Ars Rhetorica

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IV. Special Area: Literary Social Criticism

4. Secondary Readings

Aristotle. Ars Rhetorica.

Supporting References:

1. hypertextural resource: http://rhetoric.eserver.org/aristotle/
2. text: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.html
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric_%28Aristotle%29
4. http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/aristotle/section9.rhtml

5. Birch, Dinah. "rhetoric." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013 .

Rhetoric. The ancient art of speaking (or by extension, writing) persuasively, much cultivated in antiquity, and revived as a major element of the medieval and Renaissance school syllabus up to the 17th century. This tradition of learning ultimately laid the foundations for English literature as an academic discipline, notably in the lectures of Hugh *Blair at Edinburgh. Literary rhetoric is concerned chiefly with the conscious exploitation of the various figures of speech, which were extensively named and categorized in antiquity and are still mostly known under their Greek names (although George *Puttenham attempted to provide colourful English translations for them). These are commonly divided into three kinds: (i) major ‘figures of thought’, also called ‘tropes’, which transform the meanings of words and expressions, as with metaphor, metonymy, personification, irony, and hyperbole; (ii) lesser ‘figures of speech’ which arrange words in attractive or memorable ways, as with anaphora, asyndeton, chiasmus, epanalepsis, syllepsis, and dozens of others; and (iii) ‘figures of sound’, such as alliteration and onomatopoeia. A growing number of English schoolboys in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, including Shakespeare and Milton, were required to identify, memorize, and illustrate examples of more than a hundred such figures, thus encouraging a vibrant culture of linguistic exuberance in these periods. See Edward P. J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (1998); Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric (2007); Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (1988).

6. Birch, Dinah. "Aristotle." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 22 Aug. 2013 .

The following focuses on the author and not the text.

“Aristotle (384–322 bc) Philosopher, born at Stagira (hence his name ‘the Stagirite’) in Macedon, where his father was physician to King Amyntas II. Sent to Athens in 367, he studied under Plato for twenty years. After a period of travel, in 342 he was appointed by Philip II of Macedon as tutor to the future Alexander the Great. Seven years later he returned to Athens, where he opened a school in the Lyceum, a grove outside the city; from its colonnades (‘peripatoi’), where teaching took place, his school and its philosophical tradition later became known as the Peripatetic. His published works, including dialogues known to Cicero, are lost; his extant works were probably written lectures. They cover logic, metaphysics, physics, zoology, psychology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics and demonstrate a strong commitment to the classification of empirical observations and the systematization of knowledge generally. Transmitted through translations, they shaped the development of medieval thought first in the Arab world, then in the Latin West, where Aristotle came to be regarded as the source of all knowledge. His logical treatises won a central place in the curriculum during the 12th century. After a brief struggle his ethical, metaphysical, and scientific works were harmonized with Christianity—to Aquinas he was ‘The Philosopher’ and to Dante he was ‘the master of those who know’—and constituted the subject matter of higher education from the 13th to the 17th centuries. They shaped the thinking of Englishmen writing in Latin from Grosseteste to Herbert of Cherbury, but the 17th‐century promoters of the new science saw Francis *Bacon as having overthrown Aristotle by his superior grasp of experimental observation and his method of induction. The humanists favoured the Nicomachean Ethics (identified by Edmund *Spenser as the source of the virtues in The *Faerie Queene), Politics, and Poetics. This last treatise, virtually unknown during the Middle Ages, came into prominence in the middle of the 16th century and contributed to the rise of neo‐classicism. See Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (1995). See Scholasticism.”

7. Rapp, Christof, "Aristotle's Rhetoric", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Aristotle's Rhetoric

First published Thu May 2, 2002; substantive revision Mon Feb 1, 2010

Aristotle's Rhetoric has had an enormous influence on the development of the art of rhetoric. Not only authors writing in the peripatetic tradition, but also the famous Roman teachers of rhetoric, such as Cicero and Quintilian, frequently used elements stemming from the Aristotelian doctrine. Nevertheless, these authors were interested neither in an authentic interpretation of the Aristotelian works nor in the philosophical sources and backgrounds of the vocabulary that Aristotle had introduced to rhetorical theory. Thus, for two millennia the interpretation of Aristotelian rhetoric has become a matter of the history of rhetoric, not of philosophy. In the most influential manuscripts and editions, Aristotle's Rhetoric was surrounded by rhetorical works and even written speeches of other Greek and Latin authors, and was seldom interpreted in the context of the whole Corpus Aristotelicum. It was not until the last few decades that the philosophically salient features of the Aristotelian rhetoric were rediscovered: in construing a general theory of the persuasive, Aristotle applies numerous concepts and arguments that are also treated in his logical, ethical, and psychological writings. His theory of rhetorical arguments, for example, is only one further application of his general doctrine of the sullogismos, which also forms the basis of dialectic, logic, and his theory of demonstration. Another example is the concept of emotions: though emotions are one of the most important topics in the Aristotelian ethics, he nowhere offers such an illuminating account of single emotions as in the Rhetoric. Finally, it is the Rhetoric, too, that informs us about the cognitive features of language and style.

• 1. Works on Rhetoric
• 2. The Agenda of the Rhetoric
• 3. Rhetoric as a Counterpart to Dialectic
• 4. The Purpose of Rhetoric
  • 4.1 The Definition of Rhetoric
  • 4.2 The Neutrality of Aristotelian Rhetoric
  • 4.3 Why We Need Rhetoric
  • 4.4 Aristotelian Rhetoric as Proof-Centered and Pertinent
  • 4.5 Is There an Inconsistency in Aristotle's Rhetorical Theory?
• 5. The Three Means of Persuasion
• 6. The Enthymeme
  • 6.1 The Concept of Enthymeme
  • 6.2 Formal Requirements
  • 6.3 Enthymemes as Dialectical Arguments
  • 6.4 The Brevity of the Enthymeme
    – Supplement on the Brevity of the Enthymeme
  • 6.5 Different Types of Enthymemes
• 7. The Topoi
  • 7.1 The Definition of ‘Topos’
  • 7.2 The Word ‘Topos’ and the Technique of Places
  • 7.3 The Elements of a Topos
  • 7.4 The Function of a Topos
    – Supplement on the Topoi of the Rhetoric
• 8. Style: How to Say Things with Words
  • 8.1 The Virtue of Style
  • 8.2 Aristotelian Metaphors
• Glossary of Selected Terms
• Bibliography
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries
  

8. Nussbaum, Martha C. "Aristotle." The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization. : Oxford University Press, 1998. Oxford Reference. 2003. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013 .
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