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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Rhetoric

Rhetoric

Roberts, W. Rhys
Lam, Emily
Aristotle

Paperback

Philosophy

ISBN10: 1499193491
ISBN13: 9781499193497
Publisher: Createspace
Published: Apr 19 2014
Pages: 182
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.42 Width: 5.98 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
Wit is well-bred insolence.
- Aristotle, Rhetoric

Aristotle's Rhetoric is an ancient Greek treatise on the art of persuasion, dating from the 4th century BC. The English title varies: typically it is titled Rhetoric, the Art of Rhetoric, or a Treatise on Rhetoric.

Aristotle is generally credited with developing the basics of the system of rhetoric that thereafter served as its touchstone, influencing the development of rhetorical theory from ancient through modern times. The Rhetoric is regarded by most rhetoricians as the most important single work on persuasion ever written. Gross & Walzer concur, indicating that, just as Alfred North Whitehead considered all Western philosophy a footnote to Plato, all subsequent rhetorical theory is but a series of responses to issues raised by Aristotle's Rhetoric. This is largely a reflection of disciplinary divisions, dating back to Peter Ramus' attacks on Aristotlean rhetoric in the late 16th century and continuing to the present.

Like the other works of Aristotle that have survived from antiquity, the Rhetoric seems not to have been intended for publication, being instead a collection of his students' notes in response to his lectures. The treatise shows the development of Aristotle's thought through two different periods while he was in Athens, and illustrates Aristotle's expansion of the study of rhetoric beyond Plato's early criticism of it in the Gorgias (ca. 386 BC) as immoral, dangerous, and unworthy of serious study. Plato's final dialogue on rhetoric, the Phaedrus (ca.370 BC), offered a more moderate view of rhetoric, acknowledging its value in the hands of a true philosopher (the midwife of the soul) for winning the soul through discourse. This dialogue offered Aristotle, first a student and then a teacher at Plato's Academy, a more positive starting point for the development of rhetoric as an art worthy of systematic, scientific study.

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