Preface Rhetoric and philosophy are old enemies and old friends. The ancient rhetor ( rhētōr ) commanded an art of how to use words to affect an audience regardless of the truth of what was said. The philosopher ( philosophos , "lover of wisdom") sought only to apprehend the truth. To this end the philosopher used words dialectically, placing one idea against another in order to test their truth. The rhetorician and the philosopher shared the need to master words in order to practice their

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... ctive arts. Those in public positions relied on rhetoric as an art of persuasion in order to attain and hold political power. Philosophers were seeking only to understand and express what was before them. By the middle of the fifth century in ancient Greece the sophist ( sophistēs ) appeared, who, in contrast to the earlier philosophers of nature, developed the teaching of subjectivistic, relativistic, and skeptical arguments. Against the sophists, as is well known, stood Socrates, whose words were those employed by the craftsmen and the many ( hoi polloi ). Through such speech Socrates sought the truth, wherever it might be found, by the question and answer of the elenchos . In Plato's Republic , the great sophist Thrasymachus says Socrates never answers any of his own questions but leaves it to others to answer them. Thrasymachus, the master of elegant speech, can reply to any question on any subject. But to reply to Socratic speech is another matter. Socrates asks the question to which no answer is easily found. The rejection of rhetoric by philosophy occurs in Plato's dialogues, especially in the Gorgias , and has persisted despite Aristotle's treatise Rhetoric , the inclusion of rhetoric as part of the trivium of medieval education, and the Studia humanitatis of the curriculum of Renaissance humanism. Rhetoric is specifically attacked by the founders of modern theory of knowledge, especially Descartes, Locke, and Kant. Rhetoric found no place in two of the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century-analytic philosophy and phenomenological philosophy. Those two movements influenced rhetorical studies, but the influence was not reciprocal.