A spate of recent works illustrates the continuing interest of scholars in Aristotelian rhetoric. The most significant of these is Eugene Garver's Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. Two other works contain essays that focus on this text of Aristotle: Aristotle's Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays, and Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric. The second of these volumes includes several abbreviated or redressed versions of articles contained in the first. A third collection, Peripatetic Rhetoric After Aristotle, considers the fate of Aristotelian rhetoric in later (...) centuries. (shrink)

The book is divided into four parts. An introduction is supplied for the book as a whole and for each of its parts. The heart of the book is its analysis of argument, the burden of parts one and two. The third part is concerned with the nature of metaphor, its place in argument, and the final section with the interrelation of the two.

The aim of this work is to expose the true nature and merit of Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric and to correct the views of previous scholars. The author accordingly provides a thorough analysis of the opinions of some of the foremost commentators on major issues in the translation and interpretation of the Rhetoric, and he offers at the same time his own carefully reasoned position. Although this study is primarily a product of scholarship of the mid-seventies, evidently written before the (...) recent surge of interest in the Rhetoric that produced the commentaries of W. M. A. Grimaldi and L. Arnhart, it is nevertheless a useful summary of earlier scholarship and a new and insightful interpretation. Ryan says that he developed this study because no one had attempted a thorough investigation of "the entire theory of argumentation" as it appears in the Rhetoric nor had they viewed the text in relation to other works of Aristotle that are closely related, such as the Ethics and the Politics. Scholars, instead, focused on one or another feature of the work, the enthymeme, in particular. (shrink)

In this book Douglas Walton makes a subtle and scholarly case for a reconsideration of emotion in argument. The result is an important addition to the study of argumentation, one of several areas in which philosophy has contributed to rhetorical studies. A philosopher who teaches at the University of Winnipeg, Walton evinces erudition in both fields. He relates his study to classical dialectic and rhetoric, and deepens and modifies analyses of modern scholars.

In this, the latest contribution to the large literature on Giambattista Vico, Michael Mooney demonstrates the careful and insightful scholarship that we have come to expect of the students of Paul Oskar Kristeller. Written as a doctoral dissertation, the book is much more than an academic exercise; it is an extremely valuable contribution that sheds new light on this eighteenth century professor of rhetoric who dared to challenge the wisdom of the Father of Modern Philosophy.