Dr. Haixia Lan will present “Aristotelian Rhetoric, Humanistic Studies, and the Other” from 2:30-3:30 p.m. on Friday, November 16 in Wimberly 104.
The works of Aristotle (384-322BCE) are often interdisciplinary and sometimes misunderstood, since he inquired into matters metaphysical and physical but we today have rather distinct fields of studies. For example, Aristotle sees the connection between pursuits in the Humanities and in the natural sciences as in, among others, logic, and Aristotelian logic dominated the West for two millennia, so today the name Aristotle has often become synonymous with the label inflexibility. A case in point is his treatise Rhetoric. Neo-Platonic rhetoricians passionately resist the linear “successive generalization” (Berthoff 43b), and the neo-Sophistic rhetoricians credited Aristotle only ever so reluctantly: “as Aristotle himself insisted [as absolute and inflexible as that self was]” (28 emphasis added) that sometimes facts—the signified—needed to be hammered out by the use of signifiers. Yet, most people including many rhetoricians say little to nothing about the enthymeme, the "substance" (Rhetoric 1354a15) of Aristotelian rhetoric, and the complexity of the Greek concept techne translated as both science and art. Certainly, Aristotle is seriously limited in many ways like all thinkers are, but at a time when we emphasize diversity for the purpose of better connecting with each other, we may find Aristotelian rhetoric a way for us in the humanities to connect with the other.