Insignificant Wranglings

Today’s Plan:

Aristotle On Rhetoric, Book One

Questions:

• 1.1.1-6: What is Rhetoric? Why Study it? What should we be wary of? See also 1.2.7.
• 1.1.7-10: Aristotle’s suspicions regarding rhetoric and other handbooks
1.1.11-13: Another perspective on why rhetoric is necessary. See also 1.2.12
• 1.2.1: A response to the Gorgias dialogue
• 1.2.4: What is ethos for Aristotle?
• 1.2.5: What is pathos for Aristotle?

Key Terms and Concepts

Inartistic vs Artistic Proofs. Ethos, Pathos, Logos. 1.2.2. Let’s take a 10 minutes and do a thing.

Three species of rhetoric 1.3.1-4: Deliberative (exhortation vs dissuasion), Judicial (accusation vs defense), Epideictic (praise vs blame).

Judicial rhetoric judges the past.

Deliberative (or legislative) rhetoric judges the future.

On epideictic, Kennedy’s note on pg. 47. An individualistic philosophy has little desire/need for rites of communal renewal. For Aristotle, epideictic becomes a kind of catch all category for any speech that isn’t judicial or legislative. I believe that Aristotle’s impoverished notion of ethos suggests why he both misrepresents/undervalues epideictic rhetoric. The irony here is that Aristotle’s Poetics offers a fairly robust understanding of what Halloran and other rhetorical theorists identify as ethos and epideictic. We will get to this on Thursday.

What the Heck are the General/Special Topics (Or, What is Logos for Aristotle, Part 1)

Let’s examine the topic I included in the reading, on happiness (p. 56).

Professor David Russell has put up an adapted list of general topics that ground Aristotle’s approach to rhetorical invention.

Here is another explication and update.

We are going to circle back to these in a minute. But first…

Aristotle, Enthymeme, and Rhetoric (Or, What is Logos for Aristotle, Part 2)

I’m pretty confident that by the time I introduce this, we will have discussed Aristotle’s claim that rhetoric is the counterpart or converse of dialectic(al philosophy). The latter operates according to the syllogism, in which a series of premises allow for one–and only one–conclusion (supposedly). Aristotle asserts that because rhetoric is directed not at committed, individual interlocutors but rather at mass audiences of questionable interest and intelligence (see I.2.1357a), it operates according to the enthymeme rather than the syllogism.

Here is the stock example of a syllogism:

• First/Major Premise: All humans are mortals
• Minor Premise: Socrates is a human
• Conclusion: Socrates is mortal

This is a simple syllogism. It contains 3 terms: humans, mortals, and Socrates. Reduced to an analytic formula, it reads:

• P→Q
• Q→R
• P→R

If you were to go back through the Gorgias dialogue, you would see Socrates setting up major and minor premises that force Gorgias to agree to ridiculous conclusions–consider:

• Major Premise: True arts bring something new into the world
• Minor Premise: Rhetoric does not bring something into the world [Gorgias would not accept this]
• Conclusion: Rhetoric is not a true art

Or:

• MP: Expert knowledge is the most important part of persuasion
• mP: Craftsmen have more expert knowledge than rhetoricians
• C: Craftsmen are better at persuasion than rhetoricians.

Okay, so those are syllogisms. Enthymemes operate like syllogisms, but they are “truncated”–they don’t explicitly state every premise. For instance, the following syllogism is missing its Major Premise:

• I have know Roger since he was a child
• Roger is not a racist

Can you deduce what the premise must be?

Anytime I talk about rhetoric, ethos, and identifying a racist. Essentially, Jay Smooth is arguing for a logocentric approach to arguing that some*thing* is racist because it is to easy to deploy topical responses to an accusation that some*one* is racist.

I wanted to pay special attention to enthymemes because “memes” have become so prevalent in our social/political discourse. Aristotle dances around the idea that enthymemes are rooted in cultural norms–that they stem from doxa, or communal wisdom (generally accepted facts). Often, the missing foundational premise for an enthymeme is a value held by a particular community. This becomes apparent when we look through a series of memes. Before I click the link, I’d like you to number a piece of paper from 1 to 20. After each number, write agree / disagree and then one emotion, whichever one comes to mind.

Of course, visual memes aren’t always enthymemes (truncated syllogisms), they are often operating according to paradigm and are examples of poor inductive reasoning (see 40-42). But we can recognize how they are rooted in particular senses of community.

For Next Class

If you come across an interesting meme or add, add it to the slide (just add a new slide and paste the image in there, nothing fancy).

Read the other Aristotle .pdf. Next week we will meet in the computer lab. I’ll ask you to copy/paste your contributions to the Shared Reading Response Space into a Canvas quiz. I’ll be collecting responses on:

• Ong, “Writing is a Technology…”
• Plato, Gorgias
• Cavarero or McComiskey
• Aristotle, Reading #2 (Selections from Book Two and Three)
• Bunch of essays from this weekend (I’ll assign the list Thursday, if you want to get started, read the Sullivan and the two Haskins essays)