Critical response Essay
Student name
2/6/2014
Rhetoric is the art of discourse. In some specific situations, it is an art to improve the capability of writers or speakers expression. It could help people to reach the purpose of inform, persuade, and motivate with the particular audiences. As a significant subject of formal study, rhetoric has played a crucial role in the Western tradition in the past many decades. There are two famous people—Plato and Aristotle that have made huge contributions on developing Rhetoric and delivering the concept of rhetoric from different perspectives. As comparing the view of Aristotle and Plato on rhetoric, it obvious that Aristotle builds on Plato’s views to some extent; …show more content…
According to his point of view, rhetoric is defined as the ability to see what is possible persuasive in very given case. Of course, the definition as such may not be able to apply to all circumstances. Rather, he is in the situation which is similar to physician. He would not be able to convince everyone if he finds out the available means of convincing. Aristotle joins Plato in criticizing contemporary manuals of rhetoric. In Aristotle’s view, people are most strongly convinced when they suppose that something has been proven, there is no need for the orator to confuse or distract the audience by the use of emotional appeals and so on. There is no unbridgeable gap between the commonly-held opinions and what is true. The core of Aristotle's Rhetoric is the doctrine that there are three technical means of …show more content…
Both philosophers are concerned with the artist’s ability to have significant impact on others. Both philosophers hold radically different notions of reality. As a result, Plato is antagonistic towards the function of rhetoric in his dialogue Gorgias and ambivalent. Similar to Aristotle, Plato is concerned with the pursuit of truth. Nevertheless, in Plato’s dialogues he views rhetoric as a way to misrepresent truth as he states in his criticism of the sophists.
On the other hand, Aristotle views Rhetoric as both a means to find truth on par with dialectics and an effective method of communication. Through the perspective from Aristotle, he is not as considered with rhetoric being a method of metaphor or a particular way of persuade through language tricks. As he relies on conviction to establish probability, he believes that truth is not just a matter of certainty. However, Plato insists on truth being a matter of certainty which could be disguised fairly easy by rhetorical