ABSTRACT
In the past decade several scholars have pointed out a range of meanings for the term enthymeme and so provided a cautionary tale for those who would speak naively about Aristotle's enthymeme. 1 It would be nice to think that no one will ever again make the mistake of thinking that Aristotle's enthymeme is a rigidly deductive form of inferential reasoning. But this error has been corrected before, and the correction has been ignored before. 2 As early as the Renaissance, for example, the grand Greek Thesaurus from the Estienne press listed numerous meanings for the term https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203811801/9c3927f6-69ca-4810-875e-e21dd3546851/content/fig3_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> understood as an animi conceptus, sensum vel sensus. 3 After 1572 the Greek Thesaurus was widely available, and most commentators on the classics had recourse to it. But despite the wide use of this readily available resource, the most common way to speak about the details of Aristotle's enthymeme continued to be in terms of deductive inferential proceeding, and the other meanings all dropped by the wayside.
