English 622: Classical Rhetoric

I was a little baffled last week when Dave was explaining common places, so I made sure to mark that section in Book 2 for myself. I was originally picturing the common place as the location of a space that everyone could understand. Here in America land we could call the idea of "freedom" a common place (the way I was picturing it in my head); a topic that everyone has some feeling on, some endoxa, some sense of knowing. Then Dave said... Ummm, No, that a common place are "a relational concept that is given content." Okays.

The most striking aspect of book one in Aristotle’s On Rhetoric is that we are once again presented with a new classification and purpose of Rhetoric. According to Aristotle, “Rhetoric is an antistrophos to dialectic; for both are concerned with such things as are, to a certain extent, within the knowledge of all people and belong to no separately defined science” (30). Part of the reasoning for this is because speakers often need both to reach the desired end.