Philosophy as Virtuous Rhetoric

The majority of contemporary metaphilosophers and philosophical methodologists consider it to be certain that we use intuitions as evidence in order to justify our arguments and claims. Theorists then debate as to whether it should be the case that we use intuitions as evidence, however, it is thought to be ubiquitously assumed that philosophers do as a matter of fact use intuitions in this way. It is this assumption that I reject armed with multiple arguments to the contrary in the first chapter of the work.;Left bereft of this evidential methodology contemporary philosophers seem to faced with an existential crisis, which I try to better explicate in Chapter 2: if philosophers do not employ an evidential methodology, (1) what sort or activity are we engaged in and (2) is that activity worthwhile? I attempt to meet this challenge by answering that (1) philosophy is a rhetorical discipline and that (2) it is worthwhile to practice at least insofar as it is practiced virtuously. After rolling out my central thesis I then present amethodological paradox for anyone trying to even attempt an apologetics of Philosophy.;In chapter 3, I explicate my claim that philosophy is a rhetorical discipline by first introducing the academic concept of rhetoric and then defend the claim by analyzing a debate in Plato's Gorgias in which Plato's Socrates argues that rhetoric is not even a discipline at all. I argue to show that this conclusion of Socrates is founded upon the unfounded assumption that any bona fide discipline must have a unique essential subject-matter. I reject this assumption and argue in, echoing Aristotle, that rhetoric is both a bona fide discipline despite its having no unique essential subject-matter. I then further argue, again following Aristotle, that philosophy - when conceived as a dialectical discipline - is also a bona fide discipline without an essential subject-matter. This serves to finalize the substantiation of the claim that philosophy as dialectic is a rhetorical discipline by making clear the nuanced relationship between the discipline of philosophy as such on the one hand and the rhetorical disciplines writ large.;In chapter 4, I argue the second part of my thesis by first characterizing my notion of virtuous rhetoric vis a vis dialectic in terms of its aim, which I claim to be the mental state of understanding which I define in terms of understanding-that, understanding-how , and ultimately knowledge-how. In the latter part of this chapter I use these concepts to argue that practicing philosophy via dialectic virtuously is sufficient for its being an intellectually worthwhile activity despite holding the methodological operating assumption of global philosophical skepticism - the idea that philosophy is does not result in knowledge of any propositions.;In closing the work in chapter 5, I begin exploring what, if any, procedural consequences there might be in the wake of my new thesis. That is, given that philosophy is what I say it is, need we proceed in a different manner we are now? If so, how? How can we figure out how? In answer to these provocative questions I outline, what I call, the "Conversationalist's Approach" to procedural standardization - an approach that follows quite straightforwardly from my thesis that philosophy as dialectic is a virtuous rhetorical discipline. I show how this approach might lead to a procedural standardizations in the form of a dialectic logic or set of dialectical logics.