Some Antistrophes to the Rhetoric.

This article discusses six antistrophes of rhetoric: deliberation, evaluation, recollection, demonstration, dialectic, and rhetoric. But if anything has been gained from this inquiry it is not the recognition that rhetoric is different from the remaining arts; we knew this before we started. Rather it is the recognition that rhetoric is one of a family of arts with no apparent ancestry. To cast the Prior Analytics for the role and so to force analyses of speeches onto a syllogistic rack is clearly a mistake. The source of the mistake is the belief that the less complex is suited to be paradigm for the more complex; the roots of this belief in Platonism and before need not be discussed here. It is certainly the case that demonstration exhibits some features of the antistrophic arts in an especially clear way. It is for this very reason that it altogether fails to exhibit other features; it is not concerned with action; it is not concerned with opinion; it is not concerned with attitude; is it not concerned with things that may or may not come into being; it has no concerns beyond truths about the inclusion and exclusion of kinds; above all it is not concerned with time and other minds. It is therefore simple but not because it is a paradigm for rhetoric but because it omits what is of interest in rhetoric.