Aristoteles enthymem

Abstract

The Enthymeme, which is a central concept in Aristotle’s rhetoric, is also one of his most debated notions. A majority of the interpretations proceed from Aristotle’s own words “the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism” and most of them understand the enthymeme as a reduced syllogism or a syllogism based on the plausible. In this article different views of the Aristotelian enthymeme are examined, and an alternative outlook inspired by Aristotle’s own examples, is put forward. This is a suggestion that takes into consideration the context dependence, the dialogical nature and the need for presence (in a Perelmanian sense), in human communication and construction of meaning. The enthymeme is here viewed as a discursive process in which the reasoning of the speaker connects with the listener’s structures of meaning. An important phenomenon in this process is the establishment of coherence