- Plato's student, he endorsed a notion of absolute truth but located it in different sources than did Plato.
- Gave lectures on rhetoric in Plato's school (Plato likely didn't)
- Produced the first significant codified rhetorical system
- Set up most of the structures we still associate with rhetoric
- Canons of rhetoric
- Invention
- Arrangement
- Style
- Memory (mostly later formalized by Cicero, only tangentially appears in Aristotle's Rhetoric although he writes about it elsewhere)
- Delivery
- Three branches of rhetoric:
- forensic (legal matters, focused on determining what happened in the past)
- deliberative (political matters, focused on determining what to do in the future)
- epideictic (ceremonial occasions, focused on strengthening shared beliefs in the present)
- Three sources of artistic arguments (one you have to invent):
- Ethos (appeal to credibility)
- Pathos (appeal to emotion)
- Logos (appeal to reason–clearly the one Aristotle valued highest)
- The triad of:
- Topoi or "places" to get standard arguments
- Established rhetoric as the counterpart to dialectic. Dialectic could find absolute truths through the syllogism; rhetoric could find probable truths through the enthymeme
- The enthymeme is tough to define, but posterity has tended to view it as a syllogism with a missing premise that the audience is implicitly invited to supply.
- So, the standard syllogism is: all men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
- An enthymeme might be: Socrates is virtuous, for he is wise. This leaves out the premise that wisdom is virtue. (Notice that the implied premise doesn't seem self-evident, and audiences can fill in the blank variably.)
- Admits that rhetoric can be used for good or ill, but says that is true of all things save virtue itself.
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