| Summary: | "For Aristotle, arousing the passions of others can amount to giving them proper grounds for conviction. On that basis a skill in doing so can be something valuable, an appropriate constituent of the kind of expertise in rhetoric that deserves to be cultivated and given expression in a well-organised state. Such are Jamie Dow's principal claims in Passions and Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric. He attributes to Aristotle a normative view of rhetoric and its role in the state, and ascribes to him a particular view of the kinds of cognitions involved in the passions. In the first sustained treatment of these issues, and the first major monograph on Aristotle's Rhetoric in twenty years, Dow argues that Aristotle held distinctive and philosophically interesting views of both rhetoric and the nature of the passions. Rhetoric is expertise in contributing to the proper functioning of the state by providing in "proofs" (pisteis), or proper grounds for conviction, to aid citizens in their deliberations. Passions are representational pleasures and pains, felt in response to how the world is taken to be. Dow defends a distinctive understanding of how Aristotle understood the contribution of "appearance" (phantasia) to the cognitive component of the passions. On this interpretation, Aristotelian passions must involve the subjects affirming things to be the way they are represented. Thus understood, the passions of an emotionally-engaged audience can constitute a part of their reasonable acceptance of a speaker's argument, and hence proper grounds for conviction."--Jacket.
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