Rhetorica: The Fourth Ditch of Fraud
Though the topic is complex, the lesson is simple: To understand statistics, we should first learn how to.
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Texts in Context: Behold, a Pale Horse
The sophisticated, prosperous world of the High Middle Ages was brought down almost singlehandedly by one of the smallest things in existence.
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Rhetorica: Of Bacon; or, The Scientific Method
Not all science is equally rigorously conducted; if you are testing a hypothesis, you are doing science—it might just not be very thorough.
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Texts in Context: O Rose Thou Art Sick
Like every other time, the High Middle Ages were doomed to pass; but as they did, a certain kind of civilizational innocence seems to have gone with them.
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Rhetorica: The Arrest of the Mad Hatter
Learning to think rationally can be counterintuitive; at times, one almost feels like Alice astray in Wonderland. Are there no limits to the strangeness of the world?
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Texts in Context: The Chalice and the Sword
The thirteenth century was the high noon of Christendom; which also means it is when its light began to decline.
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Rhetorica: Won’t Someone Please Think of the Pathetic?—Part II
On the rhetorical appeal known as pathos; or, a practical manual for manipulating people’s emotions.
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Texts in Context: The Secret of the Rose—Part II
Both the origin and the ultimate development of courtly love are to be found in far stranger places than we might predict.
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Rhetorica: Won’t Someone Please Think of the Pathetic?—Part I
What, if anything, differentiates the rhetorician’s legitimate “appeal to emotion” from the sophist’s fallacies?
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Texts in Context: The Secret of the Rose—Part I
Romantic love certainly existed before the eleventh century. What the troubadours invented was the idea that it was a good thing.
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