Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren, we have Jacob in the booth and we’re here together because of the support of the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas at Austin. And the reason we’ve gathered together in the beautiful recording studio in the basement of Mezes Hall is to talk about the work of George Campbell.   Campbell, like his contemporary Hugh Blair, was a rhetorician-preacher and he believed that he could teach preachers to preach better through modernizing classical rhetoric. Campbell started out in law as a young buck and gradually gravitated towards a clergical vocation. From there, he became the teacherly sort of minister, becoming a scriptorian, translating the gospels of the New Testament and tinkering around with what would be one of his crowning works: the Philosophy of Rhetoric.  According to C. Downey, this guide was not just for rhetoricians and not just for preachers, also the book really reached the best-sellers list in the 19th centurey. The book had 39 editions by the 20th century (9-10). It was a bedrock for many of the rhetoric textbooks that dominated in the 19th century. But before it was one of the defining texts of Enlightenment rhetoric, it was a work-in-progress read before Campbell’s friends in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, a bunch of like-minded brainy sorts who liked to spend time philosophizing together.   Sidebar: I don’t know why people think writing groups and faculty writing retreats are new-fangled productivity machines. These Enlightenment blokes were always clumping up together to read and think and write together. I’m as much of a loner as any other scholar in the humanities, but I figure if it works for Campbell and Blair and their lot, it’s worth giving it a shot, right?   Like all of his Scottish Enlightenment buddies, Campbell was engaged in the project of making the study of human activities more empircally demonstrable. Making the humanities more scientific, if you want. Campbell went back to classical sources of rhetorical thought and read them across the budding psychological sciences. Instead of “servile imitation” of the classic authors (vi), he promoted a modern interpretation that recognizes that things have changed since the classical treastises were written. That being said, he’s not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater.   And, brother, did this guy like threes. That must be the Aristotlian influence creeping in. It might be worthwhile for you to imagine a chart with three columns when you think about Campbell’s ideas, as we go through the podcast you can start to fill in these columns in all of Campbell’s triparts.   One of the key Campbell trios are that the best langauge is “current, national and reputable.” Lets take a moment and dice out these three. Current is a modern gloss on what Campbell calls “present”--which doesn’t just refer to the time, but also to a metaphorical sense of place. Present is the opposite of past and also the opposite of absent. For a rhetor to use old-timey language is to alienate from the audeince. Similarly, Campbell, good Scotsman of the Enlightenment that he was, is a booster of national language, but this goes beyond the Eton accent--national langauge means there is no universal grammar. Again, we don’t need to stick to the same language rules of Cicero’s Latin when we’re writing and speaking in English.ure use must be (1) English (2) in the English idiom and (3) “employed to express the precise meaning which custom hath affixed to them” (170). If this all sounds cheerfully revolutionary, don’t worry, his idea of reputable will burst your bubble. Like the other “common sense” philosophers, Campbell assumed that one class--his class--were the proprietors of proper langauge. So while he wasn’t a chronological or Latinate snob, he wasn’t advocating a rich brogue riddled with slang over th