On Aristotle’s Thoughts Of Rhetorical Argument

Argument has always been an important issue of logic. Logicians, using abstract and formalized way in argumentation research, pay more attention to argument’s form and semantic over a long period of time other than the pragmatic features of argument, which leads to the difficulty in completely analyzing and evaluating the daily argument. As the founder of logic, Aristotle’s thoughts of argument is the source of the contemporary argumentation theory. His thoughts of rhetorical argument discussed the argument in speech from pragmatic perspective. As the important part of Aristotle’s thoughts of argument, rhetorical argument have not been valued for a long time until 1950s. Back to then, in order to eliminate the formal logic’s limitation in analyzing and evaluating the daily arguments and on this account exploiting the new research area, such as new rhetoric, informal logic, some logicians rediscovered Aristotle’s rhetorical arguments theory.The essay takes the Rhetoric as the start to investigate Aristotle’s thoughts of rhetorical argument to offer contemporary argumentation research some inspiration. The first part explores the meaning and characteristic of rhetoric argument and interprets Aristotle’s motivation of putting forward it. The second part tries to reconstructed the rhetoric argument through analysis and evaluation, including analyzing its types and structure and evaluating its argumentation and acceptability. The third part compares rhetoric argument with Aristotle’s demonstrative syllogism, and then makes a comprehensive interpretation of Aristotle’s argumentation theory. Based on this, the essay also discusses the revitalization of Aristotle’s rhetorical arguments, especially the new rhetoric’s rising.