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Hello, Gorgius, the great sophist philosopher and master of rhetoric said,

Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body

accomplishes most godlike works. It can banish fear. and most

God-like works. It can banish fear and remove grief

and instill pleasure and enhance pity.

Divine sweetness transmitted through words

is inductive of pleasure and reductive of pain.

But for Plato, rhetoric was a vice, and those like Gogius who taught rhetoric were teaching

the skills of lying in return for money and were a great danger. He warned, this device, be it which

it may, art or mere artless empirical knack, must not if we could help it strike root in our society. But strike root it did and there's a rich

tradition of philosophers and theologians who have attempted to make sense of it.

How did the art of rhetoric develop? What part has it played in philosophy and literature?

And does it still deserve the moral health warning applied so unambiguously by Plato?

With me to discuss rhetoric is Angie Hobbs, lecture in Philosophy at the University of Warwick,

Kerry Sullivan, senior lecture in English at the University of Wales Banger,

and Thomas Healy, professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College University of London. Angie Hobbs, when did rhetoric come into the West as a discipline in the

first of all how would you define it well as a working definition

how about the art of persuading a specific audience to specific actions and beliefs

through the use of language previously people had always been trying to persuade people to do things specifically, but it's

when it became a discipline and when it became something written down and discussed that

...