We discover that Mr. Thomas is very much in support of citizen involvement, saying towards the end of this video that “we should teach rhetoric yes, but the true rhetoric. He said he literally means rhetoric to understand how persuasion works…” Given this statement, I’ve reached the conclusion that if we had to pick out of our list Isocrates would be second on his list. As we’ve learned already this semester, Isocrates desperately wanted to be an important speaker or leader, however, due to his shortcomings in certain areas he had to settle to become a teacher. Isocrates believed in the institutions of society, and that if you want a better world, you need a better system. This goes a long really well with what Mr. Thomas was saying about real world rhetoric. When we talked about Isocrates we talked about how rhetoric is practical and situational. We need to look at the context of the moment. There are a few comments …show more content…
Romans took the framework from the Greeks and built onto it. Mr, Thomas says that there was a needed balance for not only democracy, but for high functioning rhetoric. His brief and summarized definition of high functioning rhetoric was reason, evidence, argument, character and legit anxiety. This mirrored in a lot of ways the canons of rhetoric when we discussed fact, definition and quality. As I’ve previously stated, Mr. Thomas believes that it is good to have citizen involvement, as did the Romans. Or at least what they considered citizens of the time. As Aristotle and Isocrates the Romans knew there was much more to rhetoric than what meets the eye. There were obvious flaws however, that I believe Mr. Thomas hinted, but didn’t exactly say. For example, Quintilian was known for his conflicting beliefs, that rhetoric is the art of a good man and that you can’t separate the two while also believing that you must do whatever is necessary if “the ends justify the