Artistotle Rhetoric - Essay Example

Aristotle Rhetoric Aristotle categorized methods of appeals or persuasion into Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. Pathos entails persuasion through pleasing someone’s emotions. Therefore, pathos is the magnitude with which a speaker appeals to the audience and moves them to a desirable emotional action. Good speakers perfect their skills to determine which emotion would impact on the audience based on their age, social status, and other important personal traits. In addition, Aristotle rhetoric also guide how orators can cause and maintain satisfactory emotions, such as anger, confusion, insult, fear, empathy.

Hence, Aristotle’s approach of arguments is consistent concerning the use of emotional appeal. He explicitly elaborates that people’s perception of a speaker is a reflection of the appeal to their self-interest, inner sense of identity, and importantly their emotionsCognitive theory of the emotions that Aristotle based his arguments are frameworks that relate feelings with psychological status of individuals expressing them. Cognitive theories give all types of human emotions a genuine and noticeable cognitive thought.

In relation to perceived appeal to the individual pathos, cognitive theories help to stamp notion that thoughts and other mental actions perform crucial roles in the development of emotions. Aristotle advances cognitive theory by illustrating the power of emotional appeal in arguments, speeches or personal relationships. Notably, Aristotle’s rhetoric’s emphasizes that pathos is a logical fallacy that can manipulate emotions and facilitate winning of an argument even in the absence of realistic evidence.

In other words, emotion is structure of discourse. Thus, Aristotle further elaborates that human beings make decisions based on emotional aspects or appeals.Nonetheless, Aristotle’s theory of emotional appeal has some limitations. For instance, it addresses argumentative and non-argumentative implements of persuasion with considering conflicting perspectives. At some point, this theory outlines that argumentative technique becomes less effective because of worse condition of the audience. Thus, the theory fails to address emotional aspects of listeners adequately.