orAristotle, Our Other Contemporary

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demonstration vs. persuasion

•For Aristotle, unlike Plato, the pursuit of knowledge ≠ the pursuit of certain truth, or epistêmê. There’s also the pursuit of phronesis.

•Phronesis or “practical wisdom:” The wisdom displayed in areas of human life such as ethics and politics. Concerns truths that are, by their very nature, uncertain, debatable, unknowable in any final sense.

•Demonstration: To show a proposition to be true regardless of human judgment, belief, opinion, etc., e.g., The sum of the angles of a triangle is always 180 degrees.

•Persuasion: To win the assent of an audience to a proposition that is, per definition, not susceptible to demonstration.

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demonstration vs. persuasion

•Rhetoric, for Aristotle, is the art (or techne) of persuasion is rhetoric.

•The rhetor is thus a civic artist.

•The civic arts: The ongoing debate whereby a community shapes, preserves, and changes itself, and without which it would disappear.

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enthymeme

As melody and harmony are to the musical artist and color, line and mass to the visual one, so are enthymemes to the Aristotelian rhetorical artist.

Argument: An assertion + evidence for believing it.

Enthymeme: A combination of statements that explicitly makes an argument while implicitly evoking the worldview within which that argument makes sense.