns for women’s health, sexual health, Indigenous health, and worker’s health. The goal was to “develop” communities through interdisciplinary centers (including social workers, nurses, mental health workers, and sometimes medical doctors), embedded in and engaging with local structures and leadership. We explore what distinctive (and perhaps contrasting) concepts of human collectivity are implied by social medicine and community health.

Michael Calvin McGee characterizes the ideograph as a link between rhetoric and ideology. This chapter explores the development of the ideograph <police power> in the time leading up to, and the court’s opinion in, the landmark case Floyd v. City of New York (2013). In this case, a bright spot in New York’s sullied history of stop-and-frisk, twelve Black and Hispanic individuals succeeded in a class action lawsuit against the city, alleging that the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk policy violated their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and their right to equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. The chapter shows that ideographic inquiry offers more than a useful tool for education and analysis or a method for predicting societal beliefs and behaviors: It is a force for persuasion.

The barefoot-doctor scheme in rural China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 was a synonym for social medicine in the People’s Republic of China. This chapter examines how sociopolitical, disease, and economic factors contributed to the development of the barefoot-doctor program and shaped the unique path of social medicine in China. It analyzes how the government clarified and addressed the dilemma between ideological equity and structural inequity. Furthermore, it discusses how disease models both facilitated and challenged the barefoot-doctor program and impacted on social medicine, and investigates how the changing roles and function of barefoot doctors has impacted social medicine in the evolution of community medicine. The barefoot doctors echoed the themes of social medicine in developing and developed countries and left its inspirations and legacies. By revisiting the state’s role in the barefoot-doctor program, the chapter provides a new understanding of the global history of social medicine in the twentieth century and beyond.