Espacio, tiempo físico y lugares retóricos en Aristóteles

Abstract

Scholars committed to the study of Aristotle’s Rhetoric have rarely focused their research on the impact of Aristotle’s physical doctrines on his conception of an art of persuasive discourse. This is especially true regarding the resources and devices included in Aristotle’s theory of rhetorical argumentation, which are frequently analyzed from the logical doctrines developed within the Organon. Nevertheless, we can also grasp significant aspects of Aristotle’s conception of rhetorical argumentation by analyzing how his physical doctrines contribute to providing support for the foundations of his art. In particular, in this paper we succinctly explore the connections between the rhetorical and the physical concept of topos in the corpus aristotelicum, trying to show how the latter can provide an adequate basis for understanding the former and, thus, Aristotle’s conception of rhetorical invention. In order to do so, a key text in our analysis is Aristotle’s De Memoria et Reminiscentia, in which the concept of topos is a fundamental piece structuring memory and the psychophysiological processes we call reminiscence.