Crime Scenes and Carl's Junior

Next time, on Hoarders...

I hate moving. I'm a nester by nature, and the whole process of boxing things up and carrying them away to be unboxed elsewhere gives me the icks. This little whinge-fest is by way of excuse: it's not that I didn't want to blog, it's that my computer was in seven pieces in four different boxes. But I'm getting settled, and it's time to get back to our buddy Aristotle.

To recap: you've got ethos, where an argument (buy a Buick) succeeds or fails based on the character of the speaker (Tiger Woods), and you've got pathos, where emotion is used to persuade the audience to do such varied things as adopt puppies and commit genocide. Now let's meet the new kid, logos.

Pathos, Puppies, Panzer Tanks

Here's the scene: It's late at night, and you can't sleep. You sit on the couch all bleary-eyed and cranky, pick up the remote, and start channel surfing. You settle on something light, something that doesn't tax your intellectual or emotional capabilities too much (after all, you are tired), maybe an old John Hughes movie or a little Adult Swim. Suddenly, right when you are at your least able to deal with it, it happens.

Aristotle, Ethos, and Tiger Woods

Ethos in Action

Here's the thing. If you're still here after reading my last blog post on Aristotle, there has to be a reason for that. Maybe (I hope)  you found value in what I had to say. Maybe you felt an emotional attachment to the material (even if it was just giggling at pictures of Doctor Who). Or maybe you felt like you got a sense of me as a person, and you decided you wanted to hear more. From that person. The "me" of the blogosphere.

Ta-da! You've just defined ethos.

Ethos is one of Aristotle's basic rhetorical categories, and any argument that hinges on the character of the speaker is using it. Aristotle puts it like this: "We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is..." In other words, we believe good men because they are good, not because they are experts. And this gets really interesting in modern culture. Consider, for example, the curious case of Tiger Woods.

Back and Badder than Ever - Now with More Aristotle!

My Boy Aristotle

It's been a crazy few weeks. I'm apparently now a Master of Art, which is nice. I haven't found a job, which is less nice. I have gotten plenty of sleep, spent time with some truly awesome people I hadn't seen a lot of lately, and gotten all caught up on Doctor Who. I may have mentioned, though, still no job. It's scary. No, scratch that. It's terrifying. In the meantime, I am falling back on something that never (well almost never) makes me feel incompetent and useless, the thing I have studied for most of the last two years, and the thing I will study some more should I get up the guts to go for a PhD at some point: rhetoric. So today I think I'll talk about my buddy Aristotle.

No, wait, where are you going? Come back here and sit down.