Blog Post #1

When I first read Plato’s view on rhetoric, I found myself agreeing with some base principles that he wrote about. I agreed that rhetoric can lead to truth or can lead to a false belief. However, the transcendence that Plato focused his writing and his beliefs on didn’t ring true to me or my thoughts on rhetoric. His ideas on absolute knowledge and its omnipotence in every human being didn’t sound realistic or as logical as I would have hoped. Now, after reading about Aristotle's approach to rhetoric, I find myself aligning almost entirely with his theories. While Plato’s argument that rhetoric can lead to either “knowledge or a belief of knowledge” while on the pursuit of the truth seemed reasonable to a point, Aristotle's logical and empirical approach to the subject matter seems better fitting to the real world. Aristotle’s view on rhetoric also sounds reminiscent of modern day scientific methods. 

Aristotle was also a very educated man, in a number of subjects ranging from biology to politics to philosophy (170), making his argument on rhetoric, which focuses heavily on logic and analyzation, much more credible, grounded and sound. Aristotle’s approach however, is similar to Plato's in which he is also saying that rhetoric can lead to an absolute truth, but if you approach rhetoric with logical thought. Aristotle’s approach to rhetoric can be divided into two categories, “‘artistic proofs’ [and] ‘inartistic proofs’” (171). What this means is that the rhetorician can approach their argument in one of these two ways, appealing to the absolute evidence in front of them or “constructing their own material” (171) out of what they have. The way that Aristotle separates and sub-categorizes his theory covers the rhetorical appeals and provides the most logical and reasonable approach to rhetoric out of any of the other theorists that I have read thus far.