Jamie Dow

This chapter examines Aristotle's account of fear in the Rhetoric and its significance in the Politics. For Aristotle, fear is not a blind reflex, but a cognitive response to danger, shaped by judgements about status, power, and the attitudes of others. He advises orators how to harness its persuasive power. But Aristotle opposes rhetorical manipulation and coercion. For him, rhetoric is an expertise in providing ‘proofs’ (pisteis) – justifiable grounds for conviction. Arousing fear is commended insofar as it provides rational support for the orator's conclusions. In the Politics, fear is a powerful but rational force within political life. Fear can cause stasis (faction) and revolution but can also unify citizens to support the constitution against a common threat. Understanding the cognitive and rational structure of fear equips Aristotle both to provide practical advice to orators in the Rhetoric and to explain real-world politics, constitutional change, and governance in the Politics.

This chapter is concerned with Aristotle’s view of human passions, and concentrates on anger, pity, fear, and shame, and specifically how he characterized the representational aspect of those passions. It considers a number of questions in thinking about this representational aspect. It asks a number of questions. Such as, through the exercise of what psychological faculty do passions have their representational contents? And, what type of attitude towards their representational contents do passions themselves involve? If passions involve _phantasia_, to what extent can Aristotle’s views on the correct regulation of the passions be explained by reference to the role of _phantasia_ in the psychology of humans and other animals? Finally, what kinds of conflict between passions and beliefs does Aristotle recognize, and what resources does he have for explaining these? Addressing these questions involves engaging with a recent debate about whether for Aristotle the representational state involved in human passions is belief (_doxa_) or appearance (_phantasia_).

Whether preparing us for economic recovery after the zombie apocalypse, analyzing vampire investment strategies, or illuminating the market forces that affect vampire-human romances, Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science gives both seasoned economists and layman readers something to sink their teeth into. Undead characters have terrified popular audiences for centuries, but when analyzed closely, their behaviors and stories—however farfetched—mirror our own in surprising ways. The essays collected in this book are as humorous as they are thoughtful, as culturally relevant as they are economically sound, and provide an accessible link between a popular culture phenomenon and the key concepts necessary to building one’s understanding of economic systems big and small. It is the first book to apply and combine economics and our society’s fascination with the undead, and is an invaluable resource for those looking to learn economic fundamentals in a fun and innovative way. Contributions by: Kyle William Bishop, Eleanor Brown, Ian Chadd, Darwynn Deyo, Steven Horwitz, Daniel Farhat, Jean-Baptiste Fleury, Enrique Guerra-Pujol, Brian Hollar, Sebastien Lecou, Joseph Mandarino, Alain Marciano, Fabien Medvecky, David T. Mitchell, Michael O’Hara, M. Christine Phillips, A. Lynn Phillips, G. Michael Phillips, Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Robert Prga, Hollis Robbins, Sarah Skwire, Ilya Somin, David Tufte, Mary Jo Tufte, and Charlotte Weil.

Aristotle follows the Socrates of Plato's Gorgias in contrasting rhetoric with teaching. For him, premises of arguments must in rhetoric be reputable ( endoxa), but in teaching be archai of the relevant science. And teaching requires recognition of the speaker's authority, rhetoric does not. Like Socrates, he thinks teaching but not rhetoric requires knowledge of your subject. Unlike Socrates, Aristotle does not for this reason reject rhetoric as dangerous, but accepts it as useful for public and interpersonal deliberation.

How can we distinguish the permissible use of aesthetic features in persuasive communication from their manipulative misuse? The paper reconstructs the basic argument (proposed by Stoics and others in antiquity) that persuasive speech should be aesthetically austere. The argument, it is suggested, is fundamentally sound. But the view it sustains is subject to challenge, on the grounds that it is implausible and impractical in the real world. By making clear the grounds on which the “austere” view is justified, and by making precise the arguments that underlie those challenges, the paper identifies and evaluates three different possible responses to those challenges. The most promising of these accepts the argument for “austerity” but proposes a more moderate interpretation of its conclusion. In doing so, it takes up the challenge of providing a defensible rationale for distinguishing the permissible from the impermissible use of aesthetic features in persuasive communication.

What is dialectic and what is it for, in Aristotle? Aristotle’s answer in Topics 1.2 seems surprisingly lacking in unity. He seems to imply that insofar as dialectic is an expertise, it is a disposition to three different kinds of productive achievement. Insofar as dialectic is a method, it is one whose use is seemingly subject to multiple, differing standards of evaluation. The goal of the paper is to resist this problematic “multi-tool” view of Aristotelian dialectic, by explaining how dialectic’s contributions to training, encounters, and the philosophical sciences are of the same kind. What unifies them, I argue, is the kind of reasoning that improves the epistemic position of the person that engages with it. The kind of reasoning-based practices in which dialectic is the expertise are, at heart, tools of inquiry, tools for improving people’s understanding. This is why dialectic is beneficial for persuasive encounters: it is an expertise that enables its possessor to persuade by improving the understanding of their participants.

