About this ebook
For Socrates, Plato, and Aristoteles, rhetoric and poetry were too often employed as instruments of manipulation, appealing to emotion while obscuring truth. They criticized the Sophists—including Gorgias and Isocrates—for practicing this form of persuasion, while maintaining that genuine rhetoric should be grounded in philosophy and devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment. One of Aristoteles’ most enduring contributions in this work is his recognition of rhetoric as one of the three essential pillars of philosophy, standing alongside logic and dialectic.
In Rhetoric, Aristoteles lays the foundation for a systematic theory of persuasion that has shaped rhetorical thought from antiquity to the modern era. Widely regarded as the single most influential work ever written on the art of persuasion, this classic has inspired centuries of philosophers, scholars, statesmen, and educators. As Alan G. Gross and Richard Walzer, echoing Alfred North Whitehead, have observed, if all Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato, then the history of rhetorical theory can be seen as an ongoing response to the questions first raised in Rhetoric.
For Socrates, Plato, and Aristoteles, rhetoric and poetry were too often employed as instruments of manipulation, appealing to emotion while obscuring truth. They criticized the Sophists—including Gorgias and Isocrates—for practicing this form of persuasion, while maintaining that genuine rhetori...
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