Monthly Archives: March 2010

Week 2- Commentary

I often look at people who can’t get along with others, or who always seem to be at odds with society, and I say, “That person just doesn’t get it.”  What I usually mean by this is that they don’t…

quintillian and aristotle

Throughout Aristotle and Quintillian’s works, we are presented with various interpretations of rhetoric. For Aristotle, rhetoric is “defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion”. In his neatly packaged treatise on rhetoric, Aristotle…

Week 2: Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”

The first line in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, “Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic”, began my frustration.  Having previously read Plato’s Grogias, wherein Socrates, in a very nonlinear, disorienting way, establishes the notion that the object of rhetoric is persuasion and belief and it is only…