By Richard Toye
Rhetoric used to be an important a part of western schooling. Aristotle wrote an immense treatise on it and Demosthenes continues to be well-known to at the present time for his talents as a rhetorician. yet ability with rhetoric this day isn't any longer sought after. Rhetoric is usually obvious as a synonym for shallow, misleading language-empty phrases, empty rhetoric--and for that reason as anything rather damaging. but when we view rhetoric in additional impartial phrases, because the "art of persuasion," it's transparent that we're all pressured to interact with it at a few point, if in simple terms simply because we're continuously uncovered to the rhetoric of others. during this Very brief creation, Richard Toye explores the aim of rhetoric. instead of featuring a protection of it, he considers it because the foundation-stone of civil society, and an important a part of any democratic strategy. utilizing wide-ranging examples from historic Greece, medieval Islamic preaching, the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill, and smooth cinema, Toye considers why we should always all have an appreciation of the paintings of rhetoric
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Additional resources for Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction
Sample text
Again, most people will have some awareness of simile and metaphor. Simile, where we say that one thing is like another, draws attention to the fact that a comparison is being made. ' Metaphor, where we say that one thing is another—time is money, life is a journey, failure is an orphan—can inveigle its way into the consciousness with less fanfare. Metaphors may, of course, be deliberately chosen to make an impression and stir controversy, as in the image of an 'iron curtain' dividing Cold War Europe.
During the eighteenth centuiy, the spread of newspapers and the growth of representative institutions combined with the ideology of the Enlightenment to shape the way that rhetoric was delivered and received. Classical learning remained important but, as always, it was adapted and deployed for current purposes. Indeed, those who prided themselves on being 'men of reason' felt that in some ways they had improved on the ancients' way of doing things. 24 The philosopher David Hume (1711-76) felt that the modern age was both 'superior in philosophy' and 'much inferior in eloquence' to the classical era.
Quentin Skinner—who has shown the influence of such training on the work of the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes—has noted how the Classics were exploited for Christian purposes. He writes: With its techniquesforexciting the emotions, the ancient ars rhetorica [art of rhetoric], and especially the classical Grand Style, accordingly came to be viewed as a method for expressing human spirituality, and hence as a method for illuminating and directing us towards the truth, notfordeflecting usfromit.