the rhetoric and the poetics of aristotle

When two orators oppose each other on some course of action, they both use rhetorical arguments to try to persuade their audience. Thus the power of dialectic is a power to argue both sides of an issue. Then both of the opponents in a dispute are using the dialectical power.

The dialectician, we saw, wants to defend his side and attack the other, but he may be pitted against a dialectician who is doing the same thing. First, both the rhetorician and dialectician can argue on both sides of an issue. Rhetoric and dialectic share three main features. In order to understand what is going on in Aristotle's Rhetoric, first we are going to take a broad overview of the subject, secondly we are going to focus on the two tools of the enthymeme and the argument by example.Īt the beginning the Rhetoric, Aristotle explains what rhetoric is by a comparison with dialectic. In the second we will talk about the main poetic tool, the metaphor. In the first part we will talk about the main rhetorical tools, the enthymeme and the example.

We can break up our discussion into two parts. In this lesson we will look at rhetoric and poetics especially to consider those tools. The third comes from poetics: the metaphor. There are going to be three of those tools, two of them from rhetoric: the enthymeme and the argument by example. Some of the tools of reasoning that are most appropriate to rhetorical and poetical speech are also helpful for philosophy and theology. There is another reason, however, for studying these two books. This lesson will focus on Aristotle's books, the Rhetoric and the Poetics. Studying rhetoric and poetics completes our overview of Aristotle's logic. The science of poetics discusses this action of reason. Reason also acts in poetry, or imaginative literature, to produce something beautiful and delightful. Rhetoric directs our reason when it considers moral and political actions. But we also said there was a looser sense of that term 'logic,' in which logic is broadly understood to be the art that simply directs the actions of reason. In the first eleven lessons we looked at the treatises in Aristotle's Organon that make up logic taken in the strict sense: logic as the art which directs the actions of reason in coming to know the truth. In this, our twelfth and final lesson, we will say something about rhetoric and poetics.

The rhetoric and the poetics of aristotle