Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic (or dialectic – see Martianus Capella), is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the capacities of writers or speakers needed to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. Aristotle defines 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 or for passage of proposals in the assembly or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies, calls it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics". Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle's three persuasive audience appeals, logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric, which trace the traditional tasks in designing a persuasive speech, were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

History

The study of rhetoric has traditionally been understood as a part of the Western tradition from ancient Greece to the present day. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the study of rhetoric continued to be central to the study of the verbal arts; but the study of the verbal arts went into decline for several centuries, followed eventually by a gradual rise in formal education, culminating in the rise of medieval universities. The study of rhetoric was revived in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and much of the instruction of rhetoric during this period focused on the use of figures and tropes, or schemes of words.

See also

• Aristotle
• Martianus Capella
• Logic
• Grammar
• Persuasion
• Ethos
• Pathos
• Logos

External links

• Rhetoric at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Rhetoric at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Rhetoric Resources
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