Reflective - Daniel Graham

     This week's reading made a shift from the Sophistic and Platonic ideals of objectivity and its relation to epistemology to more social applications for rhetoric as held by Aristotle and Quintilian.
     Aristotle's views were the first to be characterized as scientific. In addition to being a rhetoric theorist and philosopher, Aristotle was primarily a scientist whose standards for scientific investigation are what the modern scientific method are built upon. Aristotle's rhetorical theory was codified and separated into his artistic and non artistic proofs. These are how he explains himself using either physical evidence or appeals taken from premises in order to persuade his audience. The artistic appeals are what gives us the basic appeals of rhetoric: pathos, logos, and ethos. These ideas are greatly simplified from his main three appeals: enthymeme, example, and maxim. Enthymeme is the cornerstone to his logical appeals, which rely upon probable knowledge and the audience's familiarity with this knowledge in order to make the statement. Thus Aristotle's rhetoric is more easily applied to different social contexts than Plato, whose rhetoric is more concerned with the discovery of truth and only for the soul's own good.
     Quintilian takes rhetoric out of the context of the self sufficient art of persuasion and retools it as a power through which effective oratory performs. The oratory is what is persuasive, and paired with proper rhetoric is effective. The effective orator's performance relies on speaking well, and his power to do so is built upon an education as both a grammarian and a rhetor. Rhetoric is the practical art and action of the speaking, and requires the speaker to both have a working knowledge and good speaking ability. This strikes me as a very weak definition of what rhetoric actually is. In these words, rhetoric describes an articulate speech. It doesn't necessarily have an end goal other than to represent itself correctly. Whether the speaker wanted to convince his audience of something or talk himself in circles for an hour, it's all rhetoric in Quintilian's view if the speaker is effectively attending to his oratorical goals.