Rhetoric
Techne Rhetorike
Persuasion works through three distinct means, the speaker's own credibility, the emotional state aroused in the audience, and the logical argument of the speech itself, and rhetoric, properly understood, is not a morally suspect trick but a legitimate counterpart to logic for reasoning about matters where certainty is unavailable.
- ethos, pathos, and logos as means of persuasion
- rhetoric as dialectic's practical counterpart
- defense of rhetoric against Plato's suspicion
- a taxonomy of emotions as practical psychology
- foundation of the Western rhetorical tradition
Aristotle's Rhetoric defends rhetoric against Plato's suspicion, voiced in dialogues like the Gorgias, that it is a mere knack for flattery, arguing instead that rhetoric is the practical counterpart to dialectic, a legitimate method for reasoning persuasively about contingent matters where strict demonstrative certainty is unavailable. He identifies three technical means of persuasion, ethos (the speaker's credibility), pathos (the audience's emotional state), and logos (the argument's logical substance), and devotes extensive analysis to each, including a taxonomy of human emotions and their causes. The treatise became the foundational text of the Western rhetorical tradition.
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