Speech thoroughly mediates our common life. We use it to educate, to share experiences, to spread information, to communicate opinions, and to persuade. The first and the last of these are the most complex and difficult, for they demand interaction and reception. There is no education if no one learns what the educator offers, and there is no persuasion if no one adopts what the rhetorician proposes. Little wonder then that rhetoric is a member of the seven classical liberal arts.

This seminar, offered exclusively to educators, provides an opportunity to read closely Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric. While Aristotle’s Rhetoric contains a multitude of insights with direct, practical utility for persuasion, its principal task is to comprehend the art, not the execution, of rhetoric. His robust account treats the kinds of rhetoric, the modes of persuasion, and the elements and instruments of persuasive speech. More than that, Aristotle’s work on rhetoric discloses a rich picture of human nature in which our capacity for speech and our concern for the true, the good, and the beautiful are central and intimately connected.

Image: Charles Meynier, Polyhymnia, Muse of Eloquence, 1800

Dr. Halper delivers a lecture, "On Written Speech."

Faculty

Mary Elizabeth Halper

Mary Elizabeth Halper is Dean of the Humanities at Hertog program and a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. Previously, she was Associate Director of the Hertog Foundation. She graduated with B.A.s in Philosophy and Classics from the University of Dallas and has since been devoted to liberal education in various forms.

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