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University of California Press

About the Book

Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric offers a fresh and comprehensive assessment of a classic work. Aristotle's influence on the practice and theory of rhetoric, as it affects political and legal argumentation, has been continuous and far-reaching. This anthology presents Aristotle's Rhetoric in its original context, providing examples of the kind of oratory whose success Aristotle explains and analyzes.

The contributors—eminent philosophers, classicists, and critics—assess the role and the techniques of rhetorical persuasion in philosophic discourse and in the public sphere. They connect Aristotle's Rhetoric to his other work on ethics and politics, as well as to his ideas on logic, psychology, and philosophy of language. The collection as a whole invites us to reassess the place of rhetoric in intellectual and political life.

About the Author

Amèlie Oksenberg Rorty is Professor of the Humanities and the History of Ideas at Brandeis University. Among the numerous other volumes she has edited are Essays on Descartes' Meditations (California, 1986), Perspectives on Self-Deception (California, 1988), and (with Martha Nussbaum), Essays on Aristotle'sDe Anima (1992).

Table of Contents

PREFACE I
EXEMPLARY RHETORICAL SPEECHES:
DEMOSTHENES, THUCYDIDES, LINCOLN

Structuring Rhetoric
    Amelie Oksenberg Rorty

Aristotle's Rhetoric as a "Counterpart" to Dialectic
    Jacques Brunschwig
    
Mighty Is the Truth and It Shall Prevail?
    Robert Wardy
    
Enthymeme: Aristotle on the Rationality of Rhetoric
    M. F. Burnyeat
    
Is There an Ethical Dimension to Aristotelian Rhetoric?
    Troels Engberg-Pedersen
    
Ethics in the Rhetoric and in the Ethics
    T. H. Irwin
    
The Challenge of Rhetoric to Political and Ethical Theory in Aristotle
    Stephen Halliwell
    
Philosophy, Politics, and Rhetoric in Aristotle
    C. D. C. Reeve
    
Aristotle and the Emotions
    Stephen R. Leighton

An Aristotelian Theory of the Emotions
    John M. Cooper
    
Mixed Feelings in Aristotle's Rhetoric
    Dorothea Frede
    
Emotions in Context: Aristotle's Treatment of the Passions
    in the Rhetoric and His Moral Psychology
    Gisela Striker
    
Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion
    Martha Craven Nussbaum
    
Between Rhetoric and Poetics
    Paul Ricoeur
    
Artifice and Persuasion: The Work of Metaphor in the Rhetoric
    Richard Moran
    
Rhetorical Means of Persuasion
    Christopher Carey
    
The Composition and Influence of Aristotle's Rhetoric
    George A. Kennedy
    
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABBREVIATIONS FOR ARISTOTLE'S WORKS