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Rhetoric
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Like the other works of Aristotle that have survived from antiquity, the Rhetoric seems not to have been intended for publication, being instead a collection of his students' note from his lectures. The treatise shows the development of Aristotle's thought through two different periods while he was in Athens, and illustrates Aristotle's expansion of the study of rhetoric beyond Plato's early criticism of it in the Gorgias(ca. 386 BCE) as immoral, dangerous, and unworthy of serious study.[6][7] Plato's final dialogue on rhetoric, the Phaedrus (ca.370 BCE), offered a more moderate view of rhetoric, acknowledging its value in the hands of a true philosopher (the "midwife of the soul") for "winning the soul through discourse." This dialogue offered Aristotle, first a student and then a teacher at Plato's Academy, a more positive starting point for the development of rhetoric as an art worthy of systematic, scientific study.
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Gerard A. Hauser: Rhetoric is an instrumental use of language. One person engages another person in an exchange of symbols to accomplish some goal. It is not communication for communication's sake. Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication is explicitly pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention.
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Rhetoric has three distinct ends in view, one for each of its three kinds. The political orator aims at establishing the expediency or the harmfulness of a proposed course of action; if he urges its acceptance, he does so on the ground that it will do good; if he urges its rejection, he does so on the ground that it will do harm; and all other points, such as whether the proposal is just or unjust, honourable or dishonourable, he brings in as subsidiary and relative to this main consideration. Parties in a law-case aim at establishing the justice or injustice of some action, and they too bring in all other points as subsidiary and relative to this one. Those who praise or attack a man aim at proving him worthy of honour or the reverse, and they too treat all other considerations with reference to this one.
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Rhetoric has a bad name in popular culture. Usually it's used as a synonym for lying, or at least hiding or evading the truth (as in "That speech was nothing but rhetoric").
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Rhetoric might have languished under the weight of Christian dogma during the middle ages, had its uses to Christendom not been authoritatively demonstrated by Augustine (b. 354) and Boethius (b. 480). Augustine, himself a teacher of rhetoric before converting to Christianity and eventually becoming the bishop of Hippo (a city in North Africa) demonstrated the use of rhetoric in sermons and written polemics against heresy. Boethius... guaranteed that generations of scholars would study rhetoric by including it as one of the seven courses or "artes liberales" which were taught to undergraduates in all medieval universities. He made "rhetoric" one of the three arts pertaining to language: the trivium.
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Rhetoric falls into three divisions, determined by the three classes of listeners to speeches. For of the three elements in speech-making--speaker, subject, and person addressed--it is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech's end and object. The hearer must be either a judge, with a decision to make about things past or future, or an observer. A member of the assembly decides about future events, a juryman about past events: while those who merely decide on the orator's skill are observers. From this it follows that there are three divisions of oratory-(1) political, (2) forensic, and (3) the ceremonial oratory of display.
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