The Enthymeme

Ask most students of rhetoric what an enthymeme is and they will tell you it is a syllogism with a premise left out, the audience quietly supplying what the speaker leaves unsaid. James Fredal thinks that answer is wrong. Working closely through Aristotle's Rhetoric, Topics and Analytics, he argues that Aristotle's enthymeme is not syllogistic at all, and that Aristotle himself misrepresents the device as the Attic orators actually used it.

Turning to the courtroom speeches of Lysias and Isaeus, Fredal recovers the enthymeme as a technique of forensic storytelling, a way of leading listeners to draw an inference from a narrative. Narrative rather than formal logic, he suggests, is the root of rhetoric itself. A bold, closely argued reassessment for anyone who studies classical rhetoric, ancient philosophy or the craft of persuasion.