Q&A

Today’s communication produces an incredible amount of what could be described as ‘semantic perversion’. Moreover, it seems that the critical faculties of too many people have been dulled, dried up, and withered. These conditions make people particularly susceptible to demagoguery, to enslavement by perverse power. The discussion, based on the book The Rhetoric of Manipulation by Robert Harvey, centres on a frank exposure of vicious discursive practices and the gullibility that accompanies them; it aims to address the damage already done, to help reverse the trend and improve the current situation in view of a far more ethical immediate future.

Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus (Stony Brook University) and former Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophy. His research explores the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourse, the relations between art and philosophy, and how both dynamics may inform ethics. Author of many books, his latest are Parmi les gisants: penser le cimetière (Presses Universitaires de France, 2024), which visits burial grounds and explores what the living think they can learn from the dead; and The Rhetoric of Manipulation, which has just appeared with Bloomsbury Press (2025).

Sverre Raffnsøe is Professor of Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. Author of the following monographs: A History of the Humanities in the Modern Universities: A Productive Crisis (Palgrave 2024); Philosophy of the Anthropocene: The Human Turn (Palgrave 2016); Michel Foucault: A Research Companion. Philosophy as Diagnosis of the Present (Palgrave 2016); History, Diagnostics and Metaphysics in Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ (Palgrave 2025); Aestheticizing Society: A Philosophical History of Sensory Experience and Art (Bloomsbury 2025). He has contributed to the fields of philosophical aesthetics, social philosophy, management philosophy and recent French and German philosophy.