Rhetorical Analysis of Joe Biden’s Inauguration Address

The inaugural speeches mark the beginning of a new term in office for a community or government leader, such as the president. This reaction must persuade the people to believe in the government and the programs will be enacted. This research aims at finding the rhetorical appeals of President Joe Biden's inaugural address on his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States. The research is based on Aristotle's theory called a rhetorical theory. The resercher employs descriptive qualitative as a methodology to analyze the data from the spoken utterances of the speech. The result shows that Joe Biden uses all of the Aristotelian rhetoric strategies in his inaugural address, which are: ethos, pathos, and logos. The data shows that Joe Biden uses pathos as 55% of his speech, followed by ethos 37%, and logos 8%.. Joe Biden skillfully used and implied Aristotle's rhetorical theory in his inauguration address to engage and build trust with the American people. From the analysis, the researcher has concluded that a good speaker can use all of the three elements of the rhetorical theory and imply them in the speech or writing.

The persuasion of vaccine allocation models during Covid-19. Rhetoric, ethics and science

The swift development of effective vaccines against the new coronavirus was an unprecedented scientific achievement. In this paper, we discuss what models have been proposed for distributing vaccines locally and globally through the application of Aristotelian rhetoric. This discussion, therefore, focuses on a specific question: how are the different models of vaccine administration and distribution justified on an ethical-argumentative level? This report also examines what has come to be known as “vaccine nationalism” through the lens of the early experience with the COVID- 19 vaccination process. To this end, this report proceeds as follows: Section I explains the rhetorical method applied to ethical principles, and Section II explains the chosen criteria for the analysis. Section III looks at the Fair Priority Model; Section IV examines the COVAX and GAVI model; Section V presents the weighted lottery model. Section VI proposes a summary table of the analysis of the proposed models and Section VII focuses on the ethical problem of vaccine nationalism and its implications in relation to the models, that were taken into consideration during the previous sections. Section VIII offers brief conclusions; solidarity conceived as an argument of reciprocity should be, according to this analysis, the guiding value to address ethical problems in the area of resource allocation.

Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

Preaching, Emotion, and the Aristotelian Turn

Chapter 7 explores the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric on the emotional work of preaching. Many manuscripts of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (and a good proportion of manuscripts of De regimine principum) belonged to clerical institutions; some of the most interesting responses to Aristotelian rhetoric are left to us by readers who were actively engaged in preaching. The many medieval artes praedicandi offer nothing like Aristotle’s Rhetoric in terms of teaching emotional appeal. The preachers who encountered the Rhetoric would find that it voiced the theory behind what was already lodged in their practice but which the preceptive traditions they had inherited did not articulate. It affirmed, in theoretical terms, what no medieval art of preaching articulated so systematically: the behavioral psychology of emotion and the strategies for appealing to emotions through argument. This chapter gives particular attention to three preachers who used the Rhetoric in their own practice: Thomas Eborall of London, Engelbert of Admont, and Mathias of Linköping (confessor to Birgitta of Sweden). Finally, the chapter explores the impact of the Rhetoric on an anonymous fifteenth-century pastoral reader who composed a short English verse on “Piers the Plowman” which he left in a copy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric next to the section on amicitia; it considers how this preacher brought together the emotional concerns of English poetry (the broad Piers Plowman phenomenon) and the theory of emotion in the Rhetoric.

Epilogue

The reception of Aristotelian rhetoric was gradual and often partial. It did not overthrow established rhetorical theory; it did not displace the school rhetorics that foregrounded stylistic facility as the main source of emotional appeal. Indeed, we might characterize much late medieval rhetorical thought and practice as hybrid, balancing—sometimes nervously—between older systems that were learned consciously and theoretical models that were absorbed through later cultural influences. This concluding chapter considers some later medieval experiments with the rhetorical vocabulary of emotion before looking forward to the canonical expansions and more synthetic directions of early renaissance rhetoric. After a brief look at Ramon Llull’s Rethorica nova, the chapter turns to the French Eschéz d’amours and Evrart de Conty’s Eschéz amoureux moralisés, Christine de Pizan’s Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, the anonymous Tractatus de regimine principum ad regem Henricum sextum, and Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue invectif. The chapter ends with a brief look at the “mixed rhetorics” of the early Renaissance, where Aristotelian rhetoric found greater traction alongside the growing corpus of Ciceronian rhetoric.

De regimine principum

Chapter 5 considers the most important factor in the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, its translation from the speculative domain of scholastic philosophy to political philosophy and statecraft in Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. Widely copied and translated, this treatise proved the most influential interpretation of the Rhetoric. If in his early commentary Giles had showed little understanding of Aristotle’s distinctive phenomenology of emotions, his mirror of princes, written only a few years later, registers and mobilizes that active political dimension of emotion that is so important to Aristotelian rhetoric. Aristotle’s treatise on the emotions in book 2 of the Rhetoric figures extensively in De regimine principum, as Giles frames his theory of kingship in terms of the communicative strategies essential to rhetoric, “through arguments that are obvious and felt by the senses.” In this treatise, we also see how Giles has internalized the power of enthymematic argument, understanding political discourse as a kind of affective persuasion calling upon beliefs as well as emotions.

