Special issue editors' introduction.

• Author: Beard, David
• Position: Editorial

The co-editors of this issue of Argumentation & Advocacy on the works of Jim Aune came to his scholarship and his friendship in different ways. David Gore enjoyed a relationship with Aune as a teacher and an academic advisor at Texas A&M University. David Beard, on the other hand, met Aune at an AFA-sponsored panel at NCA, very early in his career, in which Aune celebrated the career of his undergraduate teacher, Jim Pratt. Pratt was Aune's coach in undergraduate debate, and like many of the contributors to this special issue, Aune came to rhetoric and communication studies through the experience of debate.

It is fitting that this special issue critiquing, elaborating, and extending the work of Aune be published by the American Forensics Association. Forensics was the starting place for Aune's career in rhetoric. The AFA was a community that nurtured his work. And Aune argued, vehemently, later in his career, that argumentation was the core of the field. (Aune argued more than once that argumentation, not "speaking" or "communication," should become the core concept of the basic course.)

In approaching Aune's work, we have sorted the contributions into three dimensions. In so doing, we do not wish to limit the sense of Aune's contribution to the field to these areas, and we do not wish to limit the reader's interpretations of the essays selected for this issue, which are divided into two genres: traditional academic articles and "provocations," short pieces designed to stimulate reflection and point us toward areas of future research. Both Aune's work and the work of our contributors exceed simple categorization.

In the first section, addressing rhetoric, law, and economics, our contributors approach the major facets of Aune's established work. In longer pieces (like Rodney Herring and Mark Garrett Longaker's "Wishful, Rational, and Political Thinking" and like Marouf Hasian, Jr. and Megan D. McFarlane's "A Critique of James Amt Aune's Rhetoric, Legal Argumentation, and Historical Materialism"), we see Aune's signature work examined under glass. Provocations (by Ronald Walter Greene and Alexander Hiland, in "Living Arguments" and by Eleanor Amy Lockhart in "Rethinking Rhetoric's Ontology") encourage us to extend that work by encounter with new forms of theory and new objects of criticsm.

This issue also includes works that follow the paths Aune had only begun to map. Peter Simonson's article ("Rhetoric as a Sociological Problem") and Brad...