The Art of Rhetoric · Part 8 · The five canons · C1
Invention and the Topics: Finding the Arguments
Part 8 of The Art of Rhetoric: the first of the speaker’s five tasks is invention, which means finding. Aristotle and Cicero taught that arguments live in “places”, the topics. Discourse markers for building an argument (moreover, what is more, on the other hand, by contrast, likewise, for instance, such as, namely), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
We have the three means of persuasion and the three kinds of speech. Now the five tasks of the speaker: invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery.
The word comes from the Latin invenire, “to find”. Tonight: how to find arguments.
In places. The Greeks called them topoi, “places”. We still call them topics.
A hunter, says Aristotle, does not search the whole forest; he knows where the animals are likely to be. In the same way, a speaker who knows the topics knows where arguments are likely to be found. Some topics serve any subject: the more and the less, the possible and the impossible, what has happened and what will happen.
In Book 2 of the Rhetoric he lists many particular lines of argument: from opposites, from definition, from the parts of a thing, from causes and from consequences, from earlier judgements, and from comparison: “if not even the gods know everything, human beings certainly do not.”
The Romans learned all this from the Greeks. Cicero, the greatest Roman orator, wrote about invention as a young man, and wrote a short book called Topics when he was sixty-one. The story of that book, told in its first pages by Cicero himself, is below. Things to come: about ninety years after our time, the Roman teacher Quintilian will gather all of this into twelve books.
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