The first part of this paper contends that argumentation is central and essential to Aristotle's Rhetoric, and recounts a number of arguments in support of that view, particularly the recognition that deliberative rhetoric or the rhetoric of counsel is the primary concern of Aristotle's work. The second part of the paper reviews the work that follows in this present volume to show that the other writers' views fit in perfectly with this thesis. KEY WORDS: argumentation, the rhetoric of counsel, deliberative rhetoric, enthymeme, example (paradigm) It was a process Aristotle described more than once: (1) get the data (phenomena) that are pertinent to the inquiry; (2) develop a theory that will make it possible to give a neat account of the data. Aristotle's process worked for the development of ethics and politics, for the development of physics and metaphysics, and for the development of the art of rhetoric. In each case, the data were different: what people, either individual or collectively, were accustomed to judge about a course of action; how the various forms of government worked; how we understood the reality of the world around us; and how people were accustomed to try to influence others through speech.
In each of these undertakings, the data were at hand in massive amounts: the behavior of friends toward one another; the decision of the assembly in favor of war or peace; the begetting of offspring by their parents; and the words of outstanding orators or the bickering of the people in the streets.
When data were gathered relating to the words of outstanding orators or to the people's street-bickering, they revealed a wide range of tactics, running from the rare sterling argument, to the more common appeal to emotions like anger and fear, to the appeal to ancient bits of wisdom or to authority, to the appeal to force, and finally to the outright use of guile and deceit. All of these, then, were data that had to be taken into account in constructing a theory of rhetoric.
Others had attempted such a construction, and had gotten wrapped up in the minutiae of the parts of a speech, or the classification of the figures of speech, etc. But they had failed to find a way through this maze of seemingly inconsistent data to arrive at the formulation of a theory that did indeed give a coherent account of all the data.
Aristotle accomplished what others had failed to do by developing a theory of rhetoric that is essentially a theory of argumentation. He was able to do this, not