Aristotle on Rhetoric

Socrates uses the question and answer method acting now called Socratic dialogue to provoke his opponent into specificity quite of empty phrases and imagery.

When Gorgias cannot give a name to what oratory is or does, Socrates makes his first and most significant point: if a " forge" is exactly to talk about other crafts that own a measurable product, it must be integral to those other crafts and have no meaning or value independent of them. For example, a sound dressmaker should be able to offer a speech about making shoes, including what makes a superb shoe in comparison to a bad shoe and so on and so forth. According to Plato, society has little or not need for a class of useless professionals whose only benefit is to talk about what others actually do.

Throughout Gorgias, Socrates refutes the sentiment that the greatest good is "the ability to persuade by speeches judge in a law court, councilors in a council meeting, and assemblymen in an assembly or in any other semipolitical gathering that might take place" (Plato, 1997, 799). If oratory is a producer of persuasion like Gorgias maintains, Socrates argues that other disciplines like flick and mathematics are also forms of persuasion - and they may be no more or less suited to arrange as a way of determining what takes place in a city-state than oratory. Therefore, it is only through struggling together in commo

n discussion that inform men in pursuit of the good will be able to approach that good. From there they can translate the good into civic policies and action.

In contrast to Plato's criticism of empty talk, Aristotle based his cypher of empty words on the means of Ethos, Logos and Pathos. It was his belief that glib-tongued rhetoric could, if based on a system of moral philosophy (ethos) and explicated via logic (logos) to stir passions and emotions (pathos), serve the ends of truth.

Aristotle realized that emotional tendencies were legitimate expressions of ideas and of knowledge which rejected over-reliance on emotional appeal to the abandonment or the ignorance of truth. The doctrine of rhetorical proof offered by Aristotle is important. Aristotle (1954) states that "rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. It is a subject that can be treat systematically. The argumentative modes of persuasion are the essence of the art of rhetoric; appeals to the emotions warp the judgment" (3).

When we look more closely at Aristotle's notion of rhetoric, we see it might not be as easily dismissed as useless as maintain by Plato in Gorgias. Aristotle (1954) states that the political or deliberative orator's learn is utility: "deliberation seeks to determine not ends but the means to ends, i.e., what is most useful to do" (42). Rhetoric directed toward this descriptor of utility toward the pursuit of the virtues or the manifestation of policies that will encourage the virtues is not to be as readily dismiss or as simply as Plato dismisses it in Gorgias. Aristotle considers that a account is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so. Dialectic does not construct its syllogisms out of haphazard materia
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