This introductory book on George Campbell discusses details of his life and his intellectual milieu, including his role in the Scottish Enlightenment in Aberdeen. In addition, Arthur E. Walzer provides a thorough examination of Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric, the most important work in rhetorical theory of the Enlightenment. Brief analyses of Campbell's Dissertation on Miracles and Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence are also given.

Though Campbell's (1719-96) Philosophy of Rhetoric is well represented and respected in the current literature on rhetoric, he is little studied. Walzer (rhetoric, U. of Minnesota-Twin Cities) explains some of the reasons for the neglect, and seeks to inspire scholars to correct it. Annotation (c) B

Before his famed career as moral philosopher and economist, Adam Smith (1723-1790) was well known for a series of public lectures on rhetoric that he gave in Edinburgh and Glasgow. In this volume, Stephen J. McKenna provides the first book-length treatment of Smith's rhetorical theory, focusing on his theory of rhetorical propriety--the means by which effective communication is adapted to the variables of subject, audience, speaker or writer, purpose, and moment--and the centrality of this concept to his thought. McKenna shows that Smith's contribution to the theory of rhetorical propriety...