Word Finder - rhetoric

definition

The art of using language, especially public speaking, as a means to persuade.

definition

Meaningless language with an exaggerated style intended to impress.

example

It’s only so much rhetoric.

definition

Part of or similar to rhetoric, the use of language as a means to persuade.

example

A rhetorical question is one used merely to make a point, with no response expected.

definition

Not earnest, or presented only for the purpose of an argument.

The audience was impressed by the rhetoric the young girl used in her speech.

The speaker's powerful rhetoric amazed nearly all of the audience.

The rhetoric used in the newspaper article made the readers feel like they were a part of the event.

Devices of rhetoric are used to bring imagery to writing.

Finally, he admits that rhetoric is not the highest accomplishment, and that philosophy is far more deserving of attention.

Sam went to his English teacher for tutoring in hopes of improving his rhetoric.

The students received him with enthusiasm, due partly to his splendid rhetoric and partly to the novelty and ingenuity of his views.

He gave large sums of money for the endowment of chairs in philosophy and rhetoric, with a view to making the schools the resort of students from all parts of the empire.

Eastern rhetoric, there is no occasion to seek in this section anything else than literal locusts.

The education which he provided consisted of rhetoric, grammar, style and the interpretation of the poets.

In 1618 he became Reader in Rhetoric, and in 1619 orator for the university.

The Stoics divided XoytK17 (logic) into rhetoric and dialectic, and from their time till the end of the middle ages dialectic was either synonymous with, or a part of, logic.

Rhetoric is a faculty on any subject of investigating what may be persuasive (acOavov), which is the work of no other art; its means are artificial and inartificial evidences (7riorecs), and, among artificial evidences, especially the logical arguments of example and enthymeme.

Clement professed to despite rhetoric, but was himself a rhetorician, and his style is turgid, involved and difficult.

In 1622, however, he was appointed professor of rhetoric and chronology, and subsequently of Greek, in the university.

The style of the whole book is nervous, vivid, free from artifice and rhetoric, obeying the writer's thought with absolute plasticity.

Wide as Bain's influence has been as a logician, a grammarian and a writer on rhetoric, his reputation rests on his psychology.

Together with the historian Theopompus he was a pupil of Isocrates, in whose school he attended two courses of rhetoric. But he does not seem to have made much progress in the art, and it is said to have been at the suggestion of Isocrates himself that he took up literary composition and the study of history.

Antonius Gnipho, a native of Gaul (by which Cisalpine Gaul may be meant), who is said to have been equally learned in Greek and Latin literature, and to have set up in later years a school of rhetoric which was attended by Cicero in his praetorship 66 B.C. It is possible that Caesar may have derived from him his interest in Gaul and its people and his sympathy with the claims of the Romanized Gauls of northern Italy to political rights.

But this early dialectic and rhetoric, being popular, would tend to be published.

No doubt, rational evidences had appeared in books of rhetoric, as we see from Plato's Phaedrus, 266-267,where we find proofs,probabilities, refutation and maxim, but mixed up with other evidences.

He built temples, theatres, and mausoleums, promoted the arts and sciences, and bestowed honours and salaries upon the teachers of rhetoric and philosophy.

Students are usually in high school during the rhetoric stage.

The prominence given by most of the Sophists to rhetoric, their cultivation of a subjective readiness as the essential equipment for life, their substitution of persuasion for conviction, all mark the sceptical undertone of their teaching.

The general state of learning in this century is illustrated by Ausonius (c. 310-393), the grammarian and rhetorician of Bordeaux, the author of the Mosella, and the probable inspirer of the memorable decree of Gratian (376), providing for the appointment and the payment of teachers of rhetoric and of Greek and Latin literature in the principal cities of Gaul.

During the hundred and thirty years that elapsed between the early translations of Aristotle executed at Toledo about 1150 and the death in 1281 of William of Moerbeke, the translator of the Rhetoric and the Politics, the knowledge of Aristotle had been greatly extended in Europe by means of translations, first from the Arabic, and, next, from the original Greek.

In the second half of the 17th century the rules of grammar and rhetoric were simplified, and the time withdrawn from the practice of composition (especially verse composition) transferred to the explanation and the study of authors.

In Rome he lectured on rhetoric and philosophy, and collected around him many eminent pupils, amongst whom Cicero was the most famous and the most enthusiastic. None of his works is extant; our knowledge of his views is derived from Numenius, Sextus Empiricus and Cicero.

In 1719 he was appointed professor ordinarius of rhetoric, in 1721 of poetry, and in 1724 professor extraordinarius of theology.

Five years later he became professor ordinarius of logic and metaphysics; in 1759 he exchanged this for a professorship of rhetoric and poetry.

Among the papers destroyed were probably, as Stewart suggests, the lectures on natural religion and jurisprudence which formed part of his course at Glasgow, and also the lectures on rhetoric which he delivered at Edinburgh in 1748.

