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Pistis, Persuasion, And Logos In Aristotle, Owen Goldin

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

The core sense of pistis as understood in Posterior Analytics, De Anima, and the Rhetoric is not that of a logical relation in which cognitively grasped propositions stand in respect to one another, but the result of an act of socially embedded interpersonal communication, a willing acceptance of guidance offered in respect to action. Even when pistis seems to have an exclusively epistemological sense, this focal meaning of pistis is implicit; to have pistis in a proposition is to willingly accept that proposition as a basis for some kind of activity (albeit possibly theoretical) as a result of some kind …