Michael Gilbert
A Summer Institute on multi-modal argumentation beginning on June 8 will feature a critical assessment of York University Professor Emeritus Michael Gilbert’s seminal article on the topic 25 years after its publication.
The five-day course will be taught virtually by Gilbert, along with fellow York Professor Emeritus Claudio Duran, York Philosophy Professor Linda Carozza, Michigan State University Assistant Professor David Godden and University of Windsor Professor Christopher Tindale, director of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric (CRRAR).
Gilbert studies philosophy, gender and feminist philosophy. His multi-modal theory holds that information in arguments is exchanged not through statements, but through messages which include familiar meaning, context, bodily communications, power relations and intuitions.
The Summer Institute will open with a lecture by Gilbert and will include specific days devoted to discussions of each of the four modes (logical, emotional, visceral and kisceral) highlighted in his theory.
Participants will engage in a retrospective analysis of Gilbert’s work and theory, which originally appeared in the paper “Multi-Modal Argumentation” in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences journal in 1994 and subsequently developed in his 1997 book, Coalescent Argumentation. This course gives scholars of argumentation a chance to review the theory, discuss its details and the prospects for its development.
Students who register for the course will have an opportunity to develop a project that can be submitted later in the summer.
The Institute is being hosted in conjunction with CRRAR and the 12th conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA). The course schedule, requirements, reading list and registration info can be found on the Summer Institute’s website.