Philosophy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for those interested in the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Long long ago, rhetoric was a branch of philosophy. As far as I can tell, nowadays there is no philosophical work in the domain of persuasion and argumentation; this is now done in the public-relations and communications, fields that (again as far as I can tell) have very weak philosophical underpinnings.
Assuming rhetoric has died as a philosophical topic, when and how did that occur?
The historical events are complex...
In a nutshell, during Renaissance there were a "revival" of Rhetoric (as part of Dialectic, and thus linked to logic) as a "tool" for discovering new knowledge (a "method") as opposed to traditional Aristotelian logic (syllogism) as the fundamental tool for science.
See e.g. Pierre de La Ramée and his concern with Inventio.
The debate "raged" for more than a century; we can see also Jacopo Zabarella and the debate on methodus and regressus. We can still found it into Francis Bacon's works.
But the "methodological" debate had no "effective" impact : no new scientific discoveries were made possible either by traditional logic or by Rhetoric-based "methods"
Early modern science was made possible by a unique mixture of new ideas, experiences (and experiments) and mathematical (analytical) tools : from Tycho and Kepler, through William Gilbert and William Harvey to the "founding fathers" of new science : Galileo, Descartes and Newton.
With them the "methodus" become mathematics : neither syllogism nor inventio. See e.g. Descartes' search for method.
Some secondary sources :
Charles Schmitt & Quentin Skinner (editors), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1988) : Part 2.V Logic and language;
Daniel Garber & Michael Ayers (editors), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy (1998) : Part II Logic, language, and abstract objects;
Neal Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (1960);
Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958);
Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (original ed,. 1968);
Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (2001);
Marco Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism : Logic and Epistemology in the British Isles (1570-1689) (2013);
Stephen Gaukroger, Cartesian Logic: An Essay on Descartes's Conception of Inference (1989);
W.A. Wallace, Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof: The Background, Content, and Use of His Appropriated Treatises on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (1992).