Presidential Rhetoric in the COVID-19 Pandemic Era: Jokowi’s Aristotelian Rhetorical Leadership Models Before and After Implementation of Semi-Lock Down Policy

Presidential rhetoric evolved across the globe. Knowledge regarding the ways the presidents in democratic countries, which followed the presidential government system, such as Indonesia, advanced Aristotelian rhetorical leadership models in the covid-19 pandemic era, has, however, under-developed. Selecting president Joko Widodo (Jokowi) as a study case, this work raises the following question: what types of Aristotelian rhetorical leadership models performed by Jokowi before and after semi-lock down policy (PSBB) and how did he advance such rhetorical leaderships models? Focusing on such questions, this work adopts the president’s rhetorical leadership models, posited by Teten (2007) and Aristotelian rhetoric models, formulated by Gottweis (2007), as a conceptual framework. The materials posted in official Facebook pages of president Joko Widodo were extracted using the classic content and the qualitative and thematic content analyses. The findings are follows. Soon after the covid-19 pandemic outbreak took place in Indonesia, he attempted to develop the following types of rhetorical leadership, which are the identification, the authority and the directive rhetoric and the etho -logo-, and patho-centric Aristotelian rhetoric. Based on Indonesia case, this work offers the following knowledge contribution. It gives us new knowledge of 9 Aristotelian rhetorical leadership models, which are the etho-, logo- and patho-centric identification rhetoric, the etho-, logo- and patho-centric authority rhetoric and the etho-, logo- and patho-centric directive rhetoric models. Not merely the presidents, but also the local governments’ leaders could adopt such rhetoric models when they want to resolve diverse issues resulting from the pandemic.

Aristotelian Rhetoric and the Politics of Persuasion: A Study of Imran Khan's Venture into Politics

This paper explores the politics of persuasion with special reference to Imran Khan's venture into politics. Influenced and inspired by Aristotle, he effectively used various methods of persuasion, including ethos, pathos and logos, to convince the audience to come out in large numbers and support his cause. Imran Khan was in a better position to act effectively in accordance with the features annunciated by Aristotle. This strategy worked effectively because, during the sit-in, Khan was not only able to keep his audience actively engaged and involved, he also did not let their energies exhaust. This is evident from the fact that a number of participants never came down; instead, it kept going up for continuous 126 days. Moreover, Imran Khan broadened his vote bank to such an extent that he was able to form government in the center and other two provinces in the 2018 elections. Data was collected through secondary sources from books, research articles and newspaper writings. Findings suggest that Imran khan effectively used the strategy of persuasion to change the political opinion of the masses and won the elections in the end.

Language and Politics: Prose as a Medium of Societal Apartheid in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

This paper studies the use of prose in Julius Caesar as a tool of political and social apartheid and class discrimination. Usually, Shakespeare assigns blank verse to upper-class characters and prose to lower class ones. The study analyzes three occasions in which prose is used by two patricians and an eloquent cobbler. The paper means to explain the diversion of patricians to prose and add another voice to the already heaping interpretations given in criticism. It argues that the diversion of the two patricians to prose has two functions. Firstly, it shows that prose is indigenous to the poor and the patricians use it when they address the poor or talk about them. Secondly, Shakespeare shows that the diversion of the patricians to prose is a wrong choice and leads to moral depravity or failure of mission. In contrast, the cobbler uses prose effectively because it is indigenous to him and he feels at home using it. The study uses the contextual approach to analyze the three speeches. Keywords: Prose, blank verse, patricians, plebeians, Aristotelian rhetoric, republican politics.

Persuasive Language in Presidential Speeches

Persuasive strategies in political discourse provide opportunities for politicians to influence, guide, and control their audiences according to their desires and benefits. This study examines the persuasive side of the language used in presidential speeches delivered by Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani. This contrastive study delineates persuasive strategies based on the Aristotelian approach towards the methodology of persuasion. Through extracting our corpus from the internet, we analyzed it using Aristotle’s three means of persuasion (ethos, pathos, and logos). The corpus analysis was performed through qualitative content analysis according to the predefined themes and considering earlier investigations within the frame of Aristotelian rhetoric. The results indicated the prominent role of logos in presidential speeches as the most frequent strategy. Also, the analysis indicated three contrastive themes of religion, time, and participant names in the speeches of the presidents which signified their different cultural and political discourse. The impact of contextual aspects has also been discussed.