Jamie Dow

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.

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

: 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.