ABSTRACT
William Grimaldi began to attract the attention of students in rhetoric with a series of articles he published in classical journals back in the 1950s. Some of these were eventually anthologized in Studies in the Philosophy of Aristotle's Rhetoric, published by Hermes in 1972. In this work and in his recent commentary on the first book of Aristotle's Rhetoric, he established a basic thesis underlying his interpretation of Aristotle: classical rhetoric is a general theory of language for serious human communication, and as such, it should be taken much more seriously than it currently is. By contrast, many modern views simply equate rhetoric to manipulative persuasion, or advertising, or just a study of techniques of writing. Science is demonstrative in the realm of the certain; dialectic is exploratory in the area of the probable; rhetoric is persuasive in the area of the probable; and poetry is pleasurable in the area of the internally probable.