To the latter Hugh Blair seems to refer when, in his work on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783), he acknowledges his obligations to a manuscript treatise on rhetoric by Smith, part of which its author had shown to him many years before, and which he hoped that Smith would give to the public. Smith had promised at the end of his Theory of Moral Sentiments a treatise on jurisprudence from the historical point of view.

Zoilus appears to have been at one time a follower of Isocrates, but subsequently a pupil of Polycrates, whom he heard at Athens, where he was a teacher of rhetoric. Zoilus was chiefly known for the acerbity of his attacks on Homer (which gained him the name of Homeromastix, "scourge of Homer"), chiefly directed against the fabulous element in the Homeric poems. Zoilus also wrote against Isocrates and Plato, who had attacked the style of Lysias of which he approved.

After these failures Caesar determined to take no active part in politics for a time, and retraced his steps to the East in order to study rhetoric under Molon, at Rhodes.

The first college in Mexico was founded', during the administration of Viceroy Mendoza (1535-1550), but it taught very little beyond Latin, rhetoric, grammar and theology.

Debarred from the foreign mission field, he attained high distinction as a preacher and as a teacher of rhetoric in Genoa, Florence and Rome.

He also attacked Isocrates, according to Cicero, and perhaps even set up a rival school of rhetoric. At any rate he had pupils of his own, such as Eudemus of Cyprus, Theodectes and Hermias, books of his own, especially dialogues, and even to some extent his own philosophy, while he was still a pupil of Plato.

The philosophy of Plato is dialogue trying to become science; that of Aristotle science retaining traces of dialectic. Secondly as regards subjectmatter, even in his early writings Aristotle tends to widen the scope of philosophic inquiry, so as not only to embrace metaphysics and politics, but also to encourage rhetoric and poetics, which Plato tended to discourage or limit.

After Plato's death, coming to his third period he made a further departure from Platonism in his didactic works on politics and rhetoric, written in connexion with Alexander and Theodectes.

If he did, then the Rhetoric to Alexander in 34 0 was at least four years prior to the Rhetoric, which was as late as 33 6.

Each of them, the probability (chap. 8), the example (chap. 9), the proof (chap. to), the consideration (chap. 11), the maxim (chap. 12), the sign (chap. 13), the refutation (chap. 14), though very like what it is in the Rhetoric, receives in the Rhetoric to Alexander a definition slightly different from the definition in the Rhetoric, which it must be remembered is also the definition in the Prior Analytics.

Example (7rapabayma) is not called rhetorical induction, and consideration (EVBuµnya) is not called rhetorical syllogism, as they are in the Rhetoric, and in the Analytics.

Induction (E7rayo.y17) and syllogism (ovXXcytcr oc), the general forms of inference, do not occur in the Rhetoric to Alexander.

But at any rate the process was gradual; and Aristotle was advanced in metaphysics, mathematics, physics, dialectics, rhetoric and poetics, before he became the founder of logic.

Such is the great mind of Aristotle manifested in the large map of learning, by which we have now to determine the order of his extant philosophical writings, with a view to studying them in their real order, which is neither chronological nor traditional, but philosophical and scientific. Turning over the pages of the Berlin edition, but passing over works which are perhaps spurious, we should put first and foremost speculative philosophy, and therein the primary philosophy of his Metaphysics (980 a 211093 b 29); then the secondary philosophy of his Physics, followed by his other physical works, general and biological, including among the latter the Historia Animalium as preparatory to the De Partibus Animalium, and the De Anima and Parva Naturalia, which he called " physical " but we call " psychological" (184 a 10-967 b 27); next, the practical philosophy of the Ethics, including the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia as earlier and the Nicomachean Ethics as later (1094-124 9 b 25), and of the Politics (1252-1342), with the addition of the newly discovered Athenian Constitution as ancillary to it; finally, the productive science, or art, of the Rhetoric, including the earlier Rhetoric to Alexander and the later Rhetorical Art, and of the Poetics, which was unfinished (1354-end).

Aristotle, who made this great discovery, must have had great difficulty in developing the new investigation of reasoning processes out of dialectic, rhetoric, poetics, grammar, metaphysics, mathematics, physics and ethics; and in disengaging it from other kinds of learning.

I, 1 355 a 33-35); rhetoric, since its artificial evidences involve characters, passions and reasoning, is called a kind of offshoot of dialectic and morals, and a copy of dialectic, because neither is a science of anything definite, but both faculties (SvvItyas) of providing arguments (i.

They contain however many relics of dialectic. The Rhetoric is declared by him to be partly dialectic. The Topics is at least an investigation of dialectic, which has had an immense influence on the method of argument.

He studied grammar and rhetoric at Rome and philosophy at Athens, after which he returned to Rome, where he held a judicial office.

When he entered upon this office he intended to have prelected upon the tragedies of Sophocles; but he altered his intention and made choice of Aristotle's rhetoric. His lectures on this subject, having been lent to a friend who never returned them, are irrecoverably lost.