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The Rhetoric Of The Origin Of Species, David Depew

David J Depew

In 1828, the Oxford don Richard Whately, having in his Elements of Logic (1826) defined argument as the connection between a claim and its support, proposed in its newly published counterpart, Elements of Rhetoric, to “treat argumentative composition as a species of rhetoric. . . . The office of the logician is to infer, but the office of the rhetorician is to advocate by adducing proofs. . . . Thus even the philosopher who undertakes by writing or speaking to convey his notion to others assumes for the time being the character of advocate of the doctrines he maintains.” (Whately …