Introduction to the Big Three: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle:

• Plato writes the Socratic dialogues, which are largely arguments between Socrates and one or more of the Sophists.

• Socrates (469-399 BCE) is against the Sophists because he believes that the only worthy goal of Rhetoric is to pursue absolute truth (allegory of the cave, realm of the forms).  True Rhetoric, then, is “the method of a philosopher and a pupil who free themselves from conventional beliefs and all worldly encumberances in the pursuit of transcendent, absolute truth” (Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition).

• Plato (428-347 BCE) is a student of Socrates.  Some of his most important contributions to Philosophy are the Socratic dialogues he composes.  He also wrote The Republic, a utopian treatise on the nature of the ideal society.

• Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was a student of Plato’s, who went on to found his own school (one of his pupils was the ruler Alexander the Great) and to become one of the widest ranging and most important writers in the Western tradition.  His Rhetoric is still essential reading for anyone pursuing advanced studies in philosophy, law, or English.

• More detailed consideration of these thinkers will follow.

• Though we are not studying them here, later Rhetoricians of the classical period, such as Cicero and Quintilian, further perfected the art of speaking well and considered questions of Rhetoric’s relationship to truth.