RhetoricAristotle

Aristotle defines rhetoric as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. Unlike Plato, who distrusted rhetoric as flattery, Aristotle treats it as a legitimate art, the counterpart of dialectic, useful in deliberation, law, and ceremony.

Persuasion operates through three means: ethos (the character of the speaker), pathos (the emotional state of the audience), and logos (the argument itself). Book I classifies the three genres of oratory: deliberative (advising about future action), forensic (judging past action), and epideictic (praising or blaming in the present). Book II contains Aristotle's most sustained analysis of the emotions, cataloguing anger, pity, fear, shame, and their opposites with a precision that makes it as much a work of moral psychology as of rhetorical theory. Book III addresses style and arrangement, covering metaphor, prose rhythm, and the ordering of a speech.

The Rhetoric insists that persuasion is not opposed to truth but is the practical means by which truth gets a hearing in civic life. The best rhetoric uses enthymemes (rhetorical syllogisms) and examples (rhetorical inductions), connecting it to Aristotle's logic. The treatise has shaped the teaching of composition, oratory, and argument from Roman antiquity through the Renaissance and into modern communication theory.