As Wilfrid Sellars put it, one of the principal aims of philosophy "is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." In this I think Sellars is right: the discipline is charged with taking a "synoptic...
This dissertation is a textual history of Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the American independence movement during the first half of 1776. The study uses the methodologies and vocabularies of rhetorical studies, early modern history, and political theory to analyze the 180-degree turn in colonial public opinion away from a...