Concept
Rhetoric
Overview
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It is one of the three ancient arts of discourse (trivium) of classical antiquity, along with grammar and logic/dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or writers use to inform, persuade, and motivate their audiences. Rhetoric also provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations.
Aristotle defined rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion", and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law, for passage of proposals in the assembly, or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies, he called it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics". Aristotle also identified three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric, or phases of developing a persuasive speech, were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in Western education and Islamic education in training orators, lawyers, counsellors, historians, statesmen, and poets.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Rhetoric is discussed.
_Soc._ Then rhetoric is not the only artificer of persuasion? _Gor._ True. [Sidenote: _Knowledge and belief._] [Sidenote: Of what persuasion is rhetoric the artificer?] _Soc._ Seeing, then, that not only rhetoric works by persuasion, but that other arts do the same, as in the case of the…
Plato, The dialogues of Plato in five volumes, Vol. 2
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And Polus may ask, if he likes, for he has not as yet been informed, what part of flattery is rhetoric: he did not see that I had not yet answered him when he proceeded to ask a further question: Whether I do not think rhetoric a fine thing? But I shall not tell him whether rhetoric is a fine thing or not, until I have first answered, “What is rhetoric?” For that would not be right, Polus; but I shall be happy to…
Plato, Gorgias
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Neither is the nature of man so unfortunately built, as that those powers and arts should have force to disturb reason, and not to establish and advance it. For the end of logic is to teach a form of argument to secure reason, and not to entrap it; the end of morality is to procure the affections to obey reason, and not to invade it; the end of rhetoric is to fill the imagination to second reason, and not to oppress…
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
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In the progress of refinement, when philosophy and rhetoric came into fashion, the better sort of people used to send their children to the schools of philosophers and rhetoricians, in order to be instructed in these fashionable sciences. But those schools were not supported by the public. They were, for a long time, barely tolerated by it.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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So again a man should be thought to dally, if he did note how the figures of rhetoric and music are many of them the same. The repetitions and traductions in speech and the reports and hauntings of sounds in music are the very same things. Plutarch hath almost made a book of the Lacedaemonian kind of jesting, which joined ever pleasure with distaste.
Francis Bacon, Valerius Terminus
names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Rhetoric
- Hemachandra
- Anaximander
- Heraclitus
- Zeno of Elea
- Stephen Toulmin
- Giambattista Vico
- Lucian
- Arcesilaus
- Heraclides Ponticus
- Apuleius
- Adam Smith
- Marshall McLuhan
- Marsilio Ficino
- Augustine of Hippo
- Protagoras
- Proclus
- Herbert Spencer
- Renaissance
- Maurice Blanchot
- Philodemus
- Dio Chrysostom
- Aristotle
- Petrus Ramus
- Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
Related ideas
- Erasmus
- Belief
- Francis Bacon
- Gorgias (dialogue)
- Greek language
- Classical Greece
- Harvard University Press
- Grammar
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Argument
- Argumentation theory
- Polis
- Historian
- Philosophy
- Western philosophy
- Academic discipline
- Vedas
- Stephen Toulmin
- Greenwood Publishing Group
- Jerome
- Jesuits
- John Locke
- John Milton
- Isocrates
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Anaximander.