Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Vico's lectures on rhetoric are a key to his NEW SCIENCE, February 1, 1998
By A Customer
Vico spent time to review his lectures for the students in Naples and kept their manuscripts always on his work table, consulting them, correcting them, adding new thoughts and examples from the classics. He started teaching rhetoric in 1699 and we have two surviving documents of 1711 and 1741 from which this first English translation has been derived. With regard to techniques the rhetoric here explained has one purpose: that of giving to law students the means to introduce, explain, prove, and defend a cause in court, in one word, to persuade. With regard to philosophy this book speaks of the nature of education, of language, of the first original form of language, and of the truth that essentially man is just speech.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Vico's lectures on rhetoric are a key to his NEW SCIENCE, February 1, 1998
Vico spent time to review his lectures for the students in Naples and kept their manuscripts always on his work table, consulting them, correcting them, adding new thoughts and examples from the classics. He started teaching rhetoric in 1699 and we have two surviving documents of 1711 and 1741 from which this first English translation has been derived. With regard to techniques the rhetoric here explained has one purpose: that of giving to law students the means to introduce, explain, prove, and defend a cause in court, in one word, to persuade. With regard to philosophy this book speaks of the nature of education, of language, of the first original form of language, and of the truth that essentially man is just speech.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The mystery of rhetoric finally revealed, November 10, 1999
This manual on rhetoric is an excellent introduction to the art of public and private speech. It revealed all the kinds of tropes that render our communication appealing, attractive, interesting, and fascinating. In addition, the manual explain the art of persuading and the techniques used by law professionals when in the conference room as well as in the forum, when defending a cause. The manual was indeed written for pre-law students in the eighteenth century, when the art of speaking in public and in the court was the only art of communication. Examples of the different tropes and techniques are taken from the authors of the classical world, from Cicero, for instance, Quintilian, and Demosthenes. Today in the universities the rhetoric of Ernesto Grassi goes for the most, but it is on this writing of Vico that Grassi relied in his theory of rhetoric!
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