Aristotle on the Disciplines of Argument: Rhetoric, Dialectic, Analytic

Abstract According to an argument made by other authors, analytic—the formal logical theory of the categorical syllogism expounded in the Prior Analytics—is a relatively late development in Aristotle's thinking about argument. As a general theory of validity, it served as the master discipline of argument in Aristotle's mature thought about the subject. The object of this paper is to explore his early conception of the relations between the argumentative disciplines. Its principal thesis, based chiefly on evidence about the relation between dialectic and rhetoric, is that before the advent of analytic dialectic played a double role. It was both the art or discipline of one practice of argumentation and the master discipline of argument to which other disciplines turned for their understanding of the fundamentals of argument.