| Popis: |
This chapter considers the conception of rhetoric implied by Hobbes’s use of Aristotle for teaching his pupil, the third Earl of Devonshire, in the early 1630s. Given the dominance of a Roman and, more specifically, Ciceronian understanding of rhetoric at the time, this was an unusual decision. But a neo-Aristotelian understanding of the art had begun to take shape by the early seventeenth century: an understanding visible in Hobbes’s prime source, Theodore Goulston’s bilingual edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, De Rhetorica seu arte dicendi (1619). Hobbes is shown to have been working with an understanding of rhetoric as a means of understanding what will serve to persuade a given audience on a given occasion: an understanding centred on the enthymeme and largely free from Ciceronian humanist notions of the moral value, civic necessity, and philosophic utility of the art. |
