This book reveals a tradition of thought overlooked in our intellectual history but enormously influential even now: the tradition of odious praise. Distinct from more conventional rhetorical exercises, such as panegyric or the funeral oration, odious praise uses acclaim to censure or to critique. This book reassesses the genre of praise-and-blame rhetoric by considering the potential of odious praise to undermine consensus and to challenge a society’s normative values. Surveying literature from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe, Eric MacPhail identifies a tradition of epideictic rhetoric that began with the sophists but was cultivated and employed most vigorously by Renaissance political thinkers. Presenting examples from the writings of Lorenzo Valla, Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean Bodin, among others, MacPhail shows that by inscribing a positive value to an object worthy of blame, cultural values are turned on their head. MacPhail traces the use of this technique to critique the values of the classical and scholastic traditions. Recognizing and engaging with this tradition, MacPhail argues, can reinvigorate our study of the history of social thought and reveal further the roots of modern social science. Rigorous and lucid, Odious Praise presents a rhetoric capable of suspending and thus critiquing the values of a culture, and in doing so, it uncovers the first serious attempts at social thought and the seedbed of modern social science. It will be welcomed by scholars of Renaissance literature and culture, the history of rhetoric, and political thought.

This study examines the transmission and transformation of commonplace wisdom in Renaissance humanism by tracing a series of filiations between classical sayings, anecdotes, and exampes and Renaissance poems, essays, and fictions. The circulation of commonplaces can be understood either as a process of reanimation and revitalization, where frozen sayings thaw out and come to life, or conversely as a process of immobilization and incrustation that petrifies tradition. The paradigmatic figure for this process is the proverbial dance around the well, which expresses both the danger and the compulsion of borrowed speech.

The Church of the Living God is the only organization in this world that will transcend to the next world and throughout all eternity. Everything else in this world will vanish away, but God’s Church will last for all eternity - now and forever. God has structured the Church and everyone must know what that stricture is. The information in this book has been divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit, because Scripture is used to answer Scripture. It is based on what God says, with Scriptures that make it plain. The information in this timeless book will change a Church, a ministry, and also change a Believer’s personal walk with the Lord. It is group worthy, as well as individual worthy of study because God has His Blueprint for His Church, and it is all hidden in Scriptures, and being able to interpret the language of the Author, which is the Holy Spirit, will lead us in the wealth of Spiritual prosperity. The Holy Spirit is the Designer of God’s Blueprint for His Church and He wants us all to understand His way because no prophecy of the Scriptures is of private interpretation. He wants us to know how we are individually, and collectively designed, and knowing this will transform us into His glorious Church. This book will help you recognize your place in the Body of Christ, His Church, as He works on us individually and collectively, “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ,” (Ephesians 4:13). This book is profitable for individual, Church, and group studies. It will help you see the spiritual construction from beginning to end, from start to finish, and we will stand in awe of this great Architect, the designer of our souls, God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Enquiry concerning the principles of morals / Hume, David, 1711-1776.