Doug Kulchar

Professional Bio

My research focuses on rhetoric and its historical relationship with philosophy, with particular attention to rhetoric's conditions of possibility. I understand it as a mode of probabilistic reasoning from incomplete information, in which the chief objects of rhetorical inference are the dynamics of other minds and their movement in what Wilfrid Sellars terms the "space of reasons." Because I understand rhetoric to require - explicitly or implicitly - a theory of mind, my work is invested in analytic approaches to philosophy of mind and of language, a body of work which has been largely overlooked by the field, despite its natural affinities with rhetorical studies. In this way, my work aims for a synthesis of questions and concepts from a number of fields, including pure mathematics, logic, computer science, and systems theory.

I am at work on two large projects currently: one which pursues a reconciliation between logic and rhetoric following the schism introduced by the mathematization of logic in the late 19th/early 20th century, and one which investigates a genealogy of persuasion stretching from German Idealism to American Pragmatism.