SOURCE: "Arguments in Context: Aristotle's Defense of Rhetoric," in Aristotle's "Rhetoric," edited by David J. Fuley and Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 129-66.

In the following essay, McCabe defends the structure and the content of Rhetoric, arguing that both support Aristotle's view that rhetoric is indeed an art and that it can be practiced in a legitimate manner.

Is the opening of Aristotle's Rhetoric a muddle, an agglomeration of two versions of the text, haphazardly assembled? Or is there a coherent strategy to be found here? It has been persuasively suggested that two different strands of argument within the Rhetoric correspond to two stages in the development in Aristotle's logic (an earlier, Topics-based stage, and a later one that uses the theory of the syllogism put forward in the Prior Analytics).¹ But I shall argue that the Rhetoric is not ill-knit after all. For the appearance of...