The rhetorical power of emotions came to philosophers’ attention early on in the Western tradition: emotions can exert a powerful effect on what an audience comes to believe or decides to do. It is has been surprisingly neglected since, despite abundant philosophical literature on the emotions. This paper focuses on the mechanisms and propriety of emotional persuasion. Our central focus is an apparent tension between two claims. Persuasion should succeed by getting people convinced on grounds that contribute to justifying their inclination to favour what the speaker proposes; and It is not required that persuasion's methods be dispassionate. They seem in tension, and yet dropping either seems unattractive. In particular, dropping ‘ANTI-AUSTERITY’ could commit us to a position that tends to elevate further in public deliberation the contributions of already privileged voices, and to marginalise the less privileged. This paper highlights what we would need to believe, in order to hold these two claims together. In order for emotions to contribute to justification, I argue, they must be capable themselves of being epistemically justified, and of transmitting that epistemic justification to the beliefs to which they help give rise. This in turn requires that emotions have representational contents, involve the subject's accepting those contents as true, be candidates for epistemic justification, and be such that their contents can properly feature as premises in inferences that justify the subject in believing their conclusions. Such are the striking philosophical implications of some everyday observations about the persuasive use of emotions.

The principal claim defended in this thesis is that for Aristotle arousing the emotions of others can amount to giving them proper grounds for conviction, and hence a skill in doing so is properly part of an expertise in rhetoric. We set out Aristotle’s view of rhetoric as exercised solely in the provision of proper grounds for conviction and show how he defends this controversial view by appeal to a more widely shared and plausible view of rhetoric’s role in the proper functioning of the state. We then explore in more detail what normative standards must be met for something to qualify as “proper grounds for conviction”, applying this to all three of Aristotle’s kinds of “technical proofs”. In the case of emotion, meeting these standards is a matter of arousing emotions that constitute the reasonable acceptance of premises in arguments that count in favour of the speaker’s conclusion. We then seek to show that Aristotle’s view of the emotions is compatible with this role. This involves opposing the view that in Rhetoric I.1 Aristotle rejects any role for emotion-arousal in rhetoric. It also requires rejecting the view of Rhetoric II.2-11 on which, for Aristotle, the distinctive outlook involved in emotions is merely how things “appear” to the subject.

Arguably Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to insist explicitly on a constitutive connection between logic and rhetoric. Aristotle claimed that "rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic". By this it seems he meant that central to the expert orator's expertise was a knowledge of the validity of arguments. Indeed, Aristotle insists further that the only essential component of an expertise in rhetoric is an ability to produce proofs. Such a conception of what rhetoric is differed greatly from how his predecessors (we briefly consider Gorgias and Plato) thought about rhetoric. How radical and distinctive Aristotle's conception of rhetoric was has not been properly recognised in recent work on the Rhetoric. Nor has it been recognised that Aristotle spends much of the first chapter deploying arguments to defend his distinctive, proof-centred view of rhetoric. Here, we consider one argument in which Aristotle's distinctive conception of rhetoric is deployed, from which it is clear how pivotal to Aristotelian rhetoric the role of proofs is. Then we will attempt to elucidate Aristotle's argumentative strategies for explaining and defending this distinctive view. © 2010 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

: This paper offers a new interpretation of the first chapter of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and of Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric throughout the treatise. I defend the view that, for Aristotle, rhetoric was a skill in offering the listener ‘proofs’, that is, proper grounds for conviction. His arguments in the opening chapters of the treatise state and defend this controversial, epistemically normative view against the rival views of Gorgias, Thrasymachus and the rhetorical handbook writers, on the one hand, and against those of Plato, on the other. Aristotle defends his view on the basis that rhetoric is a skill in discharging an important role in the state – the role of helping citizens to good publicly-deliberated judgements.

This paper takes up the claim of some recent commentators that Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, supposed that emotional experience involved things merely appearing to the subject to be as they are represented, rather than the subject’s actually taking them to be so. Supposedly this represents a better interpretation of the Rhetoric (especially Aristotle’s use of phantasia (appearance) and cognates in connection with the emotions) and a better philosophical position for Aristotle. I shall argue that the claimhas neither of these merits.

Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, appears to claim both that emotion-arousal has no place in the essential core of rhetorical expertise and that it has an extremely important place as one of three technical kinds of proof. This paper offers an account of how this apparent contradiction can be resolved. The resolution stems from a new understanding of what Rhetoric I. I refers to - not emotions, but set-piece rhetorical devices aimed at manipulating emotions, which do not depend on the facts of the case in which they are deployed. This understanding is supported by showing how it fits with evidence for how rhetoric was actually taught in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, in particular by Thrasymachus and Gorgias. The proposed interpretation fits well with Aristotle's overall view of the nature of rhetoric, the structure of rhetorical speeches, and what is and is not relevant to the pragma, the issue of the case at hand