The Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation & Rhetoric along with the PhD in Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor invite you to a talk by
Stephen Pender, CRRAR Fellow
Erasmus, Medicine, and the Fortunes of Praise
Abstract: Adept at expressing humanist views and values succinctly, in c. 1499 Erasmus claims that “there is no art of life which can be properly conducted without the aid of medicine.” In Encomium medicinae, written for a physician and friend but published under his own name in 1518, and still important in the seventeenth century, the Dutch humanist celebrates the discipline, demonstrating his “warm heart for medicine,” while recognising its status as a low science. Perhaps at times he is too warm, for he retails some of the commonplaces he vows to abjure — physicians are divine, no art is more noble or useful — suggesting that the problem with praise is praise itself: at what pitch, at what timbre, in what quantity? How might one avoid errant hyperbole, the insipid, the jejune? This paper is the first iteration of a larger project concerning the fortunes of the epideictic.
February 27, 2026
3:00 p.m.
Chrysler Hall North, 1163
All Welcome