syllogisms

one's rational powers

and the whole is really the flower of wisdom)

Vico recommends balance

defy the logic of theexcluded middle

Plato's dialogue

then it becomes plain that rhetoricity, in whatsoever forms it takes, will recruitfrom whatever is available to it.

so "being " is used in various senses, but always with reference to one principle. For some things are said to "be" because they are substances; others because they are modifications of substance; others because they are a process towards substance, or destructions or privations or qualities of substance, or productive or generative of substance or of terms relating to substance, or negations of certain of these terms or of substance. (Hence we even say that not-being is not-being.)

Aristotle says: ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστιν.vi “Man’s soul is, in a certain way, entities.”

When considered philosophically, the λόγος itself is an entity, and, according to the orientation of ancient ontology, it is something present-at-hand. Words are proximally present-at-hand; that is to say, we come across them just as we come across Things; and this holds for any sequence of words, as that in which the λόγος expresses itself. In this first search for the structure of the λόγος as thus present-at-hand, what was found was the Being-present-at-hand-together of several words. What establishes the unity of this “together”? As Plato knew, this unity lies in the fact that the λόγος is always λόγος τινός. In the λόγος an entity is manifest, and with a view to this entity, the words are put together in one verbal whole. Aristotle saw this more radically: every λόγος is both σύνθεσις and διαίρεσις, not just the one (call it ‘affirmative judgment’) or the other (call it ‘negative judgment’). Rather, every assertion, whether it affirms or denies, whether it is true or false, is σύνθεσις and διαίρεσις equiprimordially. To exhibit anything is to take it together and take it apart. It is true, of course, that Aristotle did not pursue the analytical question as far as the problem of which phenomenon within the structure of the λόγος is the one that permits and indeed obliges us to characterize every statement as synthesis and diaeresis.

Instead we shall give an interpretation of Aristotle’s essay on time,ii which may be chosen as providing a way of discriminating the basis and the limitations of the ancient science of Being.

f Plato’s call for fitting the speechto the souls of the audience (1.2.3). These become Aristotle’s Bthos,or the projection of the character of the speaker as trustworthy;pathos, or consideration of the emotions of people in the audience;andlogos, inductive and deductive logical argument

Thus in 347 b.c.e., inanticipation of or soon after the death of Plato, Aristotle left Athensand went first to Assos in Asia Minor and then to the island of Lesbos,where he did much of his biological research

e. Rhetoric is the counterpart of cookery, Socrates says, for just as cookery provides pleasure for the body with no regard for what truly benefits it, rhetoric gratifies the soul without considering its good. Consequently, rhetoric is ignoble flattery rather than art, both because it aims at the pleasant and also because it cannot give a rational account of its own activity.

He wants to learn, in other words, how to "make the weaker argument the stronger" (Clouds, 112-115

udicial, deliberative, epideictic

"Aristotle is Not Our Father."

It was Aristotle who said that there can be no natural connection between the sound of any language and the things signi-fied, and, if we set the problem right side up and remember the other words before examining it, we shall have to agree with him.

Among the ancients, Aristotle, the earliest whose works arc extant, may safely be pronounced to be also the best of the systematic writers on Rhc• toric.

Meanwhile, in his Rhetoric (1367a) he defines a free man (eleutheros) as a masterless person who needs obey no one because he does not depend on having to produce or sell anything.

Therefore let us allow Aristotle as sharp an intelligence in various subjects and branches of knowledge as any Aristotelian could imagine, for I admit that that philosopher had an amazing fecundity of talent.

The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art

Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly all men make use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit. Both ways being possible, the subject can plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously; and every one will at once agree that such an inquiry is the function of an art.

Therefore things both are and are not.