The purpose of this research is to examine the issue of probability in Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics, with a view toward showing how or to what extent Aristotle's analysis has relevance to the contemporary culture. The plan of the research will be to set forth the fundamental concepts informing Aristotle's discussion of these disciplines, and then to discuss the consistency with which he develops his analysis of their principal attributes.
At the outset, it is important to note that Aristotle makes certain assumptions about the character of the universe. In particular, he assumes that man is a social being, that civilized man lives in a political community, and that he addresses remarks to members of an ordinary, rational, commonsense civilized society. The audience for the Rhetoric and the Poetics is rational, has language, can discriminate in some basic ways; this may be taken as a contract between the philosopher and his students. It is important to recognize this with regard to relevance for Aristotelian rhetoric in contemporary society because of the claims that may be made on behalf of unthinking or nonthinking man, the primitive, or what Aristotle might call the barbarian. To make rational assumptions about the broad character of the philosophical audience appears to have been itself an achievement of western civilization, and therefore the persistently ethical aspect of Aristotle's philosophy of rhetoric and poetic art appears to lay some claim to contemporary culture. As Hamilton puts it, "We think and feel differently because of what a little Greek town did during a century or two, twenty four hundred years ago. What was then produced of art and of thought has never been surpassed and very rarely equalled, and the stamp of it is upon all the art and all the thought of the Western world."1. With these assumptions in mind, one may proceed to discuss in specific ways how Aristotle develops his rhetorical system ...