ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with a rhetoric that, drawing upon Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, resolves some of the contradictions not only between Aristotle and feminism, but between feminism and rhetoric itself. Certainly the law-rhetoric rupture is associated with the rise of science in the seventeenth century, more than two thousand years after the 'invention' of both law and rhetoric in Athens. Indispensable at a time when democracy was born and grew up, both for the making of laws and for their adjudication in litigious societies, rhetoric became dangerous and potentially subversive as empires began to take the place of democracies. The habits of mind that Aristotle surveys in the Nicomachean Ethics and that he calls theoria, phronesis, and techne operate in realms of knowledge he calls episteme, praxis, and poiesis.
