Often, Bain and Hill are categorized as part of a long (roughly 200 years) period of decline from the rich classical tradition to a formulaic manner of teaching and conceptualizing rhetoric, particula

Quintilian is often accused of being a “compiler,” a wholly unoriginal thinker who simply put all the advice in the classical manuals (among them Cicero’s and Aristotle’s works) into one big c

At the beginning of today’s reading, Quintilian returns us to the topic of virtue, insisting that the orator must be virtuous and that rhetorical education should teach one to be virtuous.

Quintilian advises a progressive introduction into the art of eloquence, beginning with grammar, which students should largely have mastered upon arriving at instruction in rhetoric.

Isocrates puts his finger on one recurring problem in rhetorical education: the desire for and willingness to resort to hard and fast rules (p. 73).

Nietzsche offers a fairly robust counterargument to Locke’s claim that people can directly experience and talk about things in the world.

Locke argues that the most verifiable and reliable words are those connecting to simple ideas in the mind of the speaker and thereby also to simple experiences of real objects in the empirically obser

Socrates concludes that, since elenchus leads to truth, since the experts know what is best for the commonwealth, it is best to consult the experts and not the people on matters of statecraft.

At the beginning of his discussion with Callicles (pp. 115-117), Socrates accuses Callicles of equivocating (changing the definitions of his core terms in mid-argument without signaling that change.