Tag / public sphere

by micropaedia

How to Give a Persuasive Presentation

A merry soul by the name of Miss Khadim, who writes under the nom de plume: the Silent Soliloquy asked me last week to write something on how to give a presentation. Although what she asked was about instructive speech, I will focus today on persuasive speech and return to instructive speech in a forthcoming blog.

Aristotle, who is commonly known as a philosopher, and you might be forgiven to think what might a philosopher have to say about giving presentations. But, as we shall see in this blog, Aristotle has great insight in this area; given that a presentation in other words is the act of persuading others to act or believe in a certain way; this is precisely what Aristotle is a master of – the art of persuasion – and his book entitled Rhetoric is the masterpiece that he produced on this topic.

There are basically three main strategies that one employs to persuade others. And the best words to describe these three strategies are the ones that the Greeks used. They are: ethos, pathos and logos.

rhetoric Continue reading →

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by micropaedia

Habermas’ ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’

I wish to show the theoretical underpinnings of Habermas’ ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’. Namely, I want to highlight that Habermas’ work is underpinned with a binary position of religion versus the secular; of metaphysical claims against non-metaphysical ones. I want to show that the constraints of defining religion in secular terms presumes religious values to be speculative and therefore as less real than the materiality of other concepts. I want to show that Habermas implicitly suggests that religious reasoning and viewpoints are intrinsically and diametrically opposed to secular reasoning and it is only with the condition of institutional translation proviso that they are relevant in the legislative domain. This is based on a certain definition of religion and is neither based on a sociologically unified political formation nor on a singular religious logic (Mahmood 2009). This dichotomy of characterising religion as such is based on an a priori epistemological assumption of the nature of religion. Continue reading →