Abstract
The historical controversy generated by logicians and rhetoricians over the definition of the “enthymeme” appears to derive from a confusion of causality and persuasion. The Aristotelian corpus and various interpretive commentaries suggest that enthymematic definition is properly understood in terms of the genus‐species relationship in terms of formal and material causality. Hence for Aristotle the enthymeme is best understood as a speaker's syllogistic method, not as a listener's syllogistic response.

This publication has 9 references indexed in Scilit: