<p>Circuit Debater chiming in here. Going to apply to college next year, and was deciding between majoring in Rhetoric or Philosophy. Both are pretty interesting, but I have a hard time telling them apart. Both of them overlap in some areas. Can anyone tell me the difference? Also, I eventually plan to go to law school, if that makes a difference.</p>
<p>Big Big Big difference
Philosophy consists of rigorous critical analysis
while rhetoric is the art of convincing others.
Rhetoric does not have to be logical, while philosophy always does.
Philosophers often resent rhetoric by the way.</p>
<p>Philosophy literally means "love of wisdom." Philo means love, sophi means wisdom or learning.</p>
<p>I am taking an entire course on rhetoric, and here are some of the many and varied definitions we are working with:</p>
<p>Plato: Rhetoric is "the art of winning the soul by discourse."</p>
<p>Aristotle: Rhetoric is "the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available
means of persuasion.</p>
<p>Cicero: "Rhetoric is one great art comprised of five lesser arts: inventio, dispositio,
elocutio, memoria, and pronunciatio." Rhetoric is "speech designed to
persuade."</p>
<p>Quintillian: "Rhetoric is the art of speaking well."</p>
<p>Francis Bacon: Rhetoric is the application of reason to imagination "for the better
moving of the will."</p>
<p>George Campbell: [Rhetoric] is that art or talent by which discourse is adapted to its
end. The four ends of discourse are to enlighten the understanding, please
the imagination, move the passion, and influence the will.</p>
<p>A. Richards: Rhetoric is the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.</p>
<p>Kenneth Burke: "Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a
function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of
language as a symbolic means of indjcing cooperation in beings
that by nature respond to symbols."</p>
<pre><code> "Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is
rhetoric, there is meaning."
</code></pre>
<p>Richard Weaver: Rhetoric is that "which creates an informed appetition for the good."</p>
<p>Erika Lindemann: "Rhetoric is a form of reasoning about probabilities, based on
Assumptions people share as members of a commununity."</p>
<p>Andrea Lunsford: "Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of human communication."</p>
<p>Francis Christensen: "Grammar maps out the possible; rhetoric narrows the possible
down to the desirable or effective." "The key question for rhetoric is how
to know what is desirable."</p>
<p>Sonja and Karen Foss: "Rhetoric is an action human beings perform when they use
symbols for the purpose of communicating with one another . . , [and
it] is a perspective humans take that involves focusing on symbolic
processes."</p>