J.L. Golden argues that the 70-year debates about miracles undertaken by David Hume, George Campbell, and Richard Whately was so important that they can "serve as paradigms of how representative British epistemologists sought to answer the question: What constitutes convincing proof in rhetorical discourse?" (1996, pp. 265-66). In short, these three rhetoricians are the models that later rhetors and rhetoricians followed as they constructed evidence to support their arguments.
Your objective for this assignment is to apply the concepts from this debate to a contemporary argument.
Read the summary of this debate outlined by Dr. James Arnt Aune Preview the document(follow the link to access it). If you would like to read the original works, you can find them easily on Project Gutenberg or Hathi Trust (Hume's Essay on Miracles (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., Campbell's Dissertation on Miracles (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., and Whately's Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.). Summarize what you think the key points of the debate are. Find a real-life example of argument in the public sphere and analyze it for the key points you identified. Note errors of logic or places where your rhetorical choices would have differed from the author's.
